The Emperor of Africa, Tony Blair cannot let go of Britain’s inordinate global powers by George Monbiot

The disease that afflicts all British governments is an inability to let go. Unable to accept the end of empire, they cling to past glories. However much they speak of modernity and democracy, they cannot help managing other people’s lives, preserving foreigners – often at gunpoint – from the mistakes they would make if they were allowed to govern themselves.

I was going to call this an imperial delusion, but the United Kingdom has been remarkably successful at defending its powers. Our government has retained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Its membership of the G8 is unchallenged. Most importantly, it has preserved its unwarranted share of the vote on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And it has no intention of giving this up.

In advance of the IMF’s spring meeting (which has just concluded in Washington) France and the United Kingdom rejected any political reform(1). It is true that the fund’s proposals are feeble. It is true that even after far more ambitious reforms the IMF would remain the wrong body, constitutionally destined to fail. But this is not why our government is holding out. It is resisting change because it wants to preserve its imperial rank.

The United Kingdom, with 1% of the world’s population, has 5% of the IMF’s votes(2). Sub-Saharan Africa, with 12% of the population, has 4.6%(3). The UK’s share equals that of China and India put together. It is 5 times as big as Argentina’s, 19 times Bangladesh’s, 35 times Kenya’s, 124 times bigger than Malawi’s(4). The G7 nations – the UK, US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and Italy – together possess 45% of the vote. The other 177 members are left to squabble over the remains.

Even these numbers tell only half the story. The five countries with the biggest quotas – the US, UK,

Japan, Germany and France – are each allowed to appoint their own executive director to the IMF’s board(5). The rest must submit their candidates for election. Because poor nations don’t know what’s good for them, they are assigned to the tutelage of richer ones. The votes of the English-speaking Caribbean countries are given to Canada. Mongolia is represented by Australia, Kazakhstan by Belgium(6). The reason the UK and France are resisting even the most timid reforms is that these would tip them below the threshold for automatic election: like the other countries they would be represented on the board as part of a bloc.

Power is distributed like this because the IMF is a plutocracy. A country’s vote represents its “quota”, which is a function of its gross domestic product. In theory the quota reflects countries’ financial contributions to the fund. This is no longer the case, as the IMF receives much of its income from loan repayments from poorer nations. But the old formula has resisted 60 years of complaints.

The result is that the governments which are never made subject to the IMF’s strictures control it, while those whose countries have been reduced to an IMF franchise have no say in the way it runs. The fund’s allocation of votes is a perfect inversion of democracy.

A new report by ActionAid gives us a glimpse of how this unfair distribution of power affects the poor(7). After years of protests by poor countries and their supporters in the rich world, the IMF and the World Bank at last permitted them to provide healthcare and education without charge. The rich nations also promised, in 2000, to ensure that by 2015 every child on earth would have primary education(8). It looked like a great victory for the global justice movement. But the IMF is ensuring that the promise won’t be met. It has, in effect, forbidden the poorest nations to hire sufficient teachers.

No one disputes that public sector wage rises can contribute to inflation. No one denies that governments have to exercise some degree of restraint. But the paternalists who run the IMF – who are fixated on creating safe havens for foreign capital – cannot help micromanaging the economies of the poor nations, without reference to the needs of the people who live there. The limits they have imposed on the public sector pay bill ensure that schooling can’t be improved.

ActionAid studied three very poor countries with major education problems: Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. After they abolished user fees (and when the civil war ended in Sierra Leone), vast numbers of pupils enrolled. But a combination of the rich nations’ failure to provide the foreign aid they had promised and the restrictions imposed by the IMF has prevented these countries from meeting the new demand. As a result, the pupil to teacher ratio in Sierra Leone is 57:1; in Malawi 72:1 and in Mozambique 74:1. That’s the average: in rural areas it can be much higher. Many of the teachers are untrained; many give up because they cannot survive on their wages. In Malawi, for example, the goods required for the most basic level of subsistence cost $107 a month. A trained teacher receives $55(9).

So crowds of pupils strain to hear a scarcely-literate teacher somewhere in the middle distance seeking to instruct them without books, chalk, paper or pens. We should not be surprised to discover that 40% of children fail to complete primary school in Sierra Leone and Mozambique, and 70% in Malawi. Most of the drop-outs are girls.

As a result, these countries are stuck in a vicious circle of misery. Until education improves, GDP remains low. Until GDP rises, there’s little money for education. As one of the agencies charged with rescuing countries from poverty, the IMF should be seeking to break this circle. But the conditions it attaches to its loans keep these countries in their place. In Malawi the IMF sets the ceiling for public sector wages directly; in Sierra Leone and Mozambique the broader macroeconomic rules it imposes have the same effect. ActionAid argues that its fiscal targets are outdated and unnecessary: all these countries have now achieved sufficient stability to start raising teachers’ pay.

But in no case did the IMF consult either the public or the state’s own ministry of education before laying down the law. The amount of money a teacher in rural Malawi is paid is decided by the men in Horse Guards Road and Pennsylvania Avenue. Except for the district commissioners in pith helmets, little has changed since the country was called Nyasaland.

Last year Tony Blair acknowledged that the IMF “must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries.”(10) But he just can’t let go. The proposed reforms do nothing to democratise the IMF; by linking the quota to purchasing power parity rather than raw GDP, they simply turn it into a more sophisticated plutocracy. But they would have the effect of very slightly empowering some middle-income countries while taking a few votes away from some of the rich ones. Even that is too much for the Emperor of Africa. If the British government wants to help the poor, it must first give up its power to tell them how to live. Until that happens, everything the prime minister says about “partnership” and “solidarity”(11) with the world’s oppressed is humbug.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Larry Elliott, 13^th April 2007. UK opposes plan for developing nations to have more say at IMF. The Guardian.

2. International Monetary Fund, 2007. IMF Members’ Quotas and Voting Power, and IMF Board of Governors

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/members.htm

3.David Woodward, New Economics Foundation, February 2007. IMF Voting Reform: Need, Opportunity and Options. Paper for the G24 Technical Meeting, 12 March 2007. http://www.g24.org/wood0307.pdf

4. International Monetary Fund, ibid.

5. David Woodward, ibid.

6. International Monetary Fund, ibid.

7. Akanksha A. Marphatia et al, April 2007. Confronting the Contradictions: The IMF, wage bill caps and

the case for teachers. ActionAid. http://www.actionaid.org/assets/pdf/1%20%20CONFRONTING%20THE%20CONTRADICTIONS%20E-VERSION.pdf

8. The UN Millennium Development Goals, 2000. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

9. ActionAid, ibid.

10. Tony Blair, 26^th May 2006. Foreign Policy Speech 3. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9549.asp

11. Tony Blair, 8^th July 2005. Statement on the final day of the G8 Summit.

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7877.asp

Published in the Guardian 17^th April 2007

The Devil and the Peso by Shane Elson

On my recent visit to the Middle East I was struck once more by the clear
delineation between the rich and poor. On the streets of Amman the wealthy
drove their BMWs and Mercedes past the Iraqi widows who sold individual
cigarettes to those who could not afford the buy a full packet. I will never
forget the obviously Downs Syndrome man who sat begging while we passed by
on a quest to find lunch. Some images burn themselves into your soul and
make your realise just how lucky you are.

At a recent meeting I was at two South American's spoke of their desire to
see new forms of government emerge. Both of them made reference to the need
for people to have a voice and for the poor and marginalised to find proper
representation in their parliaments and government institutions. Both these
people held great optimism for what could be achieved. While both of them
were fully aware of the current realities on the ground in their countries,
neither of them was pessimistic about the future. Rather than envisioning
"more of the same", both shared the view that the human spirit and its
creativity would prevail.

My reflections on the comments of these two people, so different and distant
from me, led me to think about the recent outcry at Hugo Chavez' speech in
the UN when he referred to "the Devil" being at the podium the previous day.
Since I first heard this it got me thinking. Why would he say such a thing?
Surely not just for the inevitable media frenzy it would cause? There had to
be something more to it. Why would this South American revolutionary raise
the spectre of the devil when his life was already under threat from hard
liners in Washington and within the Catholic Church?

In order to understand Chavez' comments it is important to look at the
history of the Catholic church in South America and the way in which it is
firmly entrenched in the politics and social orders that exist there today.
For the indigenous South Americans the imposition of European religion was
blended with imperialism, the destruction of their environment, the
overthrow of existing social orders and death. The church and the emerging
state apparatus became blended and with them came the notion of the devil.

In the Catholic religion, as in many protestant religions, the devil is to
be feared. He lurks in the darkness and quite corners of our souls waiting
for the opportunity to lead us into sin and deprivation. To surrender to his
often subtle calls, is to condemn ourselves to hell, a place that makes the
Big Brother house look like a Sunday picnic. However, as is the case with
many colonised peoples, many in the America's did not accept this reading of
the devil and indeed many of them either rejected the notion out of hand or
appropriated the concept, reinterpreting it in ways never intended by the
church.

In his 1980 book, "The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America"
Michael Taussing examines the way in which one notion of the devil was
reinterpreted and appropriated by some South American peoples.

In these belief structures the devil is ready to negotiate a price for just
about anything. In one myth, man is able to bargain with the devil to
increase his income and the productivity of his crops. This however comes at
the price of an early death. The moral of the tale is that the man works
hard to accumulate wealth but never gets to enjoy it, dying in the prime of
his life. In another myth the god-parents of a child, when taking part in
the baptism ceremony, hold a peso bill. In this myth the peso acquires the
blessing rather than the child and it is the bill that returns the
"blessings" to them while their god-child never gets to enter the "citizenry
of God". The problem for the holder of the peso is that while they become
wealthy they die a death of spiritual barrenness.

