Throwin’ Out The Trash #2

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it.  Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”.  Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them.  Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

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So, today Tony Blair comes before the Chilcot Enquiry.  I am writing this at 11am, before the conclusion of events, but I expect nothing more from this than Blair sticking firmly to his position that he believed in what he did and thought it was the right thing to do for both Iraq and the security of the world.

What else is he going to do?  Admit that he lied; that he’s a war-criminal and a mass-murderer?  That he wilfully started a war that has killed hundreds of soldiers and thousands of civilians in full knowledge that the justification for it was bullshit?

Of course not.

Blair’s testimony is a red herring.  As I’ve said before and I’ll say again now: the evidence that Saddam was not a threat was available to anybody with an internet connection and a library card, and speaks to a much deeper problem within UK and US foreign policy than this one unjust war alone.

We need more than the Chilcot Enquiry – we need a radical change of course.

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Obama has announced a pay-freeze, just as, here in the UK, whoever wins the election later this year has promised to make cuts in public spending.  Anyone else troubled that we had billions for the banks, and billions to spend on slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghans, and yet no money to pay for schools, hospitals, civil servants or benefits?

Here’s a saving we could make on both sides of the Atlantic ocean immediately: withdraw, right now, without hesitation, from Afghanistan and Iraq, stop picking fights in Pakistan and Yemen, and put all that money you’re pissing away on genocide back into the public coffers.

Oh, and then tax the fucking rich already!

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If you think the new Apple iPad is a good idea then you’re an idiot, and probably think HDTV, Blu-Ray and 3D movies are good ideas too.  They’re not, and you’re a gullible mark.

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In the Good News Department: the BNP are still in trouble regarding their constitution.  Their ridiculous pseudo-amendments made a few months ago to try and appease the Equality and Human Rights Commission have been laughed out of court, and if they don’t sort it out properly by the end of next month, they’re legally fucked.  As spokesman, Simon Darby said, the ruling forces the party to “emasculate its constitution and drop its policies and principles…This is a deadly serious attempt to put us out of business.”  Good.  I watched This Is England the other night and can’t believe racist idiots like this still exist in 2010.

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In the Oh My God It’s Worse Than I Thought Department: A recent poll in America has shown that Fox News is the most trusted news network in the country.  This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

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Revelations continue to come out about Haiti – how the US government sent soldiers instead of aid, and prioritized “securing” the area over giving people food.  Obama already got blood all over his hands by stepping up Bush’s war in Afghanistan and claiming it as his own; now it seems he has left Haitians to die in much the way Bush left the victims of Katrina.  “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, as The Who might sing.

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I wrote about the UK’s repressive Prevention of Terror Act of 2000 about ten years ago for Scanner fanzine.  This was in the heady days before 9/11, and the big concern at the time was that the UK government were using anti-terror legislation to target activists.  Well, now it’s 2010 and, according to The Guardian, the Ministry of Justice’s new “guidance on extremism” has included eco-activists on its terror list, alongside members of al-Qaeda and far-right extremists.

The Lib Dems have called it “a quite astonishing conflation of legitimate protest with terrorism”. 

Haven’t they been paying attention?  The entire war on terror has just been a concerted effort in manipulation designed to quell the anti-capitalism movement that was making such great progress between 1999 and 2001. 

The sad thing is: it has worked.

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George Clooney’s new film, Up in the Air, is rubbish.  Unless you enjoy watching a film about the assholes who go into downsizing corporations to professionally “let people go” that in no way deals with the subject of just how fucked up that is.

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Finally, I’m pretty sure that Obama’s momentary “tough talk” about banking regulation will die down pretty quickly.  Not only has “Mr Bank Bailout”, Ben Bernake, been given a second term at the Fed (so no change there), but Wall Street have been gearing up an army of lobbyists over the past twelve months (to the tune of $26m) and are planning of unleashing them in opposition to any plans for regulation.  When you combine that, the banking industry’s $78.2m in donations to well-greased federal candidates and party committees, and the recent Supreme Court decision to remove all limits on how much private corporations can spend on political influence, I think you’ll agree: banking regulation in 2010 just doesn’t have a chance.

 

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The Real Questions for Chilcot

As the Chilcot Enquiry enters its ninth week and star-witnesses, Blair and Brown, approach their impending interrogations, there are still a wealth of important witnesses who have not yet been called to give testimony.

Sadly, it seems highly unlikely that they ever will be. 

I am not talking about any more key members of government, nor am I talking about MPs, civil servants, the security services or the army.  I am talking about the million-plus people who marched on London, February 15th, 2003, in clear opposition to this war.  I am talking about the unwavering majority of British citizens polled repeatedly before the March 20th invasion who were consistently opposed to the war.  I am talking about people like me, a university student at the time, who had no access to secret government documents or high-clearance intelligence briefs and yet still knew enough – from just a couple of visits to the library and a little online searching – to know that the reasons for invasion were bogus.

The fact of the matter is, an enquiry into whatever government officials claim they did, or did not, know at the time of the Iraq invasion is far too short-sighted an endeavour to yield any meaningful results, especially when it is limited solely within the self-serving bubble of Westminster spin.  Regardless of what Tony Blair thought he knew in his heart of hearts, what convinced Gordon Brown to write the cheques, or what regrets and reservations Jack Straw might have had, the real question about Iraq is not how individual politicians happened to clear their already ambidextrous consciences on the matter, it is how so many people like me – people who marched in opposition to the war; people who signed the petitions and knew all along that we were being lied to – managed so easily to find out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just from reading readily available books and reports on the area, and yet our government and media apparently remained so utterly in the dark?

If the Chilcot Enquiry were to interview someone like me, I would tell them how I read the reports of UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, who both said that there was no sign of Iraqi WMDs.  I would tell them how even Colin Powell was on record as saying there were no WMDs in Iraq, and how about seven different books on the subject all said the same thing.  I would tell them how the only evidence we had of Saddam posing a “threat” in March of 2003, was the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 (for which America arguably gave Iraq the green light, in an effort to teach them a lesson through a manufactured conflict) and the gassing of Kurds with chemical weapons in 1988 (gas which was sold to Iraq by the USA in the first place).  I would remind Sir Chilcot that, though it was nice to see how upset Blair and Bush suddenly were about attacks that had happened back in 1988, it would have been much more useful for our governments to have been upset about them in ‘88, when they actually happened, instead of doing what we really did at the time, which was continue selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein.

There are a lot of things I could tell him, and I’m sure that any number of the millions of UK citizens opposed to the war long before the invasion – and aware that the WMD claims were a lie – would have much to say if they took the stand at the Iraq Inquiry.  If people like us could find out the truth about Iraq just from looking at books in our spare-time, the idea that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, and the Foreign Secretary – whose sole job at the time was to know about this sort of stuff – were unable to acquire that same information with all the resources of state at their disposal, is even more hard to swallow than the absurdist fantasy that there were WMDs hidden under the Iraqi sand.

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