“UK foreign policy since 1940 is as much to blame for Iraq as Blair”

 

The Chilcot report on the Iraq War has rightly criticised former UK prime minister Tony Blair for misrepresentations on a consistent basis. Blair exaggerated threat levels of non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), backed the United States’ war plans regardless of diplomatic initiatives seeking peaceful outcomes, and improperly equipped British troops once the occupation began. This has led to the denunciation of the war as neo-colonial by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and renewed calls for Blair to be charged with war crimes or crimes against peace by others.

While Tony Blair was pivotal in British decisionmaking that led to aggression against Iraq in March, 2003, he was hardly alone in promoting close alliance with the United States and the case for outright military intervention for regime change. Not only did the then Tory opposition support war on Iraq, Conservative leader David Cameron endorsed violent regime change. Indeed, apart from Robin Cook, who resigned as Leader of the House of Commons in opposition to the ‘false prospectus’ on which the Labour Government pinned its strategy, support for the war was strong throughout the political and state elite – military, intelligence, and other. And Iraq was hardly the first time that Britain had hitched its war machine to the United States.

Indeed, if we place Iraq in the sweep of post-1945 history, and in the context of a powerful British foreign policy establishment that sprang from the imperial era and became allied with US power elites after 1940, Blair appears as another example of Conservative and Labour leaders’ attempts to hang on to global influence through a one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Far from being exceptional, as Chilcