So DID the Guardian back war on Iraq?

No need to be abusive. Since you contradicted what I said you were asked to supply the evidence. Instead you lose control of yourself. So who was not a white male? Should be easy for you to reply instead of blustering.

But the point was that the control of the Guardian was by a board that was completely unrepresentative of its constituency, and contained no one with a an easily discernible career in foreign affairs, social services, charity, or in the core issues projected by the Guardian as important to them. And no one of colour, etc.

And what confidence should anyone have that the Scott Trust Chairperson would overrule the board and is there precedence for that?

Manfromatlan, thank you, it confirms in sordid detail what I gleaned from my own amateur attempts to understand what drove the Fraudian’s insane editorial policy (in those days I was still a reader). Follow the money.

“So the UK’s involvement in the war was still about seizing oil.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop cruising along on a sea of innuendo, endlessly re-implicating the bleeding obvious.

Of course the Iraq war was superficially “all about oil” – “kick their ass and take their gas”, as one American pre-teenager, probably channeling Daddy or a bumper sticker, posted in at least one online “forum” at the time. In fact, far more interesting insights, if you insist on staying in the realms of easy conjecture rather than documented fact, come from looking at possible explanations for the oil rationale in much longer term geo-politico-commercial strategies than the immediate tactics, such as exploring tne implications of a perhaps perceived requirement to retain centrality of profit taking across the now seen as imperative transition from dirty big oil to at least equally big “clean renewable” without giving ground to the possible development any of the as-efficieht but small, people-scale alternatives to big energy that a different energy management model might enable, for instance. Mao’s steel works in every village brought up to date in for a different technology in a less coercive society, say. And how that might influence the targetted conditioning of the world’s Monbiots, whether through the structures of their occupational environments (à la Ahmed) or their personal ego-prone blandishmentability (or both), to conclude that only necessarily-big nuclear could possibly fill the appropriate intervening energy gap. Maybe.

Point is, Ahmed does’t have a fucking clue why he was spiked and sacked – it could have as well been something so historically quirky as Rusbridger having the hots for Freedland and Freedland having the downs on anything anti-Zionist – so he is forced to conjecture on the reason, and the grander that reason is in the scheme of things then the more it assuages Ahmed’s anxiety and the more it fits in with the average off-Guardianista’s pretty well predetermined narrative. But, underneath that, it’s just more conjectural waffle trying to establish patterns in endless arrays of hitherto un-preconnected dots.

The sole attribute that distinguishes Chomsky (and the Chomsky-like few) from the hoards of other commentators with initially dotty theories is that Chomsky has had the low level discipline needed to get down from the ivory tower and do the grunt-level, hard-labour spadework required to put some actual evidence behind the original inductive observation and its consequent theoreticization. Having then theorized the “manufacture of consent” (way before Ahmed’s RT interview) he didn’t leave it as a pile of intellectual waffle-iffing before launching it as a formal thesis, he did (or organized the doing of) the mountain of sheer hard work reading and sorting and counting needed to support that theory (while inherently suggesting a valid method of falsification) with layer upon layer of hard (i.e. irrefutable) statistics.

As for the Guardian, despite its mind-bogglingly naïve attempt to build a Chinese wall between its old “Trust” arm and a new GMG “business” arm with a commercial(!) restructuring of the Trust(!) and a funtional separation of “independent” boards, replete with a Trust←GMG “reporting” heirarchy putatively reflecting a Trust→GMG “authority” heirarchy – John Lewis dreamt up better from his sick bed without the “aid” of a bunch of expensive(!!) commercial(!) lawyers(!) – of course the bastard result is a massive sellout. So do you need a prize for that blinding non-insight? No, we need solid, documentary proof of instance upon instance upon instance. Or forget it as the diversion it is.

So enough with the soundbite echoes already. Or, more exactly, enough with passing them off as “proof” of anything. The entire political and financial structure of the ruled world is as irremediably corrupt as it has been for millennia, except now the centuries-old exponential development of the noösphere’s external technology of mechanized communication has rendered only the perception of that corruption – or, worse, the juvenile elevation of perception to proof – about as useful as a Belgian waffle tank barrier in Tiananmen Square.

The times have afforded the big boys very big toys and while whistling the Marseillaise might still raise the blood, raising strategically effective people’s armies it won’t. It may still be an effective recruiting song but as a battle strategy for crying out loud, it isn’t. Move on. Not enough to see there any more.