(Editorial from Labour & Trade Union Review, November 2002, No. 120)
The Onward March Of Civilisation
The
threat of military force produced the unanimous Security Council Resolution
on Iraq. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British representative at the UN gave an interview
to Radio 4 on November 9th in which he got away with saying that it was a threat
of military force against Iraq which produced the Resolution. The BBC knows
that it must earn its Propaganda Licence fee by suspending its critical faculties
when affairs of state are at issue. But it must be obvious to anybody whose
critical faculties have not been put in cold storage that the threat of military
action was directed against the United Nations itself. It was given an ultimatum
by America and Britain, (by Ameranglia): support our Resolution or be discarded.
That was the meaning of President Bush’s statement that if the UN did
not back its Resolution it would be reduced to the status of the League of Nations
and treated accordingly.
That
statement may have no clear meaning in Britain today where history merits Henry
Ford’s judgement that it is bunk. Television is saturated with history
programmes, rivalling soap opera in coverage, but the historical content is
bunk. It is a kind of entertainment/propaganda glorifying the state while rigorously
avoiding anything that might inform public opinion on some issue of current
affairs.
Reporting
of the recent Iraqi election was invariably done in a sarcastic tone of voice.
It was said that it was not an election at all, only a referendum, because there
was only one candidate. If television history had been informing the public
about the brief history of this incongruous British Imperial creation called
Iraq, the sarcastic reporting of the Presidential election would hardly have
been possible.
The
Arab world, drawn into Britain’s war of conquest against the Ottoman Empire,
was promised that a general Arab state under Britain’s hegemony would
form part of the post-war world. But when the Ottoman Empire was defeated, Britain
made war on its Arab allies to prevent the formation of the Arab State. It broke
the Arab world into a number of States in order to control them all by playing
them off against each other. Three provinces of the Ottoman state, Basra, Baghdad,
and Mosul were thrown together as Iraq. There had been no Iraqi liberation movement
and no popular sense amongst those provinces that they constituted some kind
of distinct cultural or political entity. They were thrown together as a matter
of Britain’s convenience to be a subordinate “nation-state”.
The racial and religious differences which had been unproblematical under the
tolerant Ottoman state were worked up into antagonisms when these heterogeneous
provinces were required to function as a “nation-state”,
cut off from their brethren in the other “nation-states"
created around them.
The
first Iraqi election was held eighty years ago. It was the election of a King.
The front runner was Said Talib of Basra, a pioneer of Arab nationalism. The
British candidate was a son of the Sherif of Mecca who in 1916 had become an
ally of Britain and declared a Jihad against the Turks. In the aftermath of
the Great War the Sherif lost his base in Mecca when the Saudi regime declared
Jihad against him as an instrument of the infidel. Britain decided that his
son would make a suitable monarch for the new, subordinate “national”
Kingdom of Iraq, and that he should be made king by the will of the Iraqi people.
It became apparent that Said Talib, the authentic Arab nationalist with a following
in Basra region, would defeat the stranger brought in from the Western desert.
Gertrude Bell, the strongly “Arabist”
adviser to the British regime, invited Said Talib to take afternoon tea with
her. When he arrived he was kidnapped and whisked off to Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
by Gertrude’s military associates. That left only one candidate for the
Kingship. The people of Iraq grasped what their new masters required of them,
and the first Iraqi election was very like the latest one.
Political
conduct is learned much more by example that by doctrine. And the practical
lesson in democracy which Britain gave its new Iraqi creation eighty years ago
was absorbed and has been followed diligently ever since.
A
generation later, after Iraq had become nominally independent, the Baghdad Government
declared neutrality when Britain declared war on Germany. In 1941 Britain decided
to conquer Iran for the purpose of controlling its oil. Iraqi neutrality got
slightly in the way of the conquest of Iran - Britain therefore invaded Iraq,
overthrew the Government and installed a puppet Government in Baghdad. This
too was done in the name of democracy. Iraqi neutrality was branded as Nazism.
And Churchill described the decision of the supposedly sovereign Government
of Iraq to remain neutral as a “Revolt”.
The
puppet Government installed by British arms in May 1941 remained in place until
the mid 1950s. In 1956 it was required to support the British attack on Egypt
in conjunction with Israel; and that was the reason it was overthrown by a military
coup a few months later, in 1957.
The
kidnapping of the leading candidate in the first election, the regime change
of 1941, and the compulsion on the puppet regime to support the Imperialist/Zionist
adventure at Suez—these are the chief actions by which the West impressed
its values on Iraqi political culture.
The military coup of 1957 led in the course of a few years to the establishment
of the Ba’ath regime, under which there followed a generation of secular
ideological development and social reform. The chief incident of internal oppression
in that period was the destruction of the Communist Party. There was a time
when that might have incurred moral censure. But those days have gone. It is
now generally agreed by all right-thinking people that the Communist movement
was a great criminal conspiracy against civilisation. We have not heard a single
one of the many ex-members of the British Communist Party in the present Government
dissent from that view.
By
the time of the Iranian Revolution Iraq had become a relatively well-conducted
outpost of the West in the Middle East. It acted for the West in making war
on Iran and containing the Islamic Revolution. The gassing at Halabja was an
incident in that war, made an issue of only by the unelectables of the Kinnock
Labour Party. After their third electoral defeat a few years later those unelectables
threw themselves into Blair’s melting pot to be remade into Thatcherites.
They came to office after the Tory Party had exhausted itself through four successive
electoral victories, and they found themselves committed to carrying on the
war into which Thatcher and Major had launched the State. Their protest against
Halabja in their unelectable phase then became invaluable to them as a salve
for whatever remnant of conscience had survived the make-over.
In
a recent BBC Question Time, Brian Wilson, a Left idealist who has become a man
of state, said that he knows Saddam “has”
weapons of mass destruction because “he used them
on his own people” at Halabja. The depth of mindlessness that went
into the making of that statement is something we will not try to plumb.
Saddam’s
war on Iran can be seen as the first act of what is now called the war on terrorism—meaning
the war on Islamism. And it was supported by the states who now cite it as an
act of unprovoked aggression which proves that Saddam is an irrational warmongering
maniac.
The
war on Iran saved Kuwait and the other pseudo-states from Islamic revolution.
Kuwait had helped finance that war. When the war was ended it demanded repayment
of the money, although it was deluged with money. And it was found to be stealing
Iraqi oil into the bargain. When it refused to negotiate a reasonable settlement
about that oil, Saddam tried to ascertain what the American response would be
if he resorted to direct action. The American Ambassador gave him the green
light. He moved across the Kuwaiti border. The Kuwaiti Army promptly left the
country. President Bush, urged on by Margaret Thatcher, expressed outrage at
this Iraqi breach of international law which his Ambassador had approved a few
days before. The ‘diplomatic’ stance
adopted by Washington and Whitehall was designed to ensure that the matter would
not be resolved peacefully. General Schwarzkopf later admitted that a peaceful
settlement was “the nightmare scenario”.
And a Kuwaiti princess later boasted that she had aroused American public opinion
to war-fury with a concocted story about the Iraqis switching off the incubators
with premature babies in them in a hospital in Kuwait. And so it has gone on
ever since.
It
is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Iraqi move across the Kuwaiti
border was deliberately engineered as an occasion for war in the Middle East.
The existence of a strong Arab state was unacceptable to Ameranglia. Iraq was
on the point of becoming a strong Arab state because of having acted for the
West against the Iranian Revolution.
That’s
“conspiracy theory”, of course. But
the idea that the world is run without conspiracies is a story for simpletons.
The
Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was the first in the sequence of major modern wars.
So far as the movement of armies went, it was an unprovoked French attack on
Prussia. But in most British histories it was represented as a German aggression,
the aggressive act being the once famous “Ems Telegram”
sent by Bismarck for the purpose of causing France to attack so that Germany
could defend itself. The idea that the invasion of Kuwait was set up by Washington
is nowhere near as far-fetched as the Ems Telegram story that generations of
senior English politicians had no trouble with.
The
United States didn’t find itself where it is today without conspiring
to get itself there.
Roosevelt
was determined that America should participate in the Second World War, which
Britain had started by persuading the Poles to reject a reasonable settlement
of their border dispute with Germany. If you’re not in, you can’t
win. The difficulty was how to get in, since nobody was threatening the United
States. Roosevelt solved that problem by delivering an ultimatum to Japan, which
the Japanese could not meet without undermining their economy, and by leaking
secret documents which gave Hitler to understand that there had been extensive
American planning for war on Germany.
Jimmy
Carter’s Secretary of State, Brzezinski, has revealed how the United States
deliberately set about subverting the native Communist regime in Afghanistan
with the object of drawing in the Russians. The USA then acted in conjunction
with the Pakistani regime to foster an Islamist movement with universal ambitions.
Islamism, having served its purpose, is now the subject of the War On Terror.
It
is a surprise that it was under that nice Jimmy Carter that Geopolitical analysis
and strategy of the kind engaged in by Lord Curzon and Hitler took over in Washington.
But Brzezinski says it was, and why should he lie? Looking to the future, they
saw, as Sir Halford Mackinder of the LSE (London School of Economics & Political
Science) saw a hundred years ago on behalf of the British Empire, that what
was crucial was the heartland—the great Eurasian land mass. And that a
way had to be found of establishing American hegemony over it.
Afghanistan
was a start. And there is nothing at all implausible in suggesting that the
Twin Towers was allowed to happen in order to provide an initial boost of Pearl
Harbour proportions. Iraq was the next obvious objective. Not because anybody
really believed that it was connected with the Twin Towers, or retained the
capacity for producing weapons of mass destruction, or was in the grip of an
irrational regime that would have used such weapons at the cost of certain annihilation,
but because Ameranglia was bombing it anyway and it was in the right place.
Ameranglia
might have launched its war of regime change on Iraq six months ago under existing
Security Council Resolutions and in accordance with international law. It would
have been in breach of law only if the Security Council had said so, and two
vetoes would have made that impossible. Geoffrey Robinson QC and other barrack-room
lawyers might, of course, have made debating points on the matter. But law is
what the Court—or Court martial—decides and the official men of
violence execute. So it might have gone ahead six months ago. Anglia was certainly
willing.
It
chose instead to go back to the United Nations in order to humiliate it. It
demanded a new, tougher Resolution for no better reason than to demonstrate
who was master. And, if the UN refused to come to heel, Ameranglia would treat
it as the League of Nations had been treated.
Britain, hijacked by is own Great War propaganda, set up the League in 1919.
Having set it up, it prevented it from acting. It had the Empire and had no
intention of subordinating it to the League. So it disabled the League, and
then ignored it in 1939 when deciding to go to war.
What has now happened is that the Ameranglia gave the UN an ultimatum. “The
world” was given the choice between falling into line, subordinating
itself to Ameranglian policy, and being discarded. There was only one way that
threat could have been countered—by other Vetoist powers (i. e. China,
France and Russia) not only refusing the required the Resolution, but declaring
that, if Ameranglia went ahead with its threat of independent military action,
force would be used against it in defence of the principle of international
law. And that was never a practical possibility.
The UN has now been reduced to an obvious sham. The reality of things has been made obvious. And, since that is the reality of things, how could the US have done other than it did? States do what they can get away with doing. But we wish we didn’t have to put up with the moralising humbug of the New Labour turncoats while they did it.
Contents
The
Onward March Of Civilisation
LEADING ARTICLE
Why
did UNSCOM withdraw
David Morrison
Stalinism
Schmalinism
Brendan Clifford
Notes
on the News
Gwidion M Williams
Blowbacks
& Cowboy Diplomacy
Gwidion M Williams
PFI—Is
Brown "economically illiterate"?
David Morrison
LETTERS
The
Presidents Real Goal in Iraq
Jay
Bookman
Editor
John Clayden
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