One would have thought that the awesome, apocalyptic event that smashed the psyche of the Spanish nation, and toppled one of Bush’s prime collaborators, Jose Maria Aznar, and a kindred war criminal would have had a cathartic effect on his other leading accomplice in 10 Downing Street. To the contrary, he shows no signs of contrition; his fire-spouting pompous rhetoric against what he repetitively belches as ‘the enemies of civilization’ has become even shriller. It is the shriek of a creature shoveled to the wall with no help forthcoming from his beleaguered transatlantic hustler. Like the French Bourbons, Blair has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
Visibly the Bush/Blair axis is being dashed against the rocks. Blair does not have the guts to reject as the Spanish prime minister has now done in words that resonate with undisguised loathing for the architects of the colonial slaughter. A view embraced by 90 per cent of his fellow citizens opposed to the war. “The war in Iraq was a disaster and the occupation continues to be a disaster. You cannot organize a war with lies. Bush and Blair should engage in self-criticism to avoid repeating what has happened.” What a stunning and admirable reversal of his nation’s tragic links to the so-called ‘coalition of the willing.’
Events in recent months have highlighted the extent to which Blair is a relic of the past, chained to his exterminatory evangelical dogmas, relentlessly bent on pursuing a course that has proved lethal for his victims, and in the not so long run suicidal for his own political fate and perhaps the grimmest of death to his own citizens.
Did he forget so quickly the searing strictures to which he had been subjected by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury in St Paul’s cathedral? And that of Archbishop Tutu “that this is a wholly unjustified colonial war — an act of evil?” Or the personal insult of the grief-stricken father who had lost his son as he ambled out of the cathedral. Or has he installed mechanisms in his skull to tell him that the war crimes he’s perpetrated are mere fictions?
The memory of that cold October day and the lashings he received were atoned he exultantly proclaimed by Lord Hutton’s judicial inquiry. Indeed, it was a farce, a public relations stunt, an uncompromising whitewash. I surmised then that it would be a cover-up but I dismally failed to anticipate the extent to which a decadent ruling class would go to exculpate his crimes. “I am vindicated” he exultantly proclaimed and one of his little labor minions pointing to the law lord ecstatically ejaculated without blushing: “That man should be made a Duke.” It was a victory of a kind but one that would soon boomerang in his face. Bush , the master of the mega-terrorist state, was among the first to congratulate him on learning of the great news: “My wife and I have prayed for you and our prayers have been answered. Yours is a great moral victory against terrorism and a victory for all humanity.” How many times have we heard these dribblings? Never mind the sheer asininity of the utterance that conceals the blood-drenched realities of his crimes. Of the essence is that it revealed the meeting of the reborn Christian and his evangelical Anglican, both divinely inspired combatants battling “the theocracy of evil wherever it existed.”
It’s over a year, precisely March 20, when the first incendiary and cluster bombs and the cruise missiles smashed the working class districts of Baghdad, inaugurating one of the foulest illegal acts in the history of modern warfare. Aggregate costs of the war now stands at $185 billion and is climbing; but the horrendous final financial costs of the balance sheet have not yet been drawn up. To that must be added the unspeakable and unquantifiable human costs of exterminism. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been wiped out and the death tolls rises daily. The resistance continues to grow. Not a day passes without the occupation’s military forces and their native collaborators being compelled to pay the costs in blood. The occupation, despite a phony constitution engineered to give a fig leaf of legitimacy to a quisling class, created by and in the interests of the perpetuation of the Anglo-American raj and its imperialist pillage is at its wits’ end, desperately seeking for an exit strategy.
Let’s be reminded of something basic that ought never be forgotten or downplayed: two predator nations with a combined population of over 360 million, the richest in the world, with military budgets outstripping $450 billion degutted a poverty stricken nation of 25 million, a people that had been bled white by an embargo of 13 years. Their ranks have been swelled by other mercenaries.
I
Despite the tens of millions of peace activists and the heroic efforts of members of the Security Council that opposed the war the two mega-predators lunged for the kill. This was not merely a political cabal of Labour and Tory. The Republicans launched the war and the Democrats with few exceptions applauded and did their bidding. Such was the political unity of a capitalist ruling class and their political executors bent on grabbing the world’s second largest petroleum and natural gas reserves. The ‘vindication’ of the Hutton whitewash followed swiftly on the heels of Blair’s tenuous victory on higher education funding; his flagship stratagem for boosting student fees. Nothing could be better engineered to deepen the already huge class divide that’s such a glaring trait of British education. The promises of extending the democratic process via the educational media has now been scrapped. The two-track educational system reflecting the nature of class rule had always existed. Blair’s policies and the tawdry rationalizations he deployed revealed the extent to which the Labour Party was a party in labor and not a party of labor.
Explicitly it was an education ‘reform’ for the promotion of the rich. For many in the Labour Party it was a betrayal of ‘socialist principles.’ But Blair had never accepted such ‘principles.’ The Economist made the point a long time ago when it called him a Tory, and his co-conspirator George Bush was not rendering him an idle homage when he acknowledged: “I don’t know anything about what the Labour Party stands for but what I do know is that Tony Blair would make the best of Republican strategists.” The encomium is apt.
With an obviously crushing parliamentary majority he resorted to every dirty trick in the game, murky deals and arm-twisting stratagems that had rarely been seen in this most bourgeois of parliaments. He had ‘won’ the Commons vote on university tuition fees by wafer thin margins: 316-311. And that from a government that still commands a parliamentary majority of 161. A bill that would adversely impact on millions of working and middle class students. Like Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, Blair had pawned his soul to the chancellor, Gordon Brown, whose voracious and unbridled drive for the top job is no secret. Thanks to Brown’s dealing and wheeling he was able to corral the wavering rebels who were urged to drop their opposition to the bill only hours before the final vote. It was seldom that a bill had stirred such belligerent reaction in the House and the nation. We are told that it was part of ‘the larger package’ of reforming the civil service and the public sector that would ultimately involve also the axing of 80,000 civil service jobs.
The battle lines are drawn. For most students and their parents, plans to allow universities to charge up to pounds 3,000 in top-up fees represented the ultimate betrayal by a party that promised the exact opposite in its election manifesto. How could we say there are no funds for education, remarked angrily student and Labour benchers, when the government is spending billions on guns and pursuing an endless colonial war?
II
Blair no longer sports the permanent PR smile that he sedulously cultivated over the years. His countenance is now twisted. His fangs are permanently bared like an animal at bay. His momentary triumphalism is a fiction for Blair is an irretrievably wounded pol. It’s a delusion to cradle the hope that he would tumble from his power perch without the sustained and dynamic leadership of a mass movement. He cannot beat anything but the war drum — what he fatuously calls ‘the war on terror.’ In fact it’s the only drum he has to beat because he has ceased to be concerned with pressing domestic issues that are breaking all records: mounting inequalities, unemployment, racism, indebtedness and a crumbling infrastructure. Never has the need for a mass movement to oust Blair and his irrational anti-national policies been greater; and never have the conditions been more propitious for their success. Future historians of a more honest vintage will draw the analogy with the Anglo/French and Israeli attack on Suez that led to the unraveling of Anthony Eden; and the Indo-China colonial war that shredded Lyndon Johnson.
What the Hutton inquiry did was to exonerate in a particularly vulgar way Blair on virtually all counts while castigating the BBC. To have attacked the BBC as he did was misplaced and foolish for that institution was conceived as an indispensable ideological prop to class rule. It has not changed its orientations since it was founded in 1924 despite the fact it has added to its repertory a few more black skins and brown skins. The BBC was at no time anti-war, and bears no comparison to The Independent. It was no accident that the law lord, a protestant, came from one of Britain’s first and oldest colonies and was Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. Blair has survived three backbench rebellions in the past year: Iraq, financial deregulation for top performing state hospitals and the educational bill. The 328 page report that I waded through was the stereotype of the grand whitewash that it was: a compilation of witnesses that had been trotted out, an inquiry bereft of any semblance of analysis. And, of course, as the increasing body of medical evidence in The Guardian clearly pinpointed Dr. Kelly’s death was not and could not have been a suicide.
A matter that was considered outside the remit of the inquiry. Understandably a gloating Blair declared that it was one of ‘the greatest landmarks of judicial inquiry.’ It was extraordinarily thorough, detailed and clear. We accept it in full. I have been vindicated. Indeed, if Blair had orchestrated the inquiry himself it could not have been much different from what emerged. Blair had invoked his own ‘God’ when he stood forth as the knight in shining armor and declared that the war was unequivocally justified and that he would follow the same policies again. “I’m ready to meet my Maker and answer for those that have died as a result of my decisions.” Blair can rest assured that his moment of reckoning will not come in the after world of his mystical fancy, but in the citadels of purgatory that he’s created on earth for tens of thousands of his victims.
Taking his cue from Bush who felt compelled to set in motion a commission on ‘the shortcomings of intelligence’ Blair was forced to follow suit. It was whitewash all over again but there would be few that would be bamboozled this time round. The man picked to head the ‘judicial inquiry’ was one of Blair’s associates. He came from the same social caste, they spoke with the same Oxonian accents; they were members of the same select clubs. From the Hutton inquiry to the Butler inquiry the line is direct, this time with a dash of comic opera. The Butler in question is none other than Lord Butler of Brockwell, educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford. His blueblood pedigree is of the highest. His professional relations with the power structures of the Tory and Labour administrations are untainted with scandal. His clubs, as with Blair’s are : Anglo-Belgian, Athenaeum, Brook’s. The press gave us a profile of his lordship that is expected to unmask the lies of Britain’s spymasters: MI 6. Now comes the crowning glory, proof of his unmatchable objectivity. As told in a press comment, which was not intended to be hilarious, “on a hot day in June 2002 all the knights of the garter gathered at Windsor Castle, which was closed to the public, and the master of University College, Lord Butler of Brockwell, was invested by the Queen with his own garter, star, riband, collar and mantle.” The British ruling junta have at least the capacity of taking themselves seriously while the world sits in the pit and roars with laughter at their antics.
III
Blair’s rationale , which he peddles with the force of a messianic convert, for smashing Iraq stemmed from the alleged weapons of mass destruction. “What I believe the assessed Intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” This was in the Foreword to his government’s dossier entitled: Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The assessment of the British government (Sept 24 2002). Bush adds his concoction. “Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpile, Saddam has probably stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 metric tons of chemical agents, much of it added in the last year.” Note the mealy-mouthed caveats: little, probably, possibly. (US National Intelligence Council, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, October 2002). And here is the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) vociferating on the eve of the war.
- “Since UN inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, and has invested more heavily in biological weapons; and in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”
The circus and its clowns were now in business proclaiming the absolute and incontrovertible truth to the jig of Onward Christian Soldiers.
Here is Bush again on October 12, 2002.
- “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Ari Fleischer, the official toady mouthpiece of the Bush lie machine, when asked: “Didn’t we go to war because we said that WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the US?” without blinking shot back: “Absolutely.” The systematic and coordinated lie machine of the Blair/Bush duo abetted by the big-moneyed media contributed to the holocaust in Iraq. It gave Sharon one more refurbished rationalization to press on with his systematic terror, his targeted assassinations and the accelerated theft of Palestinian lands. The infamous 45 minutes hit the corporate media headlines. “Intelligence indicates,” noted Blair, “that the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so.” This was considered so important to Blair’s yearning for war that it was emphasized in his own Foreword, in the executive summary and twice in the main text.
Inevitably Blair’s cronies in the corporate gutter media joined in the holler against ‘the Saddamites.’ The Evening Standard flashed pictures of ballistic missiles hurtling out of the skies with the reminder: only 45 minutes from the attack. Murdoch’s Sun, one of the self-anointed cheerleaders of Blair cabal was even more apoplectic. British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be annihilated by germ warfare missiles launched by Iraq “in just 45 minutes.” The word ‘just’ repeated ad nauseam had become an adjunct to the allotted time span. His Fox television network in the US was broadcasting every utterance of Blair that preached that unless Iraq was stopped in its tracks Britain and the civilized (sic) world would be reduced to cinders. Sharon’s public relations impresarios and drummed the same message. All of this was naturally being peddled in the name of freedom, democracy and human rights. The record was stuck. It was aimed to drive home the profundity of Dr. Goebbels aphorism: “It may be a lie but if it is repeated a thousand times and a multiple of that it becomes the truth.”
It was difficult, however, to keep cranking the rickety lie machine. Blair was being sold down the river by the ‘defectors’ themselves. David Kay, for decades the epitome of the loyal CIA spy, returned with his 1,400 collaborators from the colony and said they found no WMD. The Carnegie Report repeated the same story. Paul O’Neill, former secretary of the treasury had the temerity to declare that Bush wanted to go to war long before 9/11, a revelation that earned him the rebuke that he was mentally unbalanced. Scott Ritter, UN weapons inspector, had exposed Operation Rockingham as deliberately manipulating intelligence for political purposes. Blair knew all about this since he came to power in 1997. In his recent book Disarming Iraq: The Search of WMD even the timorous Hans Blix that exhibits some steel in his backbone contended that the ‘supposed threat’ of Saddam Hussein was a tissue of falsehoods. Attorney general Goldsmith’s legal advice to the Blair regime, he argued had no valid legal foundations. “And I don’t buy the argument that the war was legalized by Iraq’s violation of earlier resolution or do I accept the claim that resolution 1441 authorized the use of force.” Blair could now hardly keep his head above water in his sea of lies.
Blair’s woes were compounded when Katharine Gun, a 29 year old an intelligence officer in the spy centre of Cheltenham, confessed that she had leaked The Observer an e-mail by the US government requesting assistance from British intelligence in bugging the personal offices of Kofi Annan and other Security Council members. Unsurprisingly he denied it but he was unable to prosecute Gun for such a course would have been disastrous for him and Bush as it would have conjured up once again that terror of terrors — the issue of the war’s legality. Gun’s disclosure shredded the Official Secret Act, notably Section 11. Well could The Financial Times deplore that “Blair’s government has welshed on its commitment to an effective Freedom of Information Act and indeed to open government.” What this says in blunter language is that Blair’s lie machine and its crooked politicking exercised so blatantly by his diseased political gangsters is wholly anathema to democracy.
One whistleblower were on the heels of another in rapid succession. Clare Short, former cabinet minister, went one step further than Katharine Gun when she observed that she saw transcripts of conversations with Kofi Annan. Once again Blair was pushed into a hole. As Short tersely comments: “What’s the PM going to say? Either he has to say that it’s true we were bugging the Secretary General’s office; or he’s got to say it’s not true and he’d be telling a lie; or he’s got to say something pompous about national security.” Short’s revelations left him no room to wiggle. Wounded animal that he is Blair and his creaky lie machine is latched to the killer engine of Bush and his doctrine of ‘preemptive war.’ This is imperialism’s clarion call for permanent war and permanent occupation of occupied territories. Colin Powell , the ever-faithful articulator of his master’s voice elaborated his expansionist agenda in his New Year’s resolution that appeared in The New York Times on the first of January.
- “We in the Bush administration have taken stock and made resolutions; we do so with confidence because president’s Bush vision (sic) is clear and right; we resolve of course to expand freedom everywhere and are focused in particular on Afghanistan and Iraq…We are resolved as well to turn the president’s goal of a free and democratic Middle East into reality… We are also working for the advent of a free Cuba.”
Remember that last dirty little clincher about Cuba, amplified by Treasury Secretary John Snow: “The president detests and loathes the Cuban government and what it stands for.” As a policy utterance, (or better still a death sentence on a nation whose crime was that it chose the socialist road) it couldn’t be pithier. And, of course, since then the embargo has been tightened and a ‘regime change’ has been rammed down the gullets of the Haitian people, with the democratically elected president Aristide booted into an African exile.
IV
What staggers me, and no doubt I’m in the company of millions, is Blair’s repeated abuse of the world ‘vindication.’ Is he oblivious to the hundreds of thousands that have been butchered since the embargo? Is Blair unaware that the crimes against humanity that he’s committed and which can’t be swept under the rug? And on that score it’s well that I should quote once again the desperate cry of a former senior civil servant of the UN, Mustapha El Fawzi framed in a language of epic proportions.
- “The US and Britain have been at war with my country non-stop for more than 13 years. It dragooned the UN bureaucracy into toppling our government. The platitude was regime change. It is US/UN sanctions that generated the genocide that wiped almost one million of our people. That is UNICEF data. Let’s for a moment abstract from the numbers slaughtered during the second war. When asked about this, general Tommy Franks replied that they’re not interested in counting those numbers. Our people, however, will not forget those numbers. They destroyed our factories, our dikes, our public utilities and our infrastructure.”
The psychology propelling the Bush/Blair killing machine was bundled — what else? — in the words of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom.’ The inseparable couplet. When asked about this Madeleine Albright a former Clinton Secretary of State baldly affirmed: “We think the price was worth it.” A judgment no doubt that SS Reich Gauleiter Heinrich Himmler would have fulsomely endorsed.
V
None can foresee when Blair’s lie machine will be stilled or when the holocaust visited on the Iraqi people will grind to a halt. But what we do perceive is that the Blair/Bush doctrine of preemption and permanent occupation is cracking up. The coalition of the willing has ceased to be a coalition and there was nothing willing about it. What is clear is that the hammer blows of the resistance movement burgeoning in intensity and technical sophistication joined to the courageous refusal of a rebellious Spanish government to pursue the war will entail calamitous consequences for the entire network of alliances scaffolded by imperialism since 1947. The Blair/Bush axis are now waddling in the sewers of desperation. In this respect it is timely to recall my central thesis enunciated earlier that the rape of Iraq was one of the gravest of war crimes committed against the Iraqi people that will ultimately prove to be one of the crucial points of inflection in the crippling of imperialism.” (‘Iraq: The End of Empire,’ Economic and Political Weekly, September 20, 2003.) The tragic trajectory of events is amply confirmatory.
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