Antiwar

Those allegations against Galloway

Antiwar, Manufacturing Consent
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So an US Senate committee has accused of having received “allocations” of oil under the “oil-for-food” programme:

The US report concludes: “The evidence obtained by the sub-committee, including Hussein-era documents from the ministry of oil and testimony from senior Hussein officials, shows that Iraq granted George Galloway allocations for millions of barrels of oil under the oil-for-food programme.

“Moreover, some evidence indicates that Galloway appeared to use a charity for children’s leukaemia to
conceal payments associated with at least one such allocation.”

As the blogger known as Sonic said as well, you’d think this much oil would leave some trace:

[…] If Galloway was allocated “millions of barrels of oil under the oil-for-food programme” there seems
to me there would be clear evidence of it (transaction records, invoices etc) and if there was were is it?

But it all seems to be a
mishash of earlier accusations, including accusations Galloway already won a libel suit over:

A spokesman for the Telegraph said: “The committee appears to be confusing our documents with a set of alleged receipts that emerged in Baghdad some days after our story appeared. These purported to record direct payments to Mr Galloway in the early 1990s. They were offered to the Daily Telegraph but, as they were clearly crude forgeries, we declined to publish them.”

The committee, which of course had not contacted Galloway before making the accusations, has now deigned to receive him, to which Galloway has responded with his usual charm:

The committee said it would be “pleased” for Mr Galloway to appear at a hearing in Washington on 17 May.

The MP accepted, declaring he would take “them on in their own lions’ den”.

He told the BBC: “I’ll be Daniel and I’ll be triumphant”.

In all, this whole farce smells like a slightly ill timed “october surprise”. Oona King must be pretty miffed this kerfuffle didn’t erupt a week earlier, eh?

70,000 march against the occupation of Iraq

Antiwar, War on Iraq
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The Guardian reports about the anti-war and anti-occupation march in London yesterday, which was held as the closing
demonstration of the European Social Forum. Amongst the
demonstrators were also the parents of British soldiers killed in Iraq:

Rose Gentle and Reginald Keys – parents of two soldiers killed in Iraq – were helping to launch a new organisation supporting former service personnel.

Mrs Gentle’s son, Private Gordon Gentle, 19, from Glasgow was serving with the Royal Highland Fusiliers when he was killed in a roadside blast in Basra in June this year. Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, 20, from Llanuwchllyn, near Bala in north Wales, was one of six Red Caps killed by a mob while manning a police station 120 miles north of Basra in June last year.

The parents are supporting the UK Veterans and Families for Peace organisation, which aims to tackle the welfare issues soldiers face after leaving the forces, as well as taking an anti-war stance.

Acording to the Guardian, some 70,000 people marched. Far less then before the war, but still a respectable figure, especially considering how little attention the media has paid to this demo. It shows that the issue is still alive in the UK and won’t blow over soon.

On Iraq

Antiwar, War on Iraq
Published on

Why I was opposed to the war on Iraq:

  1. Didn’t trust Bush or Blair.
  2. The long history of US and UK meddling in Iraq, beginning with the UK using poison gas in the 1920ties
    to defeat popular uprisings, through the US’s support of the Ba’ath party’s 1963 coup to the wheelings
    and dealings in the 1980ties, when saddam was our best friend as long as he kept killing Iranians, and
    let’s not forget how the Shi’ite population was encourage to rise up only to betrayed, or the decade long
    sanctions that hurt only the Iraqi people, not Saddam.
  3. The reasons given for the war were phony. It was clear from the start that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” and “Saddam has ties with Al Quaida” were so much lies.
  4. Afghanistan. Here we were supposed to believe Iraq would be led into a glorious future, when the
    country that we had been promised this about the year before was largely forgotten.
  5. A healthy skepticism of the idea that democracy can be imposed from above.
  6. A fear of the consequences of what would happen during the war, as well as after. Fortunately, the
    war was less bloody than I had expected, but the same cannot be said of the occupation.
  7. Not much faith in Bush and co not to fuck things up even if they were sincere.

We’re now more then a year further, the war is “over” and the occupation of Iraq an established fact. Yes, yes, you opposed this war, good for you, but you have to deal with reality as it is, not as you should wish it to be. Does this mean you should resign yourself to the occupation and support it, for some values of support? I don’t think so, as my presence at the March 20th anti-occupation demonstration in Amsterdam showed, but I’ve found it hard to articulate why.

It is tempting to give in to the calls to be grownup, mature and sensible and acquiescence in what Bush and Blair have done. Let them get away with their crime. But would you let a burglar live in your neighbour’s house just your neighbour was abusive to his family and the burglar says he has the best interests of the family at heart? I think not. Which is one reason I cannot accept the continuing occupation of Iraq.

The other reason is more complicated, more of a gut feeling than something I can reason out. I don’t think having US troops in Iraq is doing either Iraq or the US much good. Even if they would be under UN control tomorrow, with Bush having given up the presidency in favour of Kerry, I think I’d still oppose the occupation. Because there’s still reason #5 I was opposed to the war, something that nagged at me when bright-eyed and bushy-tailed warliberals tried to sell the war to me.

The idea is either (if you believed in this war from the start) that we in the West have a duty to liberate Iraq from Saddam and make it into a democracy or (if you didn’t) that, since “we broke it, we bought it” and we still have a duty to the Iraqi people to make their country into a democracy. It is an attractive idea, a great cause to be part of, the chance to do some good in the world in a very concrete way.

But…

Do the people who are in power in Iraq share your ideals, your goals? Will the Iraqi people themselves think the same about freedom, democracy and apple pie? Will the occupation not tend to exacerbate already existing problems or even become the focal point for anti-democratic forces? Will the temptation to take “shortcuts”, to e.g. install an “enlightened dictator’ be resisted? Is it actually possible to impose democracy from the outside? The history of US foreign policy in the 20th century, whether led by a Democratic or a Republican president, certainly doesn’t make me optimistic.

And yes, I’m aware that if the coalition troops withdraw from Iraq, there will likely be a civil war, with at best some strongman getting into power and rule Iraq much in thew same way Saddam did. The trouble is, the civil war is already there, with the coalition troops just being another target…It seems to me that at least sometimes, the presence of coalition troops just worsens the situation. Just look at Fallujah.

So what is the answer? I honestly don’t know. What I would try is to start withdrawing the coalition troops, but not to abandon Iraq. Democratic and civic forces need to be supported while those who would want to exploit Iraqi suffering for their own goals, like Al Quida, need to be defeated.

After that…?

Why Ken MacLeod won’t be in the pro-war left

Antiwar, Decentists and other ex-lefties
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Ken Macleod has a long and interesting post up detailing why he isn’t part of the
pro-war left:

This is why no argument so far presented could convince me to take the position of the pro-war left.
I admit to being one of those boring old ex-Trots whose thinking on war and peace was shaped, not only by the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, but by the oft-invoked historical memory of the 4th of August 1914, when the War to End All Wars began, and a world ended. As my oldest surviving uncle once said: ‘I haven’t believed in God since the First World War.’ Most of the left, Marxist and liberal and anarchist, backed one side or another in that war too.

Satellite age McCarthyism

Antiwar, War on Iraq
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This article says what I think about the socalled “evidence” coming out of Iraq that anti-war Labout MP George Galloway was in pay of Saddam Hussein, that France and Russia provided intelligence to Iraq during the war or that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were in league: it’s bullshit.

April 29, 2003—After the United States and Britain were shown to be providing bogus and plagiarized “intelligence” documents to the UN Security Council that supposedly “proved” Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, the world’s media is now being fed a steady stream of captured Iraqi “intelligence” documents from the rubble of Iraq’s Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters.

Welcome to the new digital and satellite age McCarthyism. Phony documents are “dropped” into the hands of a right-wing London newspaper owned by Conrad Black. They are amplified by Black’s other holdings, including the Jerusalem Post and Chicago Sun-Times. The story is then picked up by the worldwide television outlets of News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, and General Electric and echoed on the right-wing radio talk shows of Clear Channel and Viacom. Political careers are damaged or destroyed. There is no right of rebuttal for the accused. They are guilty as charged by a whipped up public that gets its information from the Orwellian telescreens of the corporate media.