Stop Blair!

The outlines of a new reality in this crisis are beginning to take shape in the light of the events of this week. The War Party is now centred in London and the illusion that Tony Blair is merely Bush's lapdog has suddenly dissipated. Blair's Hampton court speech signals his emergence as the leader of the drive to attack Iran and thereby endeavour fulfil one of the longstanding aims aims of the War Party - the destruction of that country. As many commentators have noted his words amounted to nothing less than a threat of military action and one can only wonder at the relative equanamity with which they have been received such would be the consequences of such a reckless piece of folly.

Meanwhile,the Scottish Daily Express heads its Saturday edition with this extraordinary headline:-" Maniac Plots World War III". This is not a reference to Blair but to Ahmadinejad who according to a British Intelligence " expert"

"believes that anyone who dies for Islam goes to heaven and gets the 72 virgins that are due to all martyrs".

He goes on

"even without nuclear weapons"[ he] "could set off a Middle East war which we all get sucked into"

I would have thought that we were already embroiled in a Middle East war - the illegal, crimnal and disastrous Iraq venture that we chose and were certainly not sucked into. The question I have raised already on this blog is how we respond to this monumental cockup- by escalating or withdrawing. If there was ever much doubt about this surely it has now been dispelled- all we need now is the" threat" to Britain.

We have already heard how Iran is supposedly endangering our troops lives in Iraq but now through this same quality news sheet ( the Express) we have it that " spy agencies"

"believe Iran is soon to take delivery of North Korean missiles able to carry nuclear weapons over 2,200 miles, putting London near the fringe of Tehran's range"(of course, that's logical- another of the "Axis of Evil" countries!)

Iran don't have nuclear weapons and I would have thought it was a fair bit over 2,200 miles from London but these are mere details. What matters is that Ahmaninejad is a threat, a thoroughly unpleasant sort who has had posters of David Beckam torn down. And now he's going to launch a nuclear war just as we were thinking about lanching one ourselves.

And why does it have to be a World War- couldn't it just be a question of wiping another Islamic country off the map( without commiting the indelicacy of talking about it beforehand). Well, the Express has noticed that Russia and China are now close allies of Iran. This is the factually accurate part of the article: but the inference which it draws from this information is really off the beam and in a way gives the game away. Yes, if Britain, the US of Israel attacked Iran, Russia and China could well come to its aid plunging all into a possible nuclear armageddon(Blair/Cheney have made it clear that the use of nukes is envisaged). But this scenario would only apply if US/UK were the agressors. In the unlikely case of Iran attacking Britain ( with one of its non-existent nukes, for example) Iran would be left completely isolated and would no doubt be completely destroyed. But the Express envisages world war because it envisages a US or UK agression such as has been mooted for some time and about which so many people have tried to warn us.

So ,in summary of the Express article, Ahmadinejad's undiplomatic utterances are precisely the pretext we need to push ahead with an attack on Iran and the subsequent global war will be their fault.

These are dramatic and dangerous developments and I suspect they are related to equally dramatic evemts in Washington. A whole series of threads are coming together in a way which could spell the end for Cheney and the neocons. We may well be witnessing a carefully crafted counter coup which could knock out the War Party in Washington. This is not only a mortal threat to the now notorious neocons round Cheney but spells doom for Blair who has entirely thrown in his lot with them and would be left twisting in the wind were these extraordinarily malign forces to be finally purged from the body politic. His awareness of this is the driving force behind his personal crusade for a larger war. If the Americans are indeed stumbling along the path to Armageddon, his intervention can remedy matters- he can bounce them into it perhaps with the help of our trusty Israeli friends whose patience has been fraying for some time now.

In a sense the consequences of the last elections on both sides of the Atlantic are now making themselves felt. Bush was already burnt out and had to be replaced. However, things didn't work out- he got back with the help of substantial fraud. Blair, however, was still the War Party's choice , the sole legitimate representative of the neocons in Britain and was duly returned in a shocking testimony to the advanced senility of the Great British Nation. So nothing is more appropriate than that Blair take over the mantle of warmonger- in -chief. Reckless, half-insane, a liar without peer, its mad dog himself in the chariot of fire and its to us that has fallen the task of removing this menace to the peace of the world and his accomplices from power.

The signs are not good. The mainstay of the antiwar movement ,such as it is, the Socialist Worker's Party thinks that they are only going to bomb Iran because they are already overextended in Iraq. Well, I don't know about" only". They are going to bomb Iran and bomb them with nuclear weapons because they are overextended in Iraq. I'm puzzled as to why they draw consolation from this.

Certainly all is not well in Catatonia but surely there must be some living forces, people who still have the wherewithal to see danger and to have some notion of the legacy we risk leaving new generations. The events in Washington show that there is a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. If only, we could have one last push to isolate and neutralise Blair and his gang.

An appeal to the antiwar movement

I spent much of the summer trying to raise the question of the looming Iran confrontation mainly through interventions at antiwar meetings. And I must say it has been an utter failure. Once again the antiwar movement is behaving enigmatically and the issue of Iran seems to have become a taboo. This despite the gallant efforts of Tony Benn to warn us all of the impending danger. Reported in The Big Issue, not an organ of the anti-war movement,I may add, Benn warned that Bush

" is planning an atomic attack with a release of radioactivity and consequences that would make previous wars shrink into insignificance."

He also expects Britain to go along with this venture.

One would have thought that The Stop the War coalition, of which Benn is president, would take this as a cue for an immediate and vigorous response. But no: at public meeting after public meeting I have heard platforms stashed with anti-war personalities simply ignore the issue.
The other major figure of the antiwar movement, George Galloway, speaking about the coming Iran attack on Alex Jones Radio Show, referred to

“some kind of provocation being staged by those elements who want to propel the US into an even more disastrous invasion”

At a recent meeting in Glasgow he reaffirmed his belief that an attack on Iran will come.

But this it would appear is still not sufficient to put this issue on the agenda. When I raised it at an activists meeting everyone seemed to agree that there was a serious threat: but still nothing happens. One leading SWP member explained that when they raise the question of Iraq it is understood that Iran is also included.

So we have not just a "don't talk about the Iran war" tendency but the entire anti-war movement in denial about the most serious danger we face , perhaps the most serious danger humanity has ever faced. This perplexing ommision could not have been made more graphic than by the appearance of an editorial in the Daily Mirror warning against the Iran attack- just the kind of stuff you would hope to find in Socialist Worker. The Mirror has noticed Blair's preparatory machinations - after all its only two or three years since we saw the same piece of theatre being used to set up Iraq - and been able to arrive at the fairly obvious conclusion that something dangerous and crazy is brewing.

" the voices Mr Bush needs to listen to are not the from the heavens but from the people of the world begging him not to start another, even more terrible, war."

So as in the early momths of 2003, the Mirror is placing itself in the vanguard of the opposition to the war: the capitalist press as the tribune of the people railing against the madness of this "capitalist war", as the left would have it. Meanwhile the left is finally beginning to stir over the Iraq War whilst ignoring its most important aspect just as it is becoming terrifyingly clear : I refer to the danger that it will escalate into a greater Middle East, if not global, war.

This is all very worrying and , above all , enigmatic but, unfortunately, it is not at all uncharacteristic. The left's response to the whole war crisis has been grossly inadequate and I won't enter into the litany of failure that it has represented. Nor will I try to speculate about the motives which have lead the left to spurn the long awaited opportunity which this war provides them to emerge from obscurity to leadership. I would simply appeal to the antiwar movement in its entirety, the Stop the War Coalition, CND,Respect , the church organizations and all individuals who have played a role in mobilising against the war to take cognisance of the gravity of this situation and to understand that more than ever their experience and dedication is required. One can only view our current actions by envisaging how future generations, if there are to be any, look back on how we have acquitted ourselves in this, the moment of truth. So far, it looks as if they will remember us, if at all, as being blinded by dogma and complacency .

The Iraq War: withdrawal or escalation

The coalition now appears to have arrived at a critical moment in their misadventure in Iraq, recently characterised as " the greatest strategic disaster in US history" by Lieutenant - General Odom. Despite serial destruction of Iraqi towns and the discharging of something like 100,000 bullets per resistance fighter they are no where near to being in control of the situation on the ground; nor are they likely to be. Being caught red-handed carrying out terrorist bombings doesn't help but perhaps those astounding events in Basra last Monday may have, in a perverse way, shown a way forward for the hapless coalition: they can blame there misfortunes in Iraq on the Iranians and thereby escalate the conflict burying failure in Iraq in the rubble of a greater middle east war.
Of course, the idea of attacking Iran is not new and much has already been accomplished in terms of preparing the terrain. Iran has for some time been assiduously courted as the next victim of the US/ UK rampage through the Middle East in what looks remarkably like a rerun of the ouvertures to Iraq in the run up to 2003's fateful invasion. However there is a feeling of spontaneity and improvisation here as the good Brits show they're no slouches when it comes to raising the ante; disaster has been turned into opportunity. All pointers now indicate that, mad as it is, our leaders are close to embarking on a venture even more reckless and dangerous than the Iraq debacle itself.
The only way to make sense of this is to examine the alternatives, or rather, the alternative. Withdrawal from Iraq following the necesary humiliating negotiations with "the terrorists" to enable safe passage out would mean nothing less than the end of the globalisation project, the collapse of the dollar and the collapse of US/UK credibility. It would also leave the architects of this war facing the abyss. The neocons have constituted themselves as the "no way back tendency": they've put all their eggs in the basket of "war without end" and anything so much as a whiff of peace would leave them reeling as from the effects of some alien and toxic vapour. Peace is not an option. Nor is defeat in Iraq; but that is inevitable. So escalation it is. This infernal logic can only be undone through a revolution against the war party.
There has been a recent flurry of troops out activity but the slogan "troops out of iraq" is almost a bit dated now: we're onto the next phase and the antiwar movement must concentrate on stopping the drive towards a greater war. The consequences of an attack are unknowable but it seems reasonable to regard ourselves as being in a pre-World War III scenario. Of course, virtually the entire human race will oppose such madness but it could be too late by then. We have to highlight the danger now in the hope that somehow it can be stopped.