The Long Disastrous War

[DaSangarTalib]

By Lindsey German

The government must be getting jumpy. Just days before the third anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Dr John Reid, Minister of Defence, has announced the withdrawal of 800 British troops from the country. That still leaves over 7000, plus the more than 5000 who will soon be in Afghanistan fighting against Taliban forces who were supposedly defeated more than 4 years ago.

With the record on Iraq such an obvious failure, and with conditions deteriorating in Afghanistan, you might think that the British government would show a modicum of humility.

Instead, three years on from the most disastrous war of the past half century, we are sleep-walking towards a potentially even greater disaster. Iran is under threat from the ‘international community’ for its supposed attempts to obtain nuclear weapons. Yet this same ‘international community’ consists of those countries which possess nuclear weapons and use them to maintain their dominance in the world.

Iraq continues on its downward decline. Three months after the elections in Iraq, which were hailed in the West as a triumph of democracy, there is still no new government, and the British and Americans are desperately trying to force a government of national unity which would give prominence to those who lost the election!

Government minister Kim Howells described the situation as a ‘mess’, a mastery of understatement in a country where occupying troops have presided over the dropping of depleted uranium, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the bombing of hospitals at Fallujah and the killing of countless Iraqis. The number of attacks on foreign troops is growing, not declining.

It is common to believe that it is impossible for the US and Britain to create another ‘mess’ by invading Iran. Logic or humility might suggest that, but history and the imperialist war drive tell us otherwise. When the Americans were losing in Vietnam, they invaded its neighbours, Laos and Cambodia. The only lessons learnt by Washington’s hawks over the recent catastrophe of the ‘war on terror’ (now rebranded ‘the long war’) are how to disown responsibility for your own disasters.

Anyway, it is said, the US and possibly Israel are ‘only ‘ planning air strikes. But such air strikes would cause unimaginable human suffering, with catastrophic civilian casualties. In addition, they would lead to even further conflagration in the Middle East, with greater instability and violence.

That is why so many people are coming to the march this Saturday. We are campaigning round three slogans: troops home from Iraq, don’t attack Iran and defend the Muslim community. The British and Americans are in big trouble in Iraq, hence Reid’s desperate claim that we are at the ‘end of the beginning’ of the war.

But they are trying to escape their troubles by scapegoating everyone except the people responsible. We are now told that the Iraqis can’t live together in peace, although they managed it for long enough before their country was occupied; that the Iranians are warmongers and that Muslims are equated with terrorists.

The importance of this weekend’s march is to show that Muslims and non Muslims are organising side by side, against racism and Islamophobia, against the attacks on civil liberties which particularly target Muslims and against the wars which are at the root of these attacks. It can and must be another landmark in our fight to bring Bush and Blair to account and to defend our communities.