Martin Deane
Green Party , Hull
Scunthorpe, Fri 16th Sept.
In order to end the cycle of violence let’s be quite honest about why the wheel is turning; who starts it turning; who gives it a push now and then and who oils its bearings.
Part of this must be to take on board the fact that the United States of America spends more on its Department of Defense that the whole of the rest of the world together. At $400 billion it is a record and an obscene amount of a country’s resources, in a very real sense stolen from its people – who very largely disagree with it – and means less money available for spending on health care, education, pensions and other state benefits, which are the mark of a civilized country.
Part of this must also be the recognition of what it means that the United States of America is the greatest arms dealer the world has ever seen. Lest we bang on about America a little too much, we should deal with the uncomfortable fact that the second greatest arms dealer to the world is - the United Kingdom. I see no historical problem in this given that Britain was the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and now, in military terms and in economic terms, the world’s greatest empire is now that of America.
America, and not for the first time in its bloody history, is yet again in danger of proving Chairman Mao right when he said, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
From these simple facts, the wheel of violence will continue to turn while the arms industries of these two empire states remain unfettered, in fact, in the case of Britain, the arms industry gets around £7-800 million per year to help that industry sell around the world.
As an example of the cycle of violence let us take an uncontroversial example: Iraq.
After September 11th only one country wanted to attack Iraq (with the exception of Israel), and that was America. It was irrelevant that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Despite this Rumsfeld and Bush immediately wanted everything possible relating Iraq to 9/11 to show them complicit. Try as they might they could not prove a link. That did not stop them linking Iraq and 9/11 repeatedly in the mind of the American public in order to create a guilty impression. This was part of the Bush offensive against his own people to soften them up for war, which has now claimed 1885 of their sons.
With the greatest media machine parroting government, the evidence grew: Mohammed Atta met Iraqi intelligence in Prague – FALSE. Iraq was seeking “yellowcake” from Nigeria to make nuclear weapons – FALSE, a crude forgery. That Iraq was crawling with WMD, thousands of tons of VX nerve agent, and other chemical and biological weapons, no end of TCPs, toxic chemical precursors, as my government wrote to me. All FALSE. Aluminium tubes to use for nuclear centrifuges – quickly proved false since they were nowhere near that quality.
Item after item included in the weapons dossier by Tony Blair – including, FOUR times the claim that such weaponry could attack UK troops within 45 minutes of the order being given. Completely FALSE. So false that our top weapons scientist and weapons inspector felt honour-bound to speak out against it, even to the extent that David Kelly lost his life.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter quoted the Downing St memo recently, which dates from September 2002. This UK intelligence memo to the Prime Minister shows that the US had already decided on war as policy months earlier and that intelligence was being fixed around that policy.
In practice this meant fabricating evidence of WMD to go to war. Ritter reminds us this should be combined with the authorization in Spring 2002 to engage forces of the US, CIA and DOD, in warlike actions inside Iraq.
Months later, in September and October 2002, Bush was saying continuously he did not want war, he wanted a diplomatic solution. Soon there was a massive air campaign on Iraq, with over 100 aircraft bombing, preparing Iraq for the first of the US forces. American combat troops, special forces, entered Iraq, Scott Ritter – ex-marine, former CIA, patriotic Republican - tells us, in September 2002. On October 16th the President stood before Congress and said “I have not committed to a war on Iraq.” That was the big lie. The news media was complicit, and just went along with it.
But the cycle of violence was already turning well. The wheels of sanctions ground on relentlessly for 13 years, claiming the lives of the poorest, the most vulnerable, to a total estimated as somewhere between one and two million Iraqi children, elderly, women and men. In this period the number of cancers shot up across Iraq. This is connected with the use of many hundreds of tons of solid depleted uranium shells, only used by the US and the UK.
Today we find ourselves in this ridiculous situation of George W Bush once again in the White House. He is an ignorant and stupid frontman for one of the most dangerous regimes in history – a regime which has the very real potential to oversee the end of history – at least human history. The men in this administration are what even the CIA calls “the crazies.” Power crazy men won’t end the cycle of violence.
It is nothing for these men and women to lie - even to cause a war. In their own minds they have already justified with a greater good argument. For them, the greater good involves securing the wealth and power over Iraqi oil to themselves.
It involves a number of other things too – according to the documents published years ago by the Project for the New American century – the “crazies” as the CIA calls them - securing Iranian oil, strengthening US presence in the Caspian states, ensuring no other state can rival American power, which at some stage will mean dealing with China, taking over space. Such a future hardly bears the thinking.
Similarly their promises promise nothing. Whether it is about attacking other states and respecting the UN Charter, or nuclear weapons and Non-Proliferation Treaty, they are putting the world up for grabs – by them.
Their commitments to peace are laughable. By invading other countries? By developing new and more deadly NBC weapons – nuclear , biological and chemical? By making Paul Wolfowitz Director of the World Bank? Placing John Bolton as ambassador to the UN? John Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq, now he is the intelligence supremo for all 16 US intelligence agencies. Negroponte oversaw the contra operations in Nicaragua which eventually was condemned as terrorism by the world’s highest court in 1988.
If you want world peace, whatever you do, do not start from here.
But – here we are. There are dark clouds here, and darker ones on the horizon. Climate change is a reality, its exact effects remain a spectre. Oil runs out by 2050. Uranium runs out by 2030. Global elites are adopting increasingly right wing stances and draconian policies attacking civil liberties with America and Britain leading the way among the so-called democratic societies. Remember Bush said, “in some ways it’s easier living in a dictatorship – as long as I was dictator!”
In Feb 2003 the people of Britain were quite adamant: “Don’t attack Iraq”. 1 - maybe 2 - million people in London alone - dwarfed by 3 million in Rome - and millions more worldwide, protested in strong terms that this war should not happen, in the biggest march in British history.
Firstly knowledge is power. It will be a great day when every foot-soldier knows as much about the conflict he is being sent to as every peace activist knows about the drive to war.
We know these things, despite incessant media at the time. We were right, continuously. This should lead to right action. Demos, but not only demos, letters , media work, making a splash for peace , direct action, hopefully of a nonviolent kind, intelligent, clever, humourous. Disarm the warmongers by outing them in their true colours. Because in the end, the empire is powerless, the emperor has no clothes - this so-called American civilisation , as it is at present, is not worth defending, let alone spreading like a red-striped cancer across the world.
They are after world hegemony and their method is Full Spectrum Dominance. We are the resistance. Inasmuch as we can, we should use our gifts, our talents, our insight to provide every manner of resistance. Full Spectrum Resistance. And to support each other, acting together, working in solidarity, for a world of justice and peace.