The prime minister’s “we are at war” statements are irresponsible in
the extreme. It is said that some of his senior officials understand
this, as do many MPs: thus the messages of “restraint” now being
whispered to journalists.
Tony Blair is endangering the
people of this country as well as Britons abroad. His willingness to
join Bush’s “crusade” and use military force will neither avenge nor
bring justice to nor honour the memory of the ordinary people who died
so terribly in America last week because this will almost certainly lead
to a gratuitous slaughter of more innocents in Afghanistan, Iraq or
elsewhere. It also risks nurturing a new generation of suicidal killers.
Two years ago, Denis Halliday, the assistant secretary general of the
United Nations who resigned over the Anglo-American-imposed embargo of
Iraq, told me: “We are likely to see the emergence of those who may well
regard Saddam Hussein as too moderate and too willing to listen to the
west. Such is the desperation of people whose children are dying in
their thousands and who are bombed almost every day by American and
British planes.”
Blair’s wanton disregard of this threat has been demonstrated in
recent years. On a bogus pretext, he joined America’s all-out assault on
Iraq in 1998 and backed Clinton’s missile attack on a pharmaceutical
factory in Sudan. The following year, his “moral crusade” with Clinton
against Yugoslavia killed hundreds of innocent civilians. This summer,
the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported the Bush and Blair governments
had privately “given Sharon a green light” to invade Palestinian
territories. With each of these actions, and now his bellicose
declarations, Blair increases the risk of terrorist attack against
British citizens.
Blair’s being “shoulder to shoulder” with Bush
means allying this country to a willingness to kill large numbers of
non-Americans in pursuit of uncertain immediate goals that has long been
a feature of US policy. This list is long. Remember, if you can, the
“free fire zones”, including the use of chemical weapons, that killed as
many as 50,000 civilians every year in Vietnam; the bombing of Cambodia
that killed 600,000 people; the unnecessary slaughter of tens of
thousands of Iraqis during the 1991 Gulf war, the beginning of a silent
holocaust that has since claimed half a million children, according to
the UN. For Blair and Bush to say that war has been declared upon
America is rich.
During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against
much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.
Moreover, far from being the main perpetrators of terrorism, Islamic
peoples have been its victims – more often than not of an American
fundamentalism and its proxies.
Blair is acting like a schoolboy who has never seen war and what
cluster bombs do to human beings. He and the Queen shed tears for the
victims in America; they have yet to shed tears for his – yes, his –
victims in Iraq. Nor will St Paul’s cathedral be reconvened to mourn the
innocents who will die when he and Bush attack the shadows of Osama bin
Laden.
In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the
killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies
the killing of innocent people anywhere else.
For the prime minister to behave responsibly, he would have to speak
out with a very different voice. He could say: “Our response must not be
to sink to the level of this criminal outrage and kill for the sake of
killing.” He could seize this extraordinary historic moment and call for
the redirection of western politics away from war and towards peace –
specifically peace in those regions of the world where one type of
terrorism is the product largely of imperialism, old and new. Britain is
deeply implicated. As John Cooley writes in Unholy Wars: Afghanistan,
America and International Terrorism: “It was only Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher’s British government which supported the jihad with
full enthusiasm.” The CIA passed responsibility for backing mojahedin
terrorism to the British – much of it coordinated by an MI6 officer in
Islamabad. Osama bin Laden was given “free rein” in Afghanistan.
After more than a century of invasion, plunder and bombing (since the
20s by the RAF), we in the west owe the people of Afghanistan and the
Middle East peace. The start of peace would be the establishment of a
Palestinian homeland, as laid down in international law by a 34-year-old
UN resolution; the lifting of the horrific embargo on the civilian
population of Iraq; and the careful, negotiated ending of Afghanistan’s
isolation.
A tall order, yes. But these are the root causes of a grievance and
rage we can barely imagine, and there is no other enduring solution than
peace with justice. Unless real politics replaces the autocratic
impositions of power, the understudies of those who murdered so many in
America will appear and act; nothing is surer. They cannot be bombed
into oblivion. Only justice for the millions of ordinary people, who are
not murderers, will bring the peace and security that is, after all, a
universal right.
