Blair's Wars

This is a fascinating study of social democratic warmongering. Blair has organised a record five wars in six years - `Desert Fox' against Iraq, and invasions of Serbia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. We can't say we weren't warned. Blair said in April 1997, "Century upon century it has been the destiny of Britain to lead other nations. That should not be a destiny that is part of our history. It should be part of our future. We are a leader of nations or nothing." In the same speech, he was to have said, "I am proud of the British Empire", but one of his spinners told him to omit this! Didn't the Empire's rulers always claim to be taking over for the sake of the benighted natives? Blair has, over and again, backed the US state, which has consistently schemed to control the Middle East and its oil. All during the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher sold chemical and other weapons to [...], to sustain his attack on Iran. Thatcher even signed a £340 million export credit guarantee for Iraq a month after the chemical attack on Halabja, in March 1988. After that war, the US no longer wanted proxies in the Middle East: it wanted direct control. As the Project for the New American Century proclaimed in September 2000, "the need for a substantial American presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of [...]." So the real reason for war was never the nature of the Iraqi regime, never the need for democracy. Bush does not want free elections in Iraq, he wants a government that will accept US occupation and control. In free elections, the Iraqi people would reject such a government. Nor was a supposed threat from Iraq the real reason for war. Blair misled the nation when, in his TV address to the nation on 20 March, he said, "My judgement as Prime Minister is that this threat is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before." But all these unnecessary were not just `Blair's wars': they were social democracy's wars too, because the Labour Party endorsed them all. And they are not the end of the matter: Vice President Dick Cheney has said that sixty regimes in the world needed changing. What would Blair do if Bush decided to change Cuba's regime? What would the Labour party do? More important, what would we all do? Even two million marchers did not stop a war. Marches, like elections, are based on the false premise that we live in a democracy, where people's opinions count. But we don't; we live under a dictatorship, run by a warmongering ruling class. To stop their wars, we have to remove that class from power. We can do more than march.