Blair fans the flames of intolerance

Still smarting from an attempt at a citizen’s arrest earlier this month for war crimes over the illegal invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair is now recycling noxious neo-con, pseudo-theories in telling us that modern wars are predominantly the result of religious conflicts.

Blair, who is thought to be worth around £45m, was given space in The Observer to provide us with some amazing new wisdoms. The ex-New Labour prime minister – now a Middle East “peace envoy” and head of the Faith Foundation – says:

  

"The battles of this century are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology, like those of the 20th century – but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference."

Pointing to the many places around the planet where violence has erupted between people of different faiths, Blair notes that this is a growing phenomenon and that acts of terrorism are motivated by an “abuse of religion”.

So has Blair introduced any new insights into an understanding of the undoubtedly traumatic conflicts that are taking place around the globe?

Well, no.

He’s reprocessing discredited idea from the American right-wing, with whom he is so well connected. Leaving aside for one moment that religion IS actually a form of ideology, the notion of cultural or religious clash as the driving force behind conflict is in no way a brain wave conceived in the mind of the ex-PM.

The “theory” of cultural clash goes back to the hey-day of colonialism. It was revived in the 1990s by the conservative US magazine, Atlantic Monthly, whose owner David Bradley was "dead certain about the rightness" of invading Iraq.

Its best-known advocate was political scientist Samuel P. Huntingdon, who in 1992 proposed his “clash of civilisations” thesis, a year after the first Gulf War.

He wrote: “... the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. ... The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Huntingdon’s thesis was countered by many distinguished scholars, including Amartya Sen, Naom Chomsky and Paul Berman. The most incisive critic was the late Palestinian scholar, Edward Said. In The Clash of Ignorance, written in 2001 he argued that Huntingdon’s theory was an example of "the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims".

Blair does not mention Islam by name. But his references to sectarian and terror attacks are to areas where mainly Islamic-inspired groups have been at work. And by remaining silent about results of the post-Anglo-American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he conveniently leaves out his own role in stoking the flames of conflict.

In Iraq, for example, while the Saddam regime undoubtedly suppressed the Shia population, sectarian violence was non-existent. Thanks to the “regime change” policies pursued after the invasion, inter-communal killings are a daily occurrence.

But getting back to Blair’s claim. Were the two main wars of the 20th century in which some 100 million soldiers and civilians died really caused by a clash of “political ideologies”? Of course not. In 1914, the world’s big imperialist powers went to war over a division of the world’s resources. And behind World War II were the clashing economic and political interests of the ruling classes of Europe, America and Asia.

Could Blair’s latest ignorant spouting be an attempt at resurrection in advance of the publication of the Chilcot inquiry into the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? He and many others are said to be nervous about its potential findings.

Finding scapegoats is the name of the game and not only for Blair. Bigotry of any kind – religious, nationalist or racist – is indeed on the rise, fanned by the reactionary policies of the mainstream parties. The reasons are not hard to fathom. Their purpose is to divert attention and energy from the inability of the system to satisfy the peoples of the world’s deepest needs and aspirations.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Why we should oppose any attack on Syria

Desperate acts by unpopular regimes have the capacity to spiral out of control. And we’re not talking just talking about the Assad dictatorship in Syria but also the plans by the US and Britain to launch missile attacks on Damascus.

As they build their surveillance states at home, while driving down living conditions of the majority, president Obama and prime minister Cameron are gambling on a diversion which could well backfire.

Polls show the majority of Americans and British citizens opposed to military intervention in a brutal civil war. Iran and Russia are warning that attacks on Syria in response to alleged use of chemical weapons could further destabilise the region.

With Putin’s Russia and Iran heavily committed to backing the Assad regime, any action by the US backed by Britain, France and Germany will have unpredictable consequences. Madness indeed.

While there is talk of re-calling parliament to give military action a democratic veneer, the ConDem government has already indicated that it “has to reserve the right to act immediately”. To that end, the National Security Committee is meeting tomorrow.

The supposed reason is of course the “discovery” of chemical agents. While chemical weapons may well be used by the Syrian regime, how bombing Assad’s forces can really put an end to this is of course not stated. Just as in Iraq in 2001, UN weapons inspectors are still scrambling to investigate the nature and source of chemical weapons.

But US Secretary of State John Kerry claims that the evidence is “screaming at us” as he and the US military with the support of Cameron and Hague feverishly gather together their coalition of the willing.

Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has called on the West to “stop wringing its hands” and intervene against the Syrian government. “Peace envoy” (can there be a greater misnomer?) Blair has been hard at work touring super-yachts in the Mediterranean and private-jetting around St Tropez and Sardinia.

Blair – just like US secretary of state John Kerry - says that the new government in Egypt should be supported “in stabilising the country” by continuing to provide $1.3bn of US military aid. “Stabilising”? “Restoring democracy”? A strange word for the military regime’s murder of some 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

Blair notoriously helped to launch the illegal UK-US attack on Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had secret “weapons of mass destruction”. That never-proven pretext turned out to be just that – a psychological operation to blur the issues and provide a “humanitarian” cover for a brutal war that caused hundreds of thousands civilian deaths.

Like the current pretext of chemical weapons, it was a blatant propaganda lie by the Blair, Bush and their allies to bring “democracy”, aka regime change through bombing and make Iraq “safe” for corporate exploitation. Never mind that more a decade later, Iraq has still not recovered from that war and is wracked by internal conflict.

It is well-known that the United States and Saudi Arabia have been supplying the anti-Assad forces in Syria with tanks and weaponry. But the imminent missile and drone attacks, backed up by military aircraft, will be crossing a major line.

So where is Her Majesty’s opposition on this vital question? Even less critical than the Conservatives’ own backbenchers, shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander says: "I'm not ruling out the possibility that Labour could support the government [even without a UN resolution, he made clear], but I'm certainly not prepared to write the government a blank cheque."

So that’s alright then. Just give Labour time and they will write that cheque.  

Obama-Cameron’s race to bomb Syria come what may has nothing to do with protecting the Syrian people, or even their distaste of chemical or weapons of mass destruction. After all, the US is the only country to have used atomic weapons on an undefended population and also defoliated large parts of Vietnam with chemicals, maiming hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.

So arrange the following in any order you feel like: hypocrisy, double standards, neo-imperialism, military adventurism, warmongering, military-corporate complex. Then you’ll know why we should oppose attacks on Syria.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

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

The press is neither free nor fair

The dispute over statutory (backed by Leveson, Miliband, Clegg) or non-statutory regulation of the press (Cameron) is really no dispute at all. Because regulated or not, the press will as a whole always remain hostile to the interests of ordinary people.

Phone hacking and paying off police officers for inside information was exposed at Leveson. But there was no way the report was going to stray into deeper issues. The report went soft on successive governments’ close ties to Murdoch’s empire. And the police were laughably more or less given a clean bill of health.

Some of Leveson’s proposals could even make it more difficult for investigative journalists to operate. In his proposals, the Leveson suggests major alterations to both the 1998 Data Protection Act and the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace).

Between them, journalists could become liable to prison sentences and their sources

be required to sign written agreements.

Ultimately, the press is neither free nor fair. The reasons are self-evident. Newspapers are owned by an assortment of Murdoch’s global corporation News International, Russian oligarchs (The Independent and the London Standard) or right-wing aristocrats like Viscount Rothermere.

He is chairman and controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail and General Trust PLCs, one of the largest media conglomerates with interests in newspapers, TV and radio in Europe, the United States and Australia.

Any regulatory system of the press will not make a jot of difference when it comes to the Daily Mail witch-hunting trade unionists, denying climate change is actually taking place (even though many of its readers are regularly flooded out by extreme weather) or scapegoating asylum seekers and migrant workers.

If we had had a regulatory system in place in 2003, would it have compelled the media to expose government lies in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq? Of course not. Newspapers lapped up the Blair government’s falsehoods and helped create the spurious grounds for an invasion.

Not even the liberal Guardian could bring itself to oppose the war, which by any standards was illegal under international law and did not have the backing of the United Nations.

During major strikes, the media is at one in siding with the employers and the government. Which paper supported the strikes in 2011 by public sector workers defending their pension rights?

Rail union RMT general Secretary Bob Crow, who gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry, said it had uncovered “the level of collusion between press, politicians and the state to do over anyone seen as a threat to their interests and that includes the trade union movement.

"From the miners to the firefighters and right up to date with our struggles today on transport and public services, no stone has been left unturned in vilifying and slandering those with the guts to stand up and fight back."

Crow’s reference to the miners’ strike of 1984-5 is compelling. Urged on by the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, papers like the Daily Mirror attacked miners’ leader Arthur Scargill throughout the dispute.

When it was over, the Mirror joined in a scurrilous denigration of Scargill over false allegations of misappropriation of funds. There was more than a little suspicion about the involvement of the dirty hand of the state in this infamous character assassination.

So when Miliband and Clegg urge on the very same state to get involved in “regulation” of the media, they are not proposing to remedy these kinds of wrongs.

In any case, what’s the use of an apology or a fine long after the event. The damage has already been done. In the hands of capitalist owners, the media can never be “free nor fair”. Always remember that.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Will the big three parties 'step aside' now please

As there now appears to be a new convention in public life in the shape of “stepping aside” while inquiries take place into incompetence and/or misleading broadcasts by the BBC, surely there are grounds for extending this practice into political circles as well.

So in the interests of probity, here is a short, sample list of malpractice and/or lying at Westminster that should, if we lived in a real democracy, lead to all the big three political parties “stepping aside” for the foreseeable future.

     New Labour years

1. Claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and using this lie as the basis of an illegal invasion and occupation of that country. The hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed are the direct consequence of this action and prosecutions for war crimes are in order.
2. The introduction for the first time in 1998 of university tuition fees on the spurious ground that this was the only possible way to continue to the sector. It signalled the end of free higher education.
3. Creation of the light-touch regulation of the City and finance through the hopeless Financial Services Authority, thus misleading the public into believing their money was safe in the hands of the banks. The financial collapse of 2007 showed this to be a lie.
4. Expansion of “public finance initiative” projects to build hospitals and schools on the basis that they would save taxpayers’ money in the long term. The recent collapse of several NHS Trusts shows this to have been deception on a grand scale.
5. Claiming that the expansion of the global market economy would benefit everyone. In fact, inequality grew faster, executive salaries soared and the ownership of wealth became more concentrated in fewer hands.
6. Using the spurious “war on terror” as the cover for a war on civil liberties and human rights through detention without trial, integrated national databases, interception of emails and the merging of criminal and civil laws through the notorious ASBO system.

2010 election and the ConDems

7. In the run-up to the 2010 general election, the three major parties consistently refused to divulge their plans to cut public spending if elected. As a result, the election was a massive fraud perpetrated on the electorate as a whole. The Coalition came to power without a mandate in a constitutional coup.
8. The claim that “we are all in it together” made by the ConDems has proved to be one of the greatest lies of British history. Spending and welfare cuts, inflation, the rise in VAT and other measures have fallen disproportionately on average earners, those in need and people with disabilities. The rich, as per usual, have got richer.
9. Lib Dems propping up the Tories by breaking their election pledge not to support a rise in tuition fees. Vince Cable, the business secretary, proposed the increase in fees to at least £6,000 a year. This alone disqualifies the Lib Dems from ever being in government again!
10.  David Cameron’s pledge that the health service was “safe in his hands” has become one of the all-time political lies. The NHS Act opens the door to privatisation by making hospital trusts ever-reliant on fee-paying patients and allowing GPs to commission services from the private sector.

We could go on and on, but no doubt you have your own examples of how the political system has become a conduit for misleading, misinforming and lying. There’s only solution – and that’s for the perpetrators to step aside.

Unfortunately, they intend to cling on to office for as long as possible. So it’s going to take one big shove to get them out of our hair to make room for a real democracy to take shape.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Blair's 'gratitude' sums it up

The killing of Osama Bin Laden may satisfy America’s lust for revenge but ordinary people have paid a massive price in the hunting down of al-Qaeda’s US- trained leader.

Since the infamous 9/11 attacks, untold numbers of civilians have been killed in Afghanistan by American and British forces who have occupied the country for a decade.

America used the lie that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were joint partners in crime, even though they regarded each other as enemies, to invade Iraq. Hundreds of thousands have been killed subsequently, and many driven into exile.

Where there was no al-Qaeda presence before in Iraq, there certainly is now. Even Britain’s MI5 warned former prime minister Blair that the 2003 invasion would increase the risk of terror attacks in Britain.

Blair’s sickening statement today, expressing "gratitude" to the US, and declaring that the killing of Bin Laden showed that "those who commit acts of terror against the innocent will be brought to justice, however long it takes" equally applies to himself.

The issues and causes that have served as recruiting grounds by jihadists everywhere remain absolutely unaltered and unresolved since 2001.

The Palestinians, for example, are perhaps further away from the legitimate goal of self-determination than they were. President Obama has followed his predecessor’s policy, isolating the elected Hamas government and backing Israel’s aggression in Gaza and in settlement building.

Puppet American regimes like the ones in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain continue their pro-Western policies and crack down on dissent with impunity and silence from Washington. American troops remain in Iraq.

There is also a sense that the timing of the US operation – miles inside Pakistan and without authority from the country’s government – is also to do with Obama’s attempt to paint himself as a true patriot and a man the country should re-elect next year.

The fact that the news led to rallies on world stock markets and boosted the dollar says as much about the fragility of the global economy as it does about anything else.

Similarly, state-authorised terror in the shape of the Nato war on Libya has given the beleaguered Coalition government in Britain something to brag about. Cameron’s indifference to the death of one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons and three children in an illegal targeted assassination attempt is a warning to us all.

With the British economy teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession – boosted only by spending spree on bunting for that wedding – war is good for business.

Enemies abroad are being matched by the targeting of the enemy within. The pre-emptive arrests before the wedding were in the spirit of the authoritarian state built by the previous government. Riot police battering Bristolians protesting about yet another Tesco store aimed at driving small shops out of business is also a sign of the times

The market state, as we have warned, long ago abandoned its stewardship of the economy and the welfare of its people in favour of promoting business as the only business of the planet.

Shorn of social responsibilities, the state constantly falls back on its true nature – as an instrument of repression within its borders and military action outside. None of this makes the country a safer place to live, but then the ruling classes are not particularly interested in this as they don’t travel on the Tube or frequent other likely terrorist targets.

In historical and practical terms, the curtain is coming down on bourgeois democracy. We are obliged to replace the decayed political system with something much more democratic and representative, where financial interests are replaced by social and community need. Saturday’s meeting of the People’s Assemblies Network in London has taken on a new significance.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor