Time for 'regime change' in Britain

Whatever Tony Blair says or doesn’t say at the Iraq inquiry will not alter the historical record. Blair and George W.Bush went to war on a pretext, pursuing regime change in Baghdad behind the smokescreen of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that existed in imagination only.

“Intelligence” dossiers were, to use that famous phrase, “sexed up” to suggest that Saddam Hussein could launch WMD in 45 minutes and even reach Cyprus with them. Old documents on the internet were cut and pasted and published as gospel. The British passed the Americans “information” about Iraq seeking uranium through Niger that was pure fiction.

The link made by Bush between Iraq and Al-Qaeda was total nonsense, and Blair knew it. Except it is not nonsense now. Where once they had no foothold, Al-Qaeda is now present in Iraq and is partly responsible for the near civil war that exists between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq has devastated Iraq. Apart from an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion, as of May 2007 there were 2,255,000 Iraqis displaced inside the country. A similar number had fled to either Syria or Jordan. In June 2007, 28% of Iraqi children suffered from chronic malnutrition while the unemployment rate in some areas was 60%. Four in ten professionals have left since 2003, including 12,000 physicians. The latest figures available show that 70% of Iraqis have no access to adequate water supplies.

Some have got rich out of the war, notably the US defence industry and private sector corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton. By mid-2009, US taxpayers’ funds spent or approved for Iraq totalled a staggering $800 billion, running at $5,000 a second according to Senator Harry Reid.

Congressional hearings found that Halliburton overcharged the Pentagon to the tune of $1.4 billion. But what the hell! Former vice-president Dick Cheney helped to run the corporation before entering the White House so it was natural his old friends should benefit. Iraq is a privatised war, with more than 180,000 private contractors working in support of US troops. They have killed Iraqi civilians with impunity.

Those responsible for visiting this disaster on Iraq include not just Blair but Gordon Brown and the members of the New Labour cabinet and MPs who voted for the war despite massive public opposition. A good number of them are lawyers and quite well understood that the accepted principles of international law stood in the way of regime change. So they ditched them – or rather got the hapless Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, to change his mind when the military top brass said they wouldn’t invade without legal clearance.

A special word should be reserved for the United Nations and its then secretary-general Kofi Anan. Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, reported that his team could find no WMD in Iraq and in all probability that there were none. A word from Anan querying the legality of an invasion might have just held up military action. Unfortunately, it took him until September 2004 – 18 months after the invasion - to say just that!

Iraq, the continuing occupation of Afghanistan, extraordinary renditions, the secret wars waged by US special troops in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, all show that international law is powerless to stop the British and American governments. Their actions continue to reinforce not lessen the threat of terror attacks on ordinary civilians.

There is a strengthening case for “regime change” in Washington and London. These are democratic states in name only, playthings of major corporations and financial interests. Creating a real democracy, with economic and political power in the hands of ordinary people, is the best answer to the warmongers. Then we could have the war crimes tribunal that many people are demanding, with Blair and Brown, Bush and Cheney the top four defendants.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The 'war on terror' unravels

The inquiry into New Labour’s involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq opens just as unrest is growing over the rising rate of casualties amongst British and American troops in Afghanistan. On both sides of the Atlantic, the fall-out from the “war against terror” is growing.

Yesterday morning, a serving British soldier, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, handed in a letter to 10 Downing Street in which he said that his fellow soldiers had “become a tool of American foreign policy”. Glenton, the first British soldier to speak out publicly against the Afghan war, is due to return to duty but has refused and has been court-martialled for desertion in proceedings due to start on Monday. He could face two years in prison.

In his letter he said: "I have seen qualities in the Afghan people which have also been for so long apparent and admired in the British soldier. Qualities of robustness, humour, utter determination and unwillingness to take a step backwards. However it is these qualities, on both sides, which I fear will continue to cause a state of attrition. These will only lead to more heartbreak within both our societies." Glenton said he gradually became aware that justifications for occupying Afghanistan rang hollow. "The Afghan people were attacking us, even though our politicians said we were going in to help them. It came as a real shock."

On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans are intrigued by Time magazine’s account of the internecine conflicts between former president George W.Bush and his mentor and vice-president Dick Cheney, who masterminded the “war on terror” in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. and developed plans that neutralised rights enshrined in the US constitution itself.

The Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers are looking into why Cheney insisted that covert CIA policies and actions were kept from Congress and how Cheney protected Scooter Libby, his top aide. In March 2007, Libby was convicted of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity in revenge for her husband’s criticism of the Iraq war. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, plus a $250,000 fine. Although the sentence was commuted on appeal, the affair marked a turning point in the Bush presidency, in which Cheney ally Donald Rumsfeld was also sidelined. Cheney hoped to get Libby pardoned but Bush, who had the power to grant a pardon as he left office, refused.

Despite his loss of power in the White House, Cheney pushed ahead with sinister plans to “bolster security” by having 20,000 uniformed troops within the United States by 2011. Supposedly trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, the use of troops for “homeland security”, has come under strong criticism from within the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians. They say that the new domestic emphasis could be in breach of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

Earlier this week, Jason Leopold of Truth Out, revealed revealed that Cheney pressurised Bush to deploy US soldiers against suspected terrorists in Buffalo, New York in October 2008. A Justice Department legal opinion asserted that the president had unlimited powers to prosecute the “war on terror” on American soil and could ignore constitutional rights, including First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press and Fourth Amendment requirements for search warrants. This has since been rejected by the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, while Bush has gone quietly into retirement, Cheney is leading the right-wing counter-attack on Obama, openly questioning the president’s legitimacy as well as patriotism. Undoubtedly we have not heard the last of Cheney or the sinister groups within the American state that he fronts for. He is only just in the shadows.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Katrina's victims still paying the price

Two years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Today, many of its people are still suffering. They are the victims of government bureaucracy, racism, corruption and indifference. A report by the Institute for Southern Studies catalogues the shocking conditions faced by the poor of the city, who were overwhelmingly the hurricane’s victims.

On September 15, 2005, President Bush declared to the nation in a televised speech from New Orleans: “I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.” Yet two years later, miles of the Gulf Coast are still devastated, and tens of thousands of Katrina victims remain in limbo. Many Gulf residents are running out of hope. The report shows how:

• over 80,000 people are still living in “temporary” trailers, and 31,000 are still receiving federal housing assistance
• Louisiana’s programme to assist homeowners has been crippled by delays and mismanagement, and it now faces a shortfall of as much as $5 billion
• about half of those displaced by Katrina and Rita were renters, and rent costs have jumped as much as 70% across the Gulf Coast
• of the more than 82,000 rental units destroyed by Katrina and Rita, only 33,000 are on track to be rebuilt
• the federal and city authorities want to tear down four of the city’s largest public housing complexes and replace them with mixed-income housing with less room for the poor
• the Bush administration gave $24 million to support that city’s charter schools
  while failing to support traditional public schools
• thousands of homeowners and businesses were denied insurance coverage after the storms, largely due to confusing rules about what should be covered
• there are 100,000 fewer jobs available in New Orleans today than before the 2005 storms
• recovery workers have faced abuse and fraud by their employers; the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance alone has recovered for employees over $1 million in stolen wages
• African-American workers point to a pattern of exclusion from rebuilding jobs
• the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent only 20% of the $8.4 billion allocated for New Orleans levee repair
• recent analysis found that most city neighbourhoods today are as at as great a risk of destruction from flooding as they were pre-Katrina
• testing has found dangerous levels of heavy metals and other contaminants in floodwater sediments, with lead readings in some spots two-thirds higher than levels deemed safe

The institute interviewed a wide range of community leaders and groups and concludes: “Gulf Coast leaders express outrage when Washington officials claim to have spent enormous sums of money on hurricane relief and recovery—over $116 billion, according to the Bush administration — when so little money has gotten to those most in need. The fact is, the $116 billion figure is misleading. Most of that was for emergency relief, with less than a third aimed at long-term rebuilding needs. Even worse, less than half of the long-term rebuilding money allocated has been spent.”

Katrina was a disaster waiting to happen. All the evidence suggests that the hurricane picked up power from seas that were warmer than usual as a result of climate change. Meanwhile, the federal emergency agency FEMA had been swallowed up by the Department of Homeland Security as the spurious “war on terror” - along with the invasion of Iraq - took precedence. A planning exercise conducted by FEMA in 2004 suggested that the region was woefully unprepared for a disaster that might cause significant loss of life, particularly if the levees failed in New Orleans. But its findings were ditched because budgets had been cut.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Democracy beyond the Bush regime

More and more American commentators are beginning to question whether the American political system can survive the Bush regime. Joe Conason, a columnist for the New York Observer and Salon, is blunt. In It Can Happen Here (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007), Conason says: "For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realisation that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment." Conason explains how Bush claims an authority that transcends the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government. His book cites evidence of widespread disenchantment and fear amongst the electorate, which led to the defeat for the Republicans in last autumn’s mid-term Congressional elections. Voters are fed up with what Conason describes as the lies, corruption and cronyism of the Bush administration seen from Iraq to the handling of Hurricane Katrina.

Conason writes: "The most obvious symptoms can be observed in the regime's style, which features an almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty. The most troubling effects are matters of substance, including the suspension of traditional legal rights for certain citizens; the imposition of secrecy and the inhibition of the free flow of information; the extension of domestic spying without legal sanction or warrant; the promotion of torture and other barbaric practices, in defiance of American and international law; and the collusion of government and party with corporate interests and religious fundamentalists."

The title of Conason’s book is drawn deliberately from the title of the novel by Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, which was published 1935. Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, envisaged the USA in thrall to a fascist dictator. Buzz Windrip, a plainspoken, folksy Southern politician had risen to power during a period of profound unrest in America. Lewis, who had been expelled from Nazi Germany, had written: ""When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Conason sees striking resemblance between the demagogic villain of Lewis’s book, and the present White House incumbent. Yet the authoritarian regime in Washington is, as Conason acknowledges, not fascist. The American people are not cowed or defeated by the Bush regime. But it remains true that in many countries, including Britain, the political system that evolved in tandem with capitalism, with its democratic side the result of generational struggles, is indeed in profound crisis. Globalisation of the world economy, leading to the transfer of powers and decision-making out of the hands of national governments, has tied capitalist democratic structures to corporate power in a much more direct way. In 1992, the arch-conservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama, claimed that the end of the Soviet Union marked the ultimate triumph for the Western democracies, which were themselves the last word in history as far as political systems were concerned. How hollow and stupid his words sound today! Yet relying on liberal sentiment to resuscitate the façade of bourgeois democracy would be a major mistake and could lead to the outright fascist dictatorship that Conason and others fear. Bush enjoys as much power as he does partly as the result of the supine nature of Senate Democrats. Surely the next word in history has to be the extension of democratic principles and ideals in new ways and into new areas like the workplace, colleges and communities, replacing corporate power with a genuine people’s power.

Paul Feldman, communications editor