Back to Front - Making monsters
WORKERS, FEB 2007 ISSUE
Imperialism creates monsters to destroy its enemies; the monsters then turn against their master. It is using Al-Qaeda to destabilise its economic rivals China and India. It is still protecting bin Laden and his sponsors the Pakistani and Saudi states.
And now the US state is planning to send another 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a desperate and doomed attempt to hold down the entire country. The Labour government is silent.
Bush is also ordering aggressive rules of engagement and a "tougher attitude" to Iran and Syria – US forces in late January attacked an Iranian consulate in Iraq, kidnapping five diplomats.
What Blair may think of all this matters not a bean to Bush, but Britain will take the consequences thanks to his supine cooperation. So far, as of 11 January, 3,009 US soldiers have been killed there, plus 250 other coalition soldiers, including 127 British.
US firms were awarded contracts worth $50 billion to rebuild Iraq. Yet oil output, water, electricity, sanitation, health, education and security are all worse than before the war. US forces have also destroyed entire cities, for example Fallujah. As the US Defense Science Board boasted, "We do cities into rubble." The US state is now imposing laws to allow US oil companies to exploit Iraq's huge oil reserves.
The Bush administration claimed that toppling Saddam would democratise Iraq and stabilise the Middle East. Instead the invasion and occupation have been a disaster for Iraq and destabilised all the region's countries. US General William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency, called the war "the greatest strategic disaster in American history". Perhaps so, but not if your aim is indeed to destabilise the region, the better to control it.
The war has also worsened the prospects of peace and justice for the Palestinian people and strengthened the al Qaeda terrorists. Perhaps it was designed to. Imperialism has set Sunni against Shia across the Middle East, just as it earlier set Bosnian Muslims against Serbs in Yugoslavia and Protestant against Catholic in Ireland, and now sets Scottish against English in Britain.
The US state ordered the unprecedented killing of a head of state, to cover up its secrets and called it "independent Iraqi justice". Americans were in charge throughout. US soldiers captured Saddam Hussein, the US occupiers changed Iraqi law to enable the trial to take place, American soldiers guarded him and handed him over to the lynch mob, and an American helicopter took the witnesses to the execution. Were the pictures of the lynching an accident? What better way to set Sunni against Shia? All very handy for the occupier.
Blair sent 8,000 British troops to Iraq to oust Saddam, and Brown authorised spending £5 billion so far on the war, so they too are directly complicit in the killing of Saddam Hussein.
We need our troops back home. Who else have we got to defend our borders against the terrorists, people-smugglers and drug-runners generated by the Labour government's criminal wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq?