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A GREAT many people believe that democracy has
been lost in this country. Today, true democracy will demonstrate its
resilience on the streets of London.
In the week that Parliament was manipulated by
the Government and denied a proper vote on whether Britain should join the
Bush gang in its assault on Iraq, many thousands of people will converge
on London in what is expected to be the greatest demonstration against war
for a generation.
Not since the days when American presidents were
prepared to use nuclear weapons in Europe will there be such a
demonstration of the popular will opposing violence as a means of
resolving disputes between nations. A sea of people will cover much of
central London and Hyde Park; and they will demand that a great crime is
not committed in their name. As the opinion polls make clear, they
represent the majority of the people of Britain.
What is at stake is not only an illegal and
unwarranted attack on another sovereign state that offers us no threat,
but the credibility of the British parliamentary system. If Tony Blair
uses the royal prerogative, "the absolute power of kings", to join Bush's
attack on Iraq, he acts in a manner no different, in principle and deed,
from Germany's unprovoked attacks that ignited the Second World War.
Read Hitler's speech in September 1938, on the
eve of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. "I know quite well," he ranted at
the great Nuremberg rally, "that through forbearance one will never
reconcile so irreconcilable an enemy as are the Czechs ... Herr Benes (the
Czech leader) plays his tactical game; he makes speeches, he wishes to
negotiate... But in the long run that is not good enough!"
The historian Correlli Barnett commented:
"Change Czechs and Benes to Saddam Hussein and the speech could have been
drafted in Washington today. Needless to say, President Benes's
Czechoslovakia in 1938 posed no threat to Germany and was militarily
outclassed -just as the militarily even more outclassed Iraqis today in no
way threaten the US or the UK."
Blair's "dossier" of Iraq's "weapons of mass
destruction" was written mostly in Washington by the disgraced
intelligence agencies that offered America not a hint of warning of the
attacks of September 11 last year. The Foreign Office here has not even
bothered to change the American jargon. Its 50 pages began with an
outright distortion, as a Mirror editorial pointed out on Wednesday,
claiming that a report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies
"suggested Iraq could assemble nuclear weapons within months."
IN fact, the Institute's report concluded that
Iraq was years from even developing, let alone perfecting and making,
nuclear weapons.
Too much has been said and written about this
absurd exercise in propaganda, which has made a fool of Blair and may well
finish him politically. The weapons issue always was a fake, a diversion.
Any remaining doubt about this was dispelled a week ago by US Secretary of
State Colin Powell when he announced that America might block the return
of United Nations" weapons inspectors to Iraq: the very thing that he and
Bush and Blair had been demanding.
The Americans are justifiably fearful that
Iraq's unconditional offer to the inspectors will "damage the coalition."
In other words, they will no longer have their fig leaf, their excuse, to
capture what one Bush administration official described recently as "the
big prize... oil and construction: you name it".
Blair now drifts in the breeze of Washington's
panic. Having hitched himself to the single issue of weapons inspections,
he is contradicted by the Bush gang almost every time he opens his
mouth.
He no sooner says that the US and Britain will
"act through the UN" than US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Cheney say the opposite - that "the US will act alone" or there
will be "regime change in Baghdad at any cost", regardless of what the UN
inspectors find in Iraq.
This is a truth that rebellious Labour MPs must
understand and not be distracted by the specious "legitimacy" of a United
Nations resolution written in Washington and Whitehall and foisted upon
the Security Council like the proposal of a Mafia don.
Bush and Blair must be stopped for these
reasons. The first is the most urgent. Innocent people will be killed,
maimed and made homeless in a country that has known disproportionate
grief. The propaganda prattle about dossiers has served to distract from
the prospect of the British Government complicit in a great crime against
humanity.
More than half the population of Iraq are
children, and many of the rest are widows, the elderly and the poor. This
week, leading British humanitarian agencies, such as Save the Children and
Christian Aid, left the government in no doubt of the human disaster if
the attack went ahead.
"Years of war and sanctions have already created
an extremely vulnerable population whose ability to cope with any
additional hardship is very limited," said their joint statement. "Child
mortality has risen by 160 per cent under sanctions."
THESE "sanctions" are like a mediaeval siege.
Set up by the United Nations Security Council 12 years ago, they are
driven by the United States and Britain. They have denied clean water and
vital hospital equipment to Iraq, even schoolbooks. A study by Unicef, the
United Nations children's organisation, found that between 1991 and 1998
500,000 children under the age of five had died needlessly.
In 1998, Denis Halliday, an assistant secretary
general of the United Nations, a highly respected official responsible for
humanitarian aid to Iraq, resigned, calling the sanctions genocide. His
successor also resigned and he, too, called the embargo an act of
genocide. Three years ago, 70 members of the US Congress signed an
unusually blunt letter to President Clinton, appealing to him to lift the
embargo and end what they called "infanticide masquerading as policy".
The White House had already given its reply. In
1996, in an infamous television interview, the then US ambassador to the
United Nations, Madeleine Albright, was asked: "We have heard that half a
million children have died ... is the price worth it?"
Albright replied: "I think that is a very hard
choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
The survivors of this carnage, children and the
weak, are the people Bush and Blair will be attacking. Unlike the elite,
they will not have bunkers built by British contractors in the 1980s. The
"blood price" that Blair endorsed in a recent BBC interview will be their
blood.
Having reported many wars and seen too much
bloodshed, I never cease to wonder at the essential cowardice inherent in
the decisions taken by apparently respectable politicians like Blair, who
have seen no war themselves and would never put their own privileged lives
or the lives of their families at risk.
We know about Bush. The gangleader and his vice
president are currently up to their ears in accusations of serious
corporate crime. It is not gratuitous to say that, if Blair joins them in
their grotesque adventure, he will be up to his ears in a crime of even
greater seriousness. Whether or not the United States coerces and bribes
the UN Security Council into producing a resolution - a fig leaf - for an
attack, there is nothing in the UN Charter that authorises an attack,
unprovoked, on another country. On the contrary, it is forbidden. At
Nuremberg, where the Nazis were judged, such aggression was considered
their greatest crime.
ANOTHER urgent reason for stopping Bush and
Blair derives from a term that recently entered the media language. This
is "pre-emptive attack" and it comes, of course, from Washington.
"Pre-emptive attack" means attacking someone before they attack you. When
the Bush gang use it, they like to compare themselves with Churchillian
types who opposed Europe's appeasers of German ambitions in the 1930s.
This is both false and dishonest; for it is they
who bear a likeness to the imperial planners of the Third Reich.
The "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq will not stop
there. A few commentators who do their homework, like the analyst Dan
Plasch, have begun to warn of the likelihood that the United States will
mount "pre-emptive" attacks on other countries: on Iran or North Korea
next, and eventually China, the world's most populous nation, a nuclear
power.
Ten years ago, strategists from the extreme
right of American political life, followers of the present Vice-President
Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, wrote a secret
Pentagon paper. They laid out a "vision" of a post-Cold War world where
the US would aim to "prevent the re-emergence of a new rival ... This is a
dominant consideration underlying the new regional defence strategy and
requires that we prevent any hostile power from dominating a region".
This would be achieved by "pre-emptive" action -
naked aggression.
Last year, Cheney expanded the "vision" across
an Orwellian landscape. America, he said, might have to fight an "endless
war" for 50 years or more. The term, "American primacy", meaning
domination, is now openly discussed and analysed by those who call
themselves foreign policy experts. In the voluminous studies turned out by
America's military bureaucracy, there are references to the "threat" from
China, which is considered both an economic and military rival to the
United States in Asia.
THE attack on Afghanistan was a first test. An
attack on Iraq brings the "vision" much closer, because an American
conquest of the world's second biggest source of oil will give Washington
greater control of the Middle East at a time when the loyalty of its
principal oil protectorate, Saudi Arabia, is in doubt. Another, obedient
Saddam Hussein will be installed in Iraq, and imperial history in the
region will continue uninterrupted.
That is why the fakery of the "threat" of Saddam
Hussein has been promoted so vigorously - a threat that no knowledgeable
person in the Middle East takes seriously, not even the Israelis.
The true danger is not Iraq, or Iran, or North
Korea, or China. It is the United States, and the cabal of fanatics now in
charge, led by a man who on television the other night failed to make
sense in his native tongue. To understand the nature of the threat of
America, simply reverse Bush's and Blair's propaganda on Iraq's alleged
development of nuclear weapons.
As Dr Kathleen Sullivan of the Nuclear Weapons
Education Project in New York has pointed out: "The Bush administration is
not only funding the further modernisation of nuclear weapons, but it is
also proposing two new facilities in the US dedicated to the manufacture
of chemical and biological weapons." She says that "the current doctrine
on nuclear weapons use" in the US leaves little doubt that Bush is
prepared to use them first.
Only one country has used a nuclear weapon of
mass destruction on civilians. Only one country has threatened to use
nuclear weapons in Vietnam and the Middle East. Under Bush, the United
States has revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and refused to take
part in a ban on chemical warfare. It is building a "star wars" programme,
nuclear armed, costing billions of dollars.
As he stood in the dock at Nuremberg, Hitler's
arch crony Hermann Goering said: "The people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and then denounce the peacemakers for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any
country."
That may have worked during the long years of
the Cold War when people in the West were told incessantly there was a
Soviet "threat." As official files are released, it is increasingly clear
this was nonsense. For example, the "missile gap" between America and
Russia, which triggered the building of America's massive nuclear arsenal,
was a lie, promoted by falsified intelligence - from the same intelligence
sources that Blair, waving his "dossier" on Iraq, now asks us to believe
in good faith.
SINCE September 11 last year, the great
tradition of dissent has come alive in Britain. Rarely a day goes by when
there is not a public meeting attended by hundreds of people. Today, vast
numbers of Britons of all backgrounds will put the lie to Goering's
cynical dictum that "the people can always be brought to the bidding of
their leaders."
Direct action has an inspiring recent history in
Britain and America - from the great civil rights movement of the 1960s to
the anti-war campaigns that helped end the atrocity in Vietnam and led to
treaties on nuclear weapons, which Bush wants to tear up.
Today is another date in September to remember,
and perhaps celebrate - as the beginning not of endless war, but of our
resistance to it.
The march to stop the attack on Iraq will set
off from the Embankment at 12.30 today and reach Hyde Park at about
3pm.
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