Taussing writes, ". the devil contract and the baptism of money . are .
revealed to be beliefs that endorse systematically the logic of the
contradiction between use-values and exchange-values. . the beliefs are
precise formulations that entail a systematic critique of the encroachment
of the capitalist mode of production." That is, the capitalist sees no value
behind the dollar (or peso) other than that which it obtains in the exchange
process. In short, the production processes and the deprivations imposed by
those production processes are removed from view and obscured by the systems
of production and exchange-value itself.

The speakers at the event I was at reflected the optimism Chavez spoke of at
the UN. While the media focused on the "devil" comment they failed to
comment on the rest of his speech in which he outlined the litany of
contradictions our politicians fail to acknowledge. He spoke of the poor in
US cities while their president speaks of the wealth of the nation. He spoke
of the death of innocents in Lebanon while the president spoke of peace in
the Middle East. He talked of the rising up of peoples across the globe to
fight the oppression foisted on them by imperialist conquests and years of
colonial rule while the president spoke of peaceful transitions to
democracy - something Bolivia was being denied due to outside interference,
mainly US sponsored internal disruption.

What Hugo Chavez did was turn a mirror on the capitalist system, represented
at the podium by the US president, and said that this system was the devil
stealing away the lives of the innocents. The system of capitalism which the
US and we in the west hold so dear, was nothing more than a pact with the
devil. A pact that would steal away our 'golden years' and enslave the
innocents to a lingering slow death without hope.

The devil was, deconstructing Chavez' words, embodied by a man who was
willing to make pacts while smiling all the time yet would be ready to
unleash the hounds of hell should the deal be reneged on. It was not George
W Bush who was the devil; it was the system he represented. It was the ways
in which Bush used his position and that of the US, blindly and without
reference to his so called faith, to make offers that could only lead to
more suffering. The devil, to Chavez, stood at the UN podium and offered a
one sided pact, delivered through the systems that the US and Bush
represented.

But he did not end pessimistically. Again the media chose to ignore the
optimism he brought to the UN that day. Chavez said, "There are alternative
ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. . Dawn is
breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America
and Oceania. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision. We have to
strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build
a new and better world." He went on to say, "So, my dear colleagues, Madam
President, a new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the south. We
are men and women of the south."

The woman selling cigarettes and the disabled man begging in the streets of
Amman are people of the south. Not only them. Those of us who can envision a
new way of engaging with each other and the world, free of the shackles of
capitalism are all people of the South. Chavez concluded by noting, "We want
ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat.
And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see
this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a
world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations,
but a renewed United Nations."

If peace and real security are our true motivation then we need to firstly
abandon the myth of the devil, made real in capitalism, as friend and
revision the world according to a will for basic rights and the promotion of
real human dignity.

Charades by Shane Elson

Some days I wonder just how long the charade we call 'democracy' will last.
I guess that if it is a charade it will last only as long as we are prepared
to play the game. The game, as I understand it, revolves around 'the voters'
going to the polls once in a while and 'democratically electing' a bunch of
people to 'represent' them while making the laws of the land.

This charade, like the game we sometimes play with friends, is meant to be
polite, have a set of understandable boundaries and conclude with all having
had a good time and some fun. The game of real politics, like charades, is
meant to be publicly polite, work within accepted boundaries and lead to us
all having a good time. Why, even such notable philosophers as Bono reckon
we in Oz have it good.

Speaking with Tony Jones on the ABC's "Lateline" program last week he told
us that, "he [John Howard] has led your country to great prosperity." He did
go on to temper that remark by saying that under Howard Australia was at the
bottom of nations that get involved in making a better life for the vast
majority of humans who suffer in poverty.

Bono was being polite. After all, he is a man who has supped with George W.
Bush, Tony Blair, the Pope and just about anyone else who holds power around
the world. He is on first name terms with people like Micro$oft boss Bill
Gates and Virgin's Richard Branson. He is a man accustomed to getting his
own way when on tour and given that the Vertigo tour has now become the
highest grossing rock tour of all time, a reported $430 million so far, I
guess he has the cash to ensure so.

Bono's little foray in to the front of pushing for aid relief is to be
commended. I see no reason to bag him for taking the time out from counting
his money to spend time in slums and run down villages posing for glossy
photos with poor kids. I don't see any cause to denigrate the work he's done
in attending meetings in places like Davos, rubbing shoulders with the real
movers and shakers of the world.

The problem is, that Bono believes that if enough of us send a message to
our 'democratically elected representatives' they will change their minds
and suddenly realise that the only way to help the poor and disadvantaged is
to share the wealth around a lot more. Bono is, what Labor cabinet member,
Lindsay Tanner, refers to, part of the new "entertainment politics" charade.

Tanner says, "The faultlines between left and right have blurred, and
politics has drifted into the world of entertainment. We now have
celebrities becoming candidates and candidates becoming celebrities. Being
famous for being famous is becoming an important qualification for political
office. Party affiliation still matters, but parties now seek out
celebrities as candidates. Aspiring leaders try to become celebrities and
make themselves the issue".

I find this a little ironic coming from a man whose party at both the state
and federal level has made it a policy (official or not) to recruit former
sports and rock stars to their fold. Nonetheless, he points us in the right
direction and notes that "Being famous for being famous is becoming an
important qualification for political office." Which leads me back to Bono's
utterances about how Australia, under Howard, has become a country of "great
prosperity".

The charade here is that we are meant to believe that in our country poverty
has virtually been eliminated. Those who are poor are that way simply
because they do not want to work or lift themselves out their 'poverty
trap'. If we were to use Bono's argument we find that we must agree with
Howard's claim that he has achieved the Hawk dream that "no Australian child
will live in poverty". Well, unless the child's family chooses to allow them
too!

The charade is maintained by accepting that those in privileged positions
are best equipped to observe, understand, examine and pronounce on all
issues related to the human condition. The charade is maintained so long was
the vast majority believe that "they know best" and continue to vote for
them or buy their records. This charade is maintained by believing in a two
tier structure of humankind with those that "know" looking out for the
"ignorant" masses.

Under the charade the act of voting in an election every now and again is
proof positive that all is well. What is seen as failure is when we can't
vote and our "betters" direct our gaze to those nations in which "dictators"
rule. The act of voting, we are reassured, is proof positive that our
society has reached the zenith of human achievement and that as franchise
holders in the governance of our nation, we should be overjoyed at the role
our ticks and numbers play in keeping us "safe and secure" in the world.

I really do wonder if the real politics our so called leaders engage in is
really the best way to govern. While the choice of celebrities as political
candidates certainly is a good PR move for the flagging fortunes of any
political party, one must wonder if they are the best positioned to
understand what it's like for the majority who have never been pampered or
chauffer driven to work.

The type of politics we have manifest these days is definitely one of style
over substance and spin over reality. But, I've got to admit, the charade
works. People still turn out and vote. Like sheep we line up, have our names
ticked off the roll, place our papers in the box and then off home to the
garden or footy - depending on the season. The charade is complete. Our role
as performers in it is done. Now, we believe, those who 'represent us' will
take over and lead us onwards and upwards.

However, the outcome of our participation is never what we expect. No sooner
do we cast our vote we find that some unforseen crisis or other means that
the promises made cannot be delivered on. We find the poor are still poor
and the weak still at the mercy of the strong. We find that the smoke we
blow from our cigarettes has more substance than the promise of the
political candidate. We wait three or four years and go through the whole
process again.

The problem is, we don't have to continue the game. The charade only works
because we participate. If we choose not to take part there would be no
game. There would be no chance for the real politic to kick in. The want to
be rulers of the people would have to adjust their manners and ways of doing
things to accommodate the will of the people rather than ignoring it. If we
chose not to play the game, then there is no chance for our 'rulers' to
ignore us.

Charades is a fun game to play at home on cold winter nights but it has no
place in the governance of our country. Bono enjoys playing a game each
night he performs so perhaps for him it is a legitimate past-time. Howard
too, enjoys the benefits that accrue to those who play. I guess the question
is, is it about time we dropped the charade and took back the power and
responsibility for our own destinies and those of our communities?

When Does Incompetence Become a Crime? By PATRICK COCKBURN

"When does the incompetence end and the crime begin?" asked an appalled German Chancellor in the First World War when the German army commander said he intended to resume his bloody and doomed assaults on the French fortress city of Verdun.

The same could be said of the disastrous policies of George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq. At least 3,000 Iraqis and 100 American soldiers are dying every month. The failure of the US and Britain at every level in Iraq is obvious to all. But the White House and Downing Street have lived in a state of permanent denial. On the Downing Street website are listed 10 "Big Issues" affecting the Prime Minister, but Iraq is not one of them.

The picture of what is happening in Iraq put out by Messrs Bush and Blair no longer touches reality at any point. They claim US and British troops are present because Iraqis want them there. But a detailed poll of Iraqi attitudes by WorldPublicOpinion.org, published six weeks ago, shows that 71 per of Iraqis want the withdrawal of US-led forces within a year. No less than 74 per cent of Shia and 91 per cent of Sunni say they want American and British troops out. Only in Kurdistan, where there are few foreign troops, does a majority support the occupation.

Hostility to the American and British troops has a direct and lethal consequence for the soldiers on the ground. The same poll shows that 92 per cent of Sunni and 62 per cent of Shia approve of attacks on US-led forces. This is the real explanation for the strength of the insurgency: it is widely popular.

For the past three-and-a-half years in Iraq, one needed to close both eyes very hard or live in Baghdad's Green Zone not to see that the occupation was detested by most Iraqis. At places where US Humvees had been blown up or US soldiers killed or wounded there were usually Iraqis dancing for joy.

Supposedly, the centrepiece of American and British policy is to stay "until the job is done" and hand over to Iraqi army and police who will cope with powerful militias like the Mehdi Army. But in police stations in many parts of southern Iraq, photographs pinned to the wall include one of British armoured vehicles erupting in flames, beside a portrait of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army.

In the first year of the occupation it could be argued that Bush and Blair were simply incompetent: they did not understand Iraq, were misinformed by Iraqi exiles, or were simply ignorant and arrogant. But they must know that for two-and-a-half years they have controlled only islands of territory in Iraq. "The Americans haven't even been able to take over Haifa Street [a Sunni insurgent stronghold] though it's only 400 yards from the Green Zone," a senior Iraqi security official exclaimed to me last week.

But the refusal to admit, as the British army commander Sir Richard Dannatt pointed out, that the occupation generates resistance in Iraq, means that no new and more successful policy can be devised. It is this that is criminal. And it is all the worse because the rational explanation for Mr Bush's persistence in bankrupt policies in Iraq is that he has always given priority to domestic politics. Holding power in Washington was more important than real success in Baghdad.

It is easy enough to say that Mr Bush lives in a world of fantasy in Iraq. His aides are notoriously averse to giving him bad news. Officials who do so lose their jobs. But this probably underestimates the man. After 9/11 he successfully presented himself as the security president. For the first time since the 1920s, the Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress. The war in Afghanistan was successful at little cost. He thought the same would be true in Iraq.

There was a spurious series of highly publicised turning points in the war, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the return of sovereignty to Iraq and the recapture of Fallujah in 2004, the elections and referendum on the constitution of 2005.

In each case reality was always different. Nobody in Iraq thought Saddam was the leader of the resistance, and his capture had no effect on the insurgency. The return of sovereignty had little meaning: last week the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, admitted that he could not move a company of Iraqi troops without US permission.

Fallujah was very publicly stormed by the US Marines in November 2004, but a few days later the insurgents, in an operation hardly mentioned by the administration, captured the much larger city of Mosul in northern Iraq, seizing arms worth $40m (£21m). The elections and referendum in 2005 deeply divided Iraq's communities along sectarian and ethnic lines, and led directly to civil war in central Iraq.

The US media was under extreme pressure to report the non-existent good news that the White House accused them of ignoring.

I used to think how absurd it was for me to risk my life by visiting the Green Zone, the entrances to which were among the most bombed targets in Iraq, to see diplomats who claimed that the butchery in Iraq was much exaggerated. But when I asked them if they would like to come and have lunch in my hotel outside the zone, they always threw up their hands in horror and said their security men would never allow it.

The fantasy picture of Iraq purveyed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair is now being exposed. The Potemkin village they constructed to divert attention from what was really happening in Iraq is finally going up in flames.

But it is too late for the Iraqis, Americans and British who died because they were unwitting actors in this fiction, carefully concocted by the White House and Downing Street to show progress where there is frustration, and victory where there is only defeat.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', to be published by Verso in October.

from Counterpunch, check out the link

John Pilger-Busy Fondling Their Self-Esteem

TONY JONES: One of the world's most respected medical journals has today published an estimate of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began, putting the figure at 650,000 or about 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population. The Lancet....

ABC Lateline 12-10-06

Busy Fondling Their Self-Esteem by John Pilger

The great Chilean balladeer Victor Jara, who was tortured to death by the regime of General Pinochet 33 years ago, wrote a song that mocks those who see themselves as rational and liberal, yet so often retreat into the arms of authority, no matter its dishonesty and brutality to others. He sang:

Come on over here

where the sun is nice and warm.

Yes, you, who have the habit

of jumping from one side to the other...

[Over there] you’re nothing at all,

Neither fish nor fowl,

You’re too busy fondling...

Your own self-esteem.

The past few weeks have seen a fiesta of these rational, liberal people who dominate British mainstream politics. For them, the most basic forms of morality and shame, the kind you learn as a child, have no place in public life. On 27 September, the Guardian published a front-page photograph of Tony Blair, a prima facie war criminal, his arms outstretched, his grin fixed. Beside this was a headline, "Charm and eloquence. But a missed chance". Beneath this, Polly Toynbee wrote: "There were some damp eyes dabbed with hankies and men blowing noses. 'Don’t go,' someone said."

Consider such vomit against the facts of Blair’s actual crime – the unprovoked invasion of a defenceless country, justified by lies now voluminously documented, and causing the violent deaths of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children. The word "crime" is verboten among those about whom Victor Jara sang. To spell out the truth would illuminate the collusion of an entire political class.

Instead, the shameless neither-fish-nor-fowl tribunes speak and write incessantly of a "mistake", a "blunder", even a Shakespearean tragedy (for the war criminal, not his victims). From their studios and editorial offices, they declare the mendacious and dishonest banalities of their unclad emperor "brilliant". Al-Qaeda, said Blair in his speech to the Labour party conference, "killed 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of". The breath is swept away by this one statement. Half a million infants lie dead, according to Unicef, as a result of the Anglo-American siege of Iraq during the 1990s. For Blair and his rational, liberal, neither-fish-nor-fowl court, these children never lived and never died. Clearly, the Emperor Tony was a leader for his time and, above all, clubbable, whatever the "mistakes" he had made in Iraq.

A parallel world of truth and lies, morality and immorality dominates how the crime in Iraq is presented to us. In recent months, the invaders have vanished. The US, having murdered and cluster-bombed and napalmed and phosphorus-bombed, is now a wise referee between, even a protector of, "warring tribes". The buzzword is "sectarianism", blurring the truth that most of the attacks by the resistance are against the foreign military occupiers: on average, one every 15 minutes. That the majority of Iraqis, Sunni and Shia, are united in their demand that US and British forces get out of their country now is of no interest. Has journalism ever been so voluntarily appropriated by black propaganda?

The confidence in the Blair regime that this propaganda will see them right (if not re-elected) is expressed in striking ways. The former Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the epitome of neither-fish-nor-fowl, who supported a piratical attack on a Muslim country, now aims his liberal, rational remarks at the most vulnerable community in Britain, fully aware that the racist subtext of his words will be understood in "Middle England" and hopefully further what is left of his contemptible career. It was Straw who let Pinochet escape justice for fraudulent reasons of ill-health. Victor Jara’s song is an ode to Straw, and to the authoritarian, twice "retired" David Blunkett, now elevated by the Guardian as "one of the most brilliant, natural politicians", on a mission to ensure that a higher form of corruption, mass murder, does not blight "Tony’s legacy".

The Tory leader, David Cameron, the former public relations man for the asset-stripper Michael Green, will follow this legacy, should he become prime minister. Standing on the Bournemouth seafront with his family, including three young children, he emphasised his support for the crime against the Iraqi people, whose children, says Unicef, are now dying faster under Blair and Bush than under Saddam Hussein

Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties

REVIEW BY
JOHN TOGNOLINI

“One of the aims of [British PM Tony Blair’s] government is propaganda against us, propaganda for the war ... The way to stop the flow of recruits into small terrorist organisations, some of them religious organisations, is not by dropping bombs, is not by invading countries, by destroying cities, but by beginning to tackle the political problems. Now if you’re a citizen of any country, double standards occur. [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon has nuclear weapons but he is part of the ‘war against terror’. Saddam might have nuclear weapons in three or four years’ time but he has to be bombed now.”

Tariq Ali said this at a London demonstration against the war on Iraq, before the “coalition of the willing” — US President George Bush, Blair and Australian PM John Howard — started their bloody invasion and occupation.

For some people on the left, Ali is beyond the pale for not supporting the Respect campaign in the recent British elections and, horror of horrors, for calling for a vote for the Liberal Democrats. Yet it was Ali who was among the first to speak out after the London bombings, saying they were a direct result of Blair’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ali’s interviews with Alternative Radio’s David Barsamian, now transcribed into a book, and his last two classics Crisis of Fundamentalism and Bush in Babylon, show how essential Ali’s work is to understanding imperialism in the 21st century.

In his reprinting of Street Fighting Years, which has been out of print for 10 years, one can see the formation of his politics and his activist involvement in the earth-shaking events of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. The individuals Ali has met range from revolutionary US black rights leader Malcom X to British fascist Enoch Powell, both of whom he met while studying at Oxford.

This new version of Tariq’s 1987 book includes the 1971 interview that he and Robin Blackburn conducted with John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the British socialist magazine Red Mole. There is even a picture of John Lennon selling Red Mole at a London Vietnam anti-war march. When I first became a socialist in mid-1975, I was going through the bound volumes of Direct Action, the predecessor to Green Left Weekly, and saw an issue with John and Yoko on the front cover. The same picture of John and Yoko appears in the new edition of Street Fighting Years — An Autobiography of the Sixties.

Another aspect of the new edition is a collection of photographs, including pictures of Ali with Malcom X at Oxford; in Vietnam in 1965 B; in Bolivia where Che Guevara was fighting his final guerrilla campaign; protesting against South Africa’s Apartheid system with British actress Vanessa Redgrave by his side; political gatherings with Ernest Mandel, Edward Said, Robin Blackburn, Tamara Deutscher, Stuart Hall; and a 2003 London march of high school students against the Iraq War with his daughter Aisha.

The lengthy introduction to this new edition includes headings such as “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam”, “100,000 funerals for the Iraqis who were killed in the March 2003 invasion of their country”, “Vulture capitalism”, and “Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Palestine”. Ali defends Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and he pays homage to Palestinian writer Edward Said and British socialist and journalist Paul Foot, who both passed away in the last 12 months.

Ali pays tribute to those who have stood by their ideals and shows contempt for those who have sold out and made their peace with capitalism — such as Regis Debray who was in Bolivia with Che and in the 1980s “toured Third World countries as an unofficial ambassador. He had become a pompous and shifty functionary of the French state. A friend who met him in Paris in May 1982 wrote that ‘he was plump from banquets at the Palace, possibly also power’.”

Street Fighting Years is a racy, well-written historical work that is inspiring and an essential read for political activists in today’s world. Ali dedicates his book to Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, “who always believed that the real meaning of life lay in conscious participation in the making of history”. The same can be said of Tariq Ali.

From Green Left Weekly, November 16, 2005.

An Exchange With The Political Editor Of The New Statesman

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

October 5, 2006






On September 28, we wrote to Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman:

Dear Martin

Hope you're well. On Newsnight on September 26, you said that Blair's speech that day had been "very hard, very tough, and very convincing" on "radical Islam". Can you explain which elements of the speech you were referring to? What was it that you found so convincing?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Bright responded on October 1:

“I agree with every word down to ‘if we retreat...’ From then on it's far less convincing and the messianic nonsense about battling for peace in the middle east is absurd. Blair is not the man to bring peace to the middle east.”

We responded again on October 5:

Dear Martin

Many thanks for your reply. You write:

“I agree with every word down to ‘if we retreat...’ From then on it's far less convincing and the messianic nonsense about battling for peace in the middle east is absurd.”

In other words, you “agree with every word” of the following:

“And of course, the new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit.
This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.
This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it.
It's not the consequence of foreign policy.
It's an attack on our way of life.
It's global.
It has an ideology.
It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.
It has been decades growing.
Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey.
Over 30 nations in the world.
It preys on every conflict.
It exploits every grievance.
And its victims are mainly Muslim.
This is not our war against Islam.
This is a war fought by extremists who pervert the true faith of Islam. And all of us, Western and Arab, Christian or Muslim, who put the value of tolerance, respect and peaceful co-existence above those of sectarian hatred, should join together to defeat them. It is not British soldiers who are sending car bombs into Baghdad or Kabul to slaughter the innocent.
They are there along with troops of 30 other nations with, in each case, a full UN mandate at the specific request of the first ever democratically elected Governments of those countries in order to protect them against the very ideology also seeking the deaths of British people in planes across the Atlantic.”
(‘Tony Blair’s speech,’ The Guardian, September 26, 2006; http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1881512,00.html)

But almost every word of this is false. Blair says, for example, that al Qaeda terrorism is “an attack on our way of life”.

In a September 19, 2001 appearance on the David Letterman show, ABC journalist John Miller described how Osama bin Laden had told him in an interview several years earlier that he had three major grievances against the West: "the US military presence in Saudi Arabia; US support for Israel; and US policy toward Iraq." What is your basis for rejecting this assertion?

This also gives the lie to Blair’s further comment:

“This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it. It's not the consequence of foreign policy... It [al Qaeda] killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.”

But, clearly, the September 11, 2001 attacks did +not+ precede the ferocious 1991 assault on Iraq. You will recall that US-UK forces dropped 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq, the equivalent of seven Hiroshima-size bombs. Nor did September 11 precede the 1990-2003 sanctions regime, driven by America and Britain, which led to the deaths of 1 million Iraqis. Denis Halliday, the senior UN diplomat who set up the ’oil for food’ programme, described these sanctions as “genocidal”.

Wasn’t it absurd, in fact deeply dishonest, of Blair to feign ignorance of bin Laden’s justification for al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks - US-UK foreign policy?

And wasn’t it equally absurd, therefore, for Blair to claim:

“... we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible“.

It’s worth considering some of the ’propagandists’ responsible for this “wretched capitulation“.

In January 2003, the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the US director of central intelligence, predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq “would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict“. (Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger, ‘Prewar Assessment On Iraq Saw Chance Of Strong Divisions,’ New York Times, September 28, 2004)

The CIA describes the National Intelligence Council as the intelligence community's “center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking”.

A May 2005 CIA report concluded:

“Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda’s early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban conflict.” (Douglas Jehl, ‘Iraq May Be Prime Place For Training of Militants, CIA Report Concludes,’ New York Times, June 22, 2005)

In July 2005, a report released by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) concluded, there is “no doubt” the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost to the al-Qaida network" in "propaganda, recruitment and fundraising", while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. (Guardian Reporters, ‘Ministers warned of Iraq link to terrorist attacks in Britain,’ The Guardian, July 22, 2005)

You will recall that one of the suspects in the failed second attack on the London transport system after July 7 “claimed the bomb plot was directly inspired by Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war”. (Tony Thompson, Mark Townsend, Martin Bright and Barbara McMahon, ‘Terror suspect gives first account of London attack,’ The Guardian, July 31, 2005)

On the same day as Blair's speech, a leaked US intelligence report reflecting a consensus of 16 intelligence agencies found:

"The Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success [in Iraq] would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere. The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world. If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide." (Suzanne Goldenberg, 'Intelligence report blow to Bush's war on terror,' The Guardian, September 27, 2006)

How, then, can you agree with Blair’s whitewashing assertion that al Qaeda terrorism is “not the consequence of [US-UK] foreign policy”?

Blair also said of US-UK occupying forces:

“They are there along with troops of 30 other nations with, in each case, a full UN mandate at the specific request of the first ever democratically elected Governments of those countries in order to protect them against the very ideology also seeking the deaths of British people in planes across the Atlantic.”

In the Daily Mail, Max Hastings commented on Blair’s speech:

“He lied in asserting that our presence in Iraq has 'a full UN mandate'.” (Hastings, ‘Requiem for a hollow man,’ Daily Mail, September 27, 2006)

How, after all, can the occupation have a “full UN mandate” when Kofi Annan said of the 2003 US-UK invasion:

"From our point of view and from the charter point of view, it was illegal."? (Leader, 'Kofi Annan on Iraq: The war was illegal,' The Guardian, September 17, 2004)

It is clear to any honest observer that the UN has been undermined and discredited by US strong-arm tactics. Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in 2004:

“The interim government recognized by the UN, like the Governing Council before it, is a creature of the United States, not the United Nations. By giving a UN ‘bluewash‘ imprimatur, the Security Council has undermined the credibility and legitimacy of the United Nations as a whole. It will be difficult to reclaim that credibility after such abject submission to U.S. power.” (Bennis, ‘UN resolution on Iraq,’ Jun 12, 2004; http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5696§ionID=1)

As for the fanciful claim that the January 2005 Iraqi elections were democratic, Bennis again made the obvious points well:

"An election cannot be legitimate when it is conducted under foreign military occupation; when the country is nominally ruled by, and the election will be officially run by, a puppet government put and kept in place by the occupying army and the election will be under the ultimate control of the occupying army; when war is raging extensively enough to prevent participation by much of the population; and when the election is designed to choose a new assembly responsible for drafting a constitution and selecting a government that will continue to function under the conditions of military occupation." (Bennis, 'Iraq's Elections,' Institute for Policy Studies, December 20, 2004)

How, then, can you agree with Blair’s deceptive and mendacious comments?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Bright responded on the same day:

David

Every word is not false -- that is just hysterical. There is an issue with the use of the word "we", because it's difficult to define who Blair means by this. Otherwise Blair's comments are fairly uncontroversial and his stance on the dangers of the ideology of radical Islam is one I would support.
But clearly al-Qaeda is an attack on our way of life (though not a very successful one), it is global (as a limited and very overstretched franchise) and it has an ideology (Wahabbi Islamism). It killed 3,000 people in New York (unless you belive it was the Americans or Mossad) and its victims are mainly Muslim.
That doesn't mean I support US/UK action in Iraq (which I don't) or that I believe a "war against terror" will help matters (which it won't).
We (he) may be responsible for making things worse, but Blair is not responible for the ideology, which emerged long before he was born.

Best

Martin


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Quotes about 21st Century Imperialism

Imperialism, n 1 the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and domination of a nation esp by territorial acquisition. 2 any unacceptable extension or attempted extension of power or influence.

The Penguin English Dictionary

“John Howard is a war criminal. I’ve branded Bush, Blair, Howard as war criminals. It is the greatest act of aggression by any western nation since the days of Adolf Hitler. The slaughter and aggression are still going on. They have unleashed war, destruction and maiming on the Iraqi people.”

John Valder, former N.S.W and National President of the Liberal Party,-Springwood Civic Centre meeting, 24-7-04

"Empire is on the move, and democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-mix imperial democracy, bring to boil, add oil, then bomb.

Arundhati Roy

Political language ….is designed to make lies sound to make truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell Shooting an Elephant

Once we [The Poles] had socialism without social justice, now we have capitalism without capital.

Jan Petrzak, Sayings of the Week, 15 April 1990.

He disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating un-American activities in Germany.

Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 1923-1999

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face –forever. . . .
And remember that is forever.

George Orwell 1984