The letters from Blair and Brown were also interesting, also why we sent our Aircraft over to Libya and it is of course Oil.

Also love the letters from MI6 who basically new about rendition, so I suspect labour will now look like a butch of cowboys riding behind the dearly beloved USA

This is very true, but politics is mostly about doing something now and dealing with adverse effects later. To do otherwise is to risk becoming ineffectual. Jimmy Carter is a prime example and Obama seems to be heading that way too.

The TNC needs NATO more than NATO needs them. I fully expect much carping for the media but smiles and agreement in meetings. Plus the revelation is hardly surprising, the intervention had more to do with getting western interests involved sympathetically with the arab spring, rather than being the foreign powers who armed those they wish to overthrow.

Just proves that the dirty fucking hippies were right all along, and the ever so serious people who said “we don’t torture” were wrong agin.

‘For example:
- US support for the opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s helped to strengthen Islamic extremism, and thus diminish US security in the long-run.’

That’s not a ‘revenge effect’ – its an unintended consequence. If the West had supported the Soviet Union it would have been ‘revenge’.

Most of the ‘effects’ you list owe more to the Butterfly Effect but I’m not sure grouping everything from 9/11 to wage demands in the 70s all together tells you anything more significant than ‘shit happens’.

Even inaction has unintended consequences.

Cherub @2:

That’s purely an artefact of our current electoral system in the West. Long-term planning is actively discouraged by it.

Shatterface:

That’s actually the most literal example of a ‘revenge effect’ in the list, in the sense that it is an example where the relevant factor is explicitly personal vengeance for past wrongs.

The Mujahedin who were funded, trained and (in fact) more or less invented by the USA in the 1980s were then personally betrayed by said sponsor as soon as the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan. That led directly and demonstrably to a 20-year revenge plot by ex-Mujahed, including the very famous one, but also including several others who didn’t even agree with him politically until then.

Another example from the same region can be found in the Crusades. Until we showed up horsing around with plate armour on, the Fatimids, Ottomans, Shi’a, Ismaelians and Sunni (more or less, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, Syria & the rest of Arabia) spent all their time fighting each other. In particular, the Fatimids and the rest of Islam loathed each other because a) Egypt was an ex-colonial power and b) they venerated Fatima, and the rest of Islam had gone hard-line patriarchal by that time. Most of Palestine were ethnic “Jewish” Christians, until the Christians attacked the place and overwhelming numbers of locals converted to Islam for safety.

They only became, in their own minds, one group once we attacked ‘em. There’s a lesson to learn in that, somewhere.

Note for the pedantic; my last paragraph above is a radical oversimplification, for obvious reasons. A full discussion would take longer, and involve more inter-library loans, than I have time for. The analysis is true as far as it goes; don’t try and push it further, please

Unintended consequences of government policies have become such a regular feature of the political landscape that it is a serial wonder politicians and their senior advisers don’t consider the likelihood and anticipate the manifestation.

How many times in recent years have we heard that chilling phrase: There is no Plan B?

Any prudent business has contingency plans so why not governments?

Realpolitik leads to all manner of weird and wonderful allies. Western powers used Islamists over the decades against more secular forces that they did not like, only to find that the Islamists end up causing more trouble, which does not, of course, preclude them being used again when it is convenient, as in Libya today. Tomorrow, who knows who one’s allies might be…

Were I Gaddafi, I’d feel very annoyed at the West’s lack of gratitude. Having finally ingratiated himself into the hallowed portals of the ‘international community’, even taken the rap for Lockerbie in order to do so, and then done much useful work in informing on Islamists (and executing a good number of them), whilst being subcontracted to do the sort of thing that happened to this bloke, he must feel very narked that the big powers end up dropping him like a hot potato and assisting the opposition to overthrow him.

I see so some of you will say Blair being god father to Murdock’s kid or kids we are not yet sure if it’s one or two, was basically political, I would say it was more to do with Blair making his fortune.

The letters about the SAS being sent to train Gaddiffi men, seems to have been wasted. But the rendition is pretty shocking.

We are told to day Miliband intends to redraft the Labour constitution to make it more of a party of today, in other words to remove the bits about welfare, social housing and I suspect the NHS. Reason we are told labour has to seek a wider area to get donations, meaning it will seek to become New labour 2.

Seems odd to me that this came from the Guardian in a leaked document seems labour has problems with leaks again.

How much did ministers know about rendition and what went on?

It’s perhaps worth recalling that Attlee, as prime minister (1945-51), using the royal prerogatives, authorised development of Britain’s A-bomb (first tested in October 1952) without informing his cabinet.

A clever example of raising a smokescreen.
The Labour Government sent innocent men to be tortured by Gaddafis thugs. Approved by Labour Ministers, backed by Labour MPs. Your Party has blood on its hands.

@12: “A clever example of raising a smokescreen.”

I don’t know whether that was intended for me because of @11 but I don’t belong to a political party and long ago suggested that Blair should stand trial at the ICC in The Hague for the invasion of Iraq without sanction of the UN Security Council.

The point of @11 was to show that Prime Ministers can accomplish much by use of the royal prerogatives, evidently safe even from cabinet scrutiny. Parliament only approved the engagement of British forces in the invasion of Iraq in a debate shortly before the invasion started on 20 March 2003 – the preparations for the war were made by use of royal prerogatives:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2862325.stm

One of the unintended consequences of that invasion was the ensuing internal strife in Iraq. It’s estimated that c. 150,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result.

When I used the word “smokescreen” I was referring to the idea that sending people to be tortured in Libya was “unintended”, it was very clearly intended.
I doubt there will ever be Proof that Labour Ministers gave direct orders for the torture or that other Labour MPs knew what was going on. Thats not how these things work, usually its handled with a nod & a wink.

@14: “I doubt there will ever be Proof that Labour Ministers gave direct orders for the torture or that other Labour MPs knew what was going on. Thats not how these things work, usually its handled with a nod & a wink.”

I agree with that.

After decades of turning over the archives of Nazi Germany, no historian has ever found a piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it authorising the holocaust.

@OP, Chris Dillow: “Two things suggest revenge effects will often occur.”

A third contributor is that even when politicians can see that something is going wrong, they continue in spite of the evidence. To make a U-turn is weak, a signifier of wooly thinking, an admission of failure. Changing course is rational if your boat is heading towards the rocks, unless of course, you are sailing the ship of state.

Governments regularly deny having contingency plans because that would amount to a tacit admission that they realistically recognise events may not turn out as planned – which events often don’t.

How many amendments have been made under pressure to the originally proposed NHS legislation?

This will teach the governments here and in France and the USA to make sudden, spur-of-the-moment decisions in foreign policy, as things can come back and bite them on the backside. Very awkward, very embarrassing.

Who is this bloke? The BBC site states:

‘Mr Belhaj – known in the jihadi world as Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq – commanded the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The group was formed in 1990 by Mr Belhaj and other Islamist Libyans who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. The LIFG waged a three-year low-level insurgency mainly based in eastern Libya, and staged three attempts to assassinate Col Gaddafi in 1995 and 1996, according to Middle East analyst Omar Ashour of Exeter University. By 1998, the group was crushed. Most of its leaders fled to Afghanistan and joined forces with the Taliban. There, Mr Belhaj is alleged to have developed “close relationships” with al-Qaeda leaders and Taliban chief Mullah Omar, according to an arrest warrant issued by the Libyan government in 2002. The warrant says that he was based in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from where he ran and financed training camps for Arab mujahideen fighters.’

Just the right sort of nice bloke to have running Libya, I would say. But one can see why he was a ripe candidate to be sent to Libya for interrogation, once the Colonel had been initiated into The International Community. Who at that point would ever had assumed that London, Paris and Washington, having graciously accepted the Colonel into their Club, would be cheerleading this bloke as a brave freedom-fighter, and having to apologise for their sending him back to interrogation in Libya?

Well, from brave, freedom-fighting jihadi against Moscow, to vile al Qaeda terrorist, back to brave, freedom-fighting rebel in Libya. Same bloke, same politics right through — but very different images. But realpolitik leads you to choose all manner of peculiar allies, doesn’t it?

“But realpolitik leads you to choose all manner of peculiar allies, doesn’t it?”

Quite. Try this pic of the cordial meeeting in December 1983 between Donald Rumsfeld, as President Reagan’s envoy, and Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/