A decade of weapons of mass disinformation about Iraq

News that the BBC is preparing a special programme to mark the 10^th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq doesn’t feel you with joy, even though it might contain new material about the Blair government’s use – or, rather, misuse – of intelligence.

The BBC’s record on a war that led to the disintegration of a country that continues to this day, is not a pretty one. Did the BBC challenge any of the lies during the run-up to the war? For example, the lie supplied by British intelligence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger? Or the false claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? 

In company with virtually all the mainstream media, the BBC went along with the Blair government’s falsehoods. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told anyone who wanted to listen what the real position was: “All this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons is no longer valid. Most of it is based on speculation that Iraq could have hidden some of these weapons from UN inspectors.”  

When Andrew Gilligan suggested on the May 29, 2003 Today programme on Radio 4 that a government dossier on Iraq had been “sexed up”, all hell broke out. Gilligan was compelled to quit in January 2004, along with director-general Greg Dyke and chairman Gavin Davies, after the publication of the whitewash Hutton report.

When the Butler report on the use of pre-war intelligence was published later in 2004, Dyke said it proved that Gilligan was right. It was too late for government scientist David Kelly, who helped Gilligan with the original story. He had died in somewhat suspicious circumstances 12 months earlier after being hounded by Labour MPs.

From a decade of sanctions to the invasion and its consequences, the people of Iraq have been subject of a ghastly experiment that rivals anything in previous history. A decade of sanctions prior to 2003 led to the deaths of 500,000 children from malnutrition, lack of medicine and disease from polluted water supplies.

At least a 100,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives in the ensuring chaos. Other sources, including the Lancet magazine, suggest the death toll is over 600,000. The death toll climbs on a daily basis. Hundreds of thousands have fled the country as refugees and up to a million have been displaced. A third of the country’s physicians have left Iraq since 2003. Thousands of occupying troops were killed and 35,000 US soldiers injured.

The cost to the US taxpayer to date is $1,000 billion. And for what? Halliburton and other corporations made piles of money initially. But the neo-cons’ dream of a “New American Century”, where America would build “free-market democracies” at will is in tatters. The Chinese control most of Iraq’s oil contracts.

As the US foreign policy think-tank CSIS notes: “The US invasion now seems to be a de facto grand strategic failure in terms of its cost in dollars and blood, its post-conflict strategic outcome, and the value the US could have obtained from different uses of its political, military, and economic resources. The US went to war for the wrong reasons – focusing on threats from weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi-government sponsored terrorism that did not exist.”

There is more than just a failure of US policy here, however. If we actually lived in a half-just world, then Bush and Blair and everyone in their regimes who endorsed the invasion would be behind bars for war crimes. Millions marched in Britain and around the world in an heroic but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent the invasion. This time around we need to mobilise to create a real democracy that can put an end to wars for profit.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Pensions attack brings tipping point nearer

On both sides of the Atlantic, a massive onslaught is under way with the single purpose of dramatically reducing the share of national wealth going to working and retired people in favour of the rich, powerful elites who own and control the economy.

This is not an “ideological attack”, as some trade union leaders in Britain claim, but capitalism trying to “solve” the crisis that has enveloped the system since 2008. The global market for commodities has shrunk, with recession and unemployment taking over.

As the low-cost Chinese and Indian economies seize the initiative, corporations operating in North America and Europe are desperate to drive down costs and increase the surplus going to shareholders as the basis for “renewed growth”.

In Britain this week alone, the Coalition launched its historic attack on welfare benefits, including the disability living allowance (DLA), and published proposals that undermine public sector pensions. The aim is to cut DLA expenditure by 20% by 2015-16. The Disability Alliance says: “We believe the new approach risks over 835,000 disabled people losing what is often described as an essential ‘lifeline’ of support.”

Yesterday, with considerable help from Labour peer Lord Hutton, public sector pensions were hung out to dry. Under the plans, firefighters and others will have to work well into their 60s, pay more in contributions and receive less in pensions than at present. Pay more for less, in other words.

Yet, as a table in the Hutton report shows, the actual cost of the present public sector pensions scheme as a share of national income is forecast to decline over the next 20 years. So this is all about spending cuts and a redistribution of wealth to the private sector.

Which is the story in Wisconsin, where a union-busting law has been railroaded through the state legislature by Republicans against a background of mass opposition which has included sit-ins and demonstrations into the early hours of the morning. The Wisconsin bill “could spell the beginning of the end of public-sector unions,” warned former US Labour Secretary Robert Reich.

Collective bargaining rights are substantially eroded and state workers have to pay 5.8% of their salary toward pensions and 12.6% of their health-insurance costs. Calls for a state-wide general strike are under discussion. Similar moves are afoot in Ohio as states face up to a combined debt of $100 billion that results from the recession.

In Britain, as in the United States, the question is how to fight against capitalism’s attempts to make workers pay for the crisis. In Britain, it certainly cannot be through the Labour Party which is essentially glove in hand with the Coalition. Labour-controlled councils have, for example, passed on government spending cuts at town hall level.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, who favours a “fairer”, “prosperous capitalism”, instructed his backbenchers this week to abstain (!) on the government’s anti-welfare legislation, leaving a handful of MPs like John McDonnell to do the right thing and vote against. Why did Miliband do this? Because many of the government’s proposals actually follow from attacks on benefits begun by New Labour, so there is no disagreement in principle between the two major parties.

While trade union leaders lined up to attack the Hutton report and threatened strike action, Labour’s response was muted to say the least. Angela Eagle, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, only said that “it would be deeply unfair for public sector workers to disproportionately bear the brunt" of what were “tough choices”. Thank you and good night.

Add in soaring prices for food and fuel, rising unemployment, the attack on the NHS and other public services and you sense that a tipping point is coming. Most people will soon find it simply impossible to get by. When that occurs, the road to take will be more like Egypt’s ongoing revolution than one-day protest strikes and lobbies of an undemocratic Parliament stuffed full of pompous, self-seeking “representatives”.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The great pensions robbery

Public sector workers should pay more and retire later on smaller pensions, according to former New Labour minister Lord Hutton. His proposals form part of the continuing pensions rip-off by both the state and the private sector that condemns millions to hardship in older age.

Measures already taken by the previous government and the coalition since June will reduce the value of future pension pay-outs by 25%. Now Hutton, the former Labour work and pensions secretary, has branded public sector pensions schemes "unfair and unsustainable".

Yet, as Hutton’s interim report commissioned by the Lib-Con coalition acknowledges, the average public pension is £7,800 a year. It’s hardly a king’s ransom and peanuts compared to corporate payouts such as the £650,000 a year to Fred Goodwin, the former RBS boss in charge when his bank collapsed into the arms of the state.

Although the economy is in recession, directors of the UK's top companies have amassed pensions pots worth an average of £3.8 million, according to a recent TUC survey. It shows that the average transfer value for a director's pension is £3.8 million, an increase of £400,000 since last year, providing an average annual pension of £227,726. The average director's pension is 26 times the average occupational pension.

Meanwhile, actual workers enrolled in many private pension schemes – a number of which have collapsed in recent years – are losing up to 80% of contributions in fees and commissions, BBC Panorama revealed this week.

In one HSBC pension plan, £120,000 paid in over 40 years would result in fees and commissions totalling £99,900. The Co-Op Individual Personal Pension would take out nearly £96,000 in fees across 40 years of investment growth upon deposits of £120,000. Legal and General's Co-funds Portfolio Pension would take out about £61,000.

Despite what Hutton says, what is really unsustainable is a profit-driven economic and financial system that robs workers and pensioners on a daily basis and then invests time and resources working out how to wreck existing schemes. It is not, as a wretched editorial in today’s Guardian claims, that we “are living too long and saving too little for the existing public sector schemes to remain viable”, adding: “Meeting the existing public pension shortfall will cost £4bn this year and £9bn by 2014: not affordable now, nor sustainable in the longer term.”

But why shouldn’t part of society’s wealth – which is the source of public spending – be used to fund proper pensions, even if it costs more? It’s the same argument that says the government’s budget deficit can only be solved through massive spending cuts, plunging capitalism into even greater crisis.

There is an alternative and it involves breaking away from a shattered system that takes pension contributions and then makes them dependent on growth in speculative investments in shares and property and/or steals the money in fees. It is about reorganising the economy along worker controlled, not-for-profit lines.

Pension fund managers will then be freed from the self-defeating requirement to maximise income by chasing profits from investments in hedge funds and derivatives, learning from co-operative ventures like Mondragon in Spain. Accumulated funds can then be directed to socially-useful purposes including community-owned and operated renewable energy generation, which in turn can produce income for further investments.

Public sector workers are already facing a wage freeze, redundancies and harsher conditions. Increasing pension contributions will amount to a further pay cut. Some union leaders have threatened strike action over pensions. Labour’s new leader Ed Miliband said strikes would “alienate the public” and he was opposed to them. In practice, the coalition ranged against ordinary workers stretches from one end of the mainstream political spectrum to the other.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor