Invading Iraq is what we did instead of tackling climate change

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Original article well said by Adam Ramsay republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

OPINION: Instead of launching a war, the US and UK could have weaned us off the fossil fuels that pay for the brutal regimes of dictators

Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George 'Dubya' Bush
Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George ‘Dubya’ Bush

Twenty years ago today, [20 March] war was once again unleashed on Baghdad. In the UK – and much of the rest of the world – people sat in front of their TVs watching the skies above the ancient city flash with flame as buildings were rendered to rubble, the limbs and lives inside crushed.

The real victims of George Bush and Tony Blair’s shock and awe were, of course, the people of Iraq. Estimates of violent deaths range from a hundred thousand to a million. That doesn’t include the arms and legs that were lost, the families devastated, the melted minds and broken souls, trauma that will shatter down generations. It doesn’t include anyone killed in the conflict since then: there are still British and US troops in the country. It doesn’t include the poverty resulting from crushed infrastructure, the hopes abandoned and the potential immolated.

And that’s just the 2003 war: Britain has bombed Iraq in seven of the last 11 decades.

But in far gentler ways, the war was to shape the lives of those watching through their TVs, too. The invasion of Iraq – along with the other post-9/11 wars – was a road our governments chose irrevocably to drive us down. And we, too, have been changed by the journey.

The financial cost of the Iraq war to the US government, up to 2020, is estimated at $2trn. The post-9/11 wars together cost the US around $8trn, a quarter of its debt of $31trn. Much of the money was borrowed from foreign governments, in a debt boom which, some economists have argued, played a key role in the 2008 crash.

It was in this period, in particular, that China bought up billions of dollars of US government debt. Just before Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Beijing had overtaken Tokyo as the world’s largest holder of US Treasury bonds. Today, America’s neoconservatives are obsessed with China’s power over the US. What they rarely mention is that this was delivered by their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Britain’s financial contribution was more meagre – in 2015 the UK government estimated it had spent £8.1bn on the invasion of Iraq, and around £21bn on Afghanistan. But these are hardly figures to be sniffed at.

Also significant, in both cases, is where this money went: the Iraq war saw a revolution in the outsourcing of violence. In 2003, when the war began, the UK foreign office spent £12.6m on private security firms. By 2015, just one contract – paying G4S to guard Britain’s embassy in Afghanistan – was worth £100m.

Over the course of the wars, the UK became the world centre for private military contractors – or, to use the old fashioned word, mercenaries. While many of these are private army units, others offer more specialist skills: retired senior British spooks now offer intelligence advice to central-Asian dictators and, as we found out with Cambridge Analytica during the Brexit vote, psychological operations teams who honed their skills in Iraq soon realised how much money they could make trialling their wares on the domestic population.

This vast expansion of the military industrial complex in both the US and UK hasn’t just done direct damage to our politics and economy – affecting the living standards of hundreds of millions of people across the world. It has also distorted our society, steered investment into militarised technology when research is desperately needed to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

Similarly, the war changed British politics. First, and perhaps most profoundly, because it was waged on a lie, perhaps the most notorious lie in modern Britain, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Acres of text have been written about the rapid decline in public trust in politicians in the UK in recent years. Very few grapple with the basic point – that, within the memory of most voters, a prime minister looked us in the eye, and told us that he had to lead us into war, based on a threat that turned out to be fictional. There are lots of reasons people increasingly don’t trust politicians – and therefore trust democracy less and less. But the Iraq war is a long way up the list.

Obama – who had opposed the war – managed to rally some of that breakdown of trust into a positive movement (whatever you think of his presidency, the movement behind it was positive). So did the SNP in Scotland.

But often, it went the other way. If the war hadn’t happened, would Cleggmania have swung the 2010 election from Gordon Brown to David Cameron? Probably not. And this, of course, led to the second great lie of modern British politics, the one about tuition fees and austerity.

Without the invasion, would Donald Trump have won in 2016? Would Brexit have happened?

There is a generation of us – now approaching our 40s – who were coming into political consciousness as Iraq was bombed. Many of us marched against the war, many more were horrified by it. The generation before us – Gen X – were amazingly unpolitical. Coming of age in the 1990s, at the end of history, very few got involved in social movements or joined political parties.

When I was involved in student politics in the years following Bush and Blair’s invasion, student unions across the UK were smashing turnout records. Soon, those enraged by the war found Make Poverty History, the climate crisis, the financial crisis and austerity. A generation of political organisers grew up through climate camps and Occupy and became a leading force behind Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, helping organise a magnificent younger cohort of Gen-Zers which arrived after us.

But I shouldn’t end on a positive note. The disaster predicted by the millions across the world who marched against the war has played out. Hundreds of thousands have died. The Middle East continues to be dominated by dictators.

This war was justified on the grounds that Saddam was a threat to the world. But while his weapons of mass destruction were invented, scientists were already warning us about a very real risk; already telling us that we had a few short decades to address the climate crisis.

Rather than launching a war that would give the West access to some of the world’s largest oil reserves, the US and UK could have channelled their vast resources into weaning us off the fossil fuels that pay for the brutal regimes of dictators. Instead, we incinerated that money, and the world, with it.

Original article well said by Adam Ramsay republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

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Twenty years after: the lessons of Iraq for today’s world

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Stop the War protest march 15 February 2003 London

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/twenty-years-after-lessons-iraq-todays-world

TWENTY years ago tomorrow two million marched for peace in the biggest protest in British history.

The London demonstration formed just one of scores of marches against the US’s stated plan to invade Iraq which maybe mobilised 30 million people worldwide.

Despite a barrage of lies and war propaganda echoed by the BBC and most major newspapers, polls showed a solid majority of the British people were against the war.

But the government went ahead nonetheless. This was the crime of the century: not the first of the wars of aggression that the US and its allies embarked on during Washington’s “unipolar moment” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the largest and most consequential.

It was also the most blatantly unprovoked. Unlike Yugoslavia or Libya, where Nato effectively took sides in a local conflict to advance its destructive agenda, the Iraq crisis was entirely fabricated. The US and British governments knew their case against Iraq was based on lies.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/twenty-years-after-lessons-iraq-todays-world

‘A beautiful outpouring of rage’: did Britain’s biggest ever protest change the world?

Continue ReadingTwenty years after: the lessons of Iraq for today’s world

The Highway to (Climate) Hell

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The Highway to Hell was a short poem published by me to oppose the USUK-Iraq War 2003.

THE HIGHWAY TO HELL

I respect all religions
And belief-systems worldwide

But
I have no time
for those b******s

That claim to be Christians
That claim Divine guidance
On the Highway to Hell

dt

26/7/23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death

The wikipedia page appears incomplete. I understood that large earth-moving machines were used to kill retreating Iraqi soldiers through burying them alive but there’s no mention of it.

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Tony Blair, Terrorist (2)

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The BBC reported Building 7 was demolished / fekked / collapsed 23 minuted before it did. I can’t understand this except that it was scripted and Building 7 was late in being collapsed / fekked / demolished. Can it be anything other than following a script? Please explain.

edit: That there was a script to 9/11 that a section of BBC was actively participating in i.e. that would be according to UK government direction. That would be the UK government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

ed: Please explain. The BBC editors tried …

ed: Just to make absolutely clear: The BBC reported that the Solomon Building also known as Building 7 collapsed. The BBC report was premature and the Soloman building collapsed 23 minutes later.

The BBC reported the premature collapsuation of Building 7 a full 23 minutes before it collapsed – is that a record premature collapsuation?

11/7/14. The purpose of this post is to suggest that the BBC and by extension Tony Blair’s UK government were complicit in the attacks in New York known as 911. I am suggesting that by prematurely announcing the collapse of Building 7, the BBC was following a pre-planned script and that Building 7’s collapse or destruction was delayed according to that script. How else is it explained.

While the BBC is the UK’s state broadcasting corporation, I tend to understand it as comprising of 2 parts: the normal news reporting operation and another section concerned with state propaganda. I do think of these two parts as separate and distinct although the news reporting arm is sometimes biased and misleading.

 

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UK politics news

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A selection of recent UK and international news articles

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Commentary on recent UK political events

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Hey Ho, Hey Ho …

 

How the Orange Bookers took over the Lib Dems


What Britain now has is a blueorange coalition, with the little-known Orange Book forming the core of current Lib Dem political thinking. To understand how this disreputable arrangement has come about, we need to examine the philosophy laid out in The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, edited by David Laws (now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and Paul Marshall. Particularly interesting are the contributions of the Lib Dems’ present leadership.

Published in 2004, the Orange Book marked the start of the slow decline of progressive values in the Lib Dems and the gradual abandonment of social market values. It also provided the ideological standpoint around which the party’s right wing was able to coalesce and begin their march to power in the Lib Dems. What is remarkable is the failure of former SDP and Labour elements to sound warning bells about the direction the party was taking. Former Labour ministers such as Shirley Williams and Tom McNally should be ashamed of their inaction.

Clegg and his Lib Dem supporters have much in common with David Cameron and his allies in their philosophical approach and with their social liberal solutions to society’s perceived ills. The Orange Book is predicated on an abiding belief in the free market’s ability to address issues such as public healthcare, pensions, environment, globalisation, social and agricultural policy, local government and prisons.

The Lib Dem leadership seems to sit very easily in the Tory-led coalition. This is an arranged marriage between partners of a similar background and belief. Even the Tory-Whig coalition of early 1780s, although its members were from the same class, at least had fundamental political differences. Now we see a Government made up of a single elite that has previously manifested itself as two separate political parties and which is divided more by subtle shades of opinion than any profound ideological difference.

 

Continue ReadingCommentary on recent UK political events

Politics news allsorts

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Commentary and analysis on recent UK politics news.

The Conservative-Liberal-‘Democrat’-Conservative coalition intends to persecute benefits claimants and (poor) young people.

Jobless young people without basic skills told to learn or lose benefits

The principles of “earn or learn” have been hotly debated within the coalition, after David Cameron used his conference speech in October to float the idea of taking away housing benefit and jobseeker’s allowance from under-25s who were not in work or training.

The Liberal Democrats have not agreed to all those ideas but appear to have relented on some elements of “earn or learn”, as Osborne announced that 18 to 21-year-olds without basic skills would only get their benefit if they undergo 16 hours of training a week.

On top of this, all 18 to 21-year-olds who are unemployed for more than six months will have to undertake compulsory work experience, a traineeship or a full-time community work placement.

The measures appear to be an extension of the government’s controversial “workfare” schemes – or mandatory work activity – where jobseekers are forced to go on a month of work experience in order to qualify for their benefits.

Autumn statement: how are families and individuals affected?

Missing from the autumn statement were figures on welfare benefits, tax credits and child benefit. Under the Welfare Benefits Uprating Act passed earlier this year, rises in most benefits no longer go up by the rate of inflation but are capped at an increase of 1% until 2016. So Jobseekers Allowance, currently £71.70 for the over 25s who have a record of paying National Insurance, should on that basis rise to £72.42 – an increase of 72p, or enough to buy a tin of Heinz baked beans at Tesco and still have 4p left over.

In the 2010 budget, Osborne said child benefit rates would be frozen for three years, taking effect from April 2011. Since then, the rate has been £20.30 a week for the first child and £13.40 for the second or more. Nothing was mentioned about child benefit in the autumn statement, but assuming the provisions of the Uprating bill are applied to child benefit from April next year, expect another 20p for the first child and 15p for the second.

The basic state pension, currently £110.15 a week, will rise by 2.7% – the rate of inflation – to £113.10. George Osborne also confirmed that the state pension age will rise to 68 nearly 15 years earlier than originally planned, starting for people retiring in the mid-2030s, rather than 2046. It will then rise again to 60 by the late 2040s, and 70 in the decades after that, saving £500bn from pension expenditure over the next 50 years. “We have to guarantee that the basic state pension is affordable in the future, even as people live longer and our society grows older. The only way to do that is to ensure the pension age keeps track with life expectancy,” said Osborne.


COMMUNISTS ON OSBORNE STATEMENT: “Good news for the rich, City and big business”

Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths responded as follows to the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement today (December 5)

‘The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement is good news for the super-rich, City speculators and the corporate fat cats. It hands yet more lavish subsidies to big business on top of the tax cuts on high incomes and monopoly profits. There will be extra state finance for exports to China together with tax relief for City speculation in Exchange Traded Funds and for shale gas fracking, business rates and employers’ National Insurance contributions.

But there will be no windfall taxes on energy and retail monopoly profits and no moves to end tax haven status in British overseas territories. Instead, the extra state pension of £2.95 a week from April will be swallowed up in rising household fuel costs while almost one-third of men and more than one quarter of women today will not live long enough to draw their pensions in the mid-2030s at the age of 68′.

Imran Awan discusses terrorism suggesting that the ConDem coalition government is intending measures that “…  will simply further stigmatise Muslim communities.” Awan raises many issues:

  • ‘Terrorism’ and the ‘war on terror’ are poorly defined
  • ‘Terrorists’ and freedom fighters are not clearly distinguished
  • States sanction the use of the ‘terrorist’ label to stigmatise individuals and small groups e.g. the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden
  • Many protest issues are labelled as being of a ‘terrorist’ nature e.g. animal rights activism, anti-capitalism and anti-abortion campaigning
  • States’ use of drones and torture can be regarded as terrorism
  • “[T]he media have vilified and demonised Islam, making it comparable to terrorism”
  • The terrorism label is far less likely to be applied to right-wing terrorism

Image of Guantanamo Bay prisoners

‘Terrorism’ is a wonderfully useful tool for governments engaged in oppression: the huge scale of the surveillance by NSA and partners is justified through the so-called threat of terrorism despite the fact that the fact that the so-called threat cannot justify such oppressive measures. Terrorism permitted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terrorism is so important to these oppressive regimes that they have to ensure it’s continuing existence through drone strikes, renditions, the use of torture in prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and by [later edit: the]demonizing of Islam and Muslims.

If terrorism didn’t exist these governments would have to invent it. Actually, they did invent it: Glenn Grenwald reports on research by Remi Brulin that it was invented “… by Israel in the 1960s and early 1970s as a means of universalizing its conflicts (this isn’t our fight against our enemies over land; it’s the Entire World’s Fight against The Terrorists!). The term was then picked up by the neocons in the Reagan administration to justify their covert wars in Central America (in a test run for what they did after 9/11, they continuously exclaimed: we’re fighting against The Terrorists in Central America, even as they themselves armed and funded classic Terror groups in El Salvador and Nicaragua). From the start, the central challenge was how to define the term so as to include the violence used by the enemies of the U.S. and Israel, while excluding the violence the U.S., Israel and their allies used, both historically and presently. That still has not been figured out, which is why there is no fixed, accepted definition of the term, and certainly no consistent application.”

Terrorism is bullshit ideology invented, used, nurtured and maintained by USUK and it’s allies to rule the world.

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Blair’s government allowed USA to spy on UK citizens

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Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George 'Dubya' Bush
Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George ‘Dubya’ Bush

The Guardian and Channel4 – in a joint investigation – have released documents sourced by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents reveal that US intelligence agencies were given far greater powers to spy on UK citizens by UK intelligence agency GCHQ in 2004. It is extremely unlikely that this move would be taken without treasonous ministerial approval by Tony Blair’s government.

GCHQ and the cabinet office are not commenting.

Image of GCHQ donught buildingUS and UK struck secret deal to allow NSA to ‘unmask’ Britons’ personal data

Documents show Blair government let US spy on Britons

1pm update: The important issue about these revelations is that UK allowed US authorities to spy on UK subjects who are not guilty or even suspected of any crime. Further, the scale of those subjected to such spying without any legal oversight is astonishingly wide. While it is reported as contacts-of-contacts or friends-of-friends of suspects it may be more practical to just consider it as being all UK subjects. [2.20pm Most news sources are reporting contacts-of-contacts. The Guardian say that it’s ‘”three hops” from its targets — who could be people who talk to people who talk to people who talk to you.’ That does look like all UK subjects. ]

This post subject to change

Continue ReadingBlair’s government allowed USA to spy on UK citizens

Torture inquiry ‘finds UK intelligence officers knew of mistreatment’

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http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/nov/14/torture-inquiry-gibson-report-intelligence-detainees

Gibson report, published next week, is said to call for further investigation of how far British ministers were responsible

Image of Guantanamo Bay

An official investigation into the extent of the UK’s involvement in rendition and torture after 9/11 is reported to have concluded that British intelligence officers were aware that detainees were being mistreated in prisons across the globe.

The Gibson inquiry report recommends that further inquiries now be made to establish how far ministers were responsible, according to the Times.

The inquiry headed by Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge, was shelved before any witnesses gave evidence, amid a behind-the-scenes dispute over the control of information that was to be made public, and after police launched their own investigations.

However, Gibson completed an interim report based on an examination of documentary evidence, and a version is to be published next week, almost 18 months after it was sent to the prime minister.

Following the disclosures of the mass digital surveillance operations being mounted by the UK and the US, it appears likely that the contents of the Gibson report will add to the pressure for more effective democratic oversight of the UK’s intelligence agencies.

Gibson has concluded that there is evidence that British intelligence officers were aware that detainees were being mistreated at US-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, and at prisons in Pakistan, according to the Times.

Continue ReadingTorture inquiry ‘finds UK intelligence officers knew of mistreatment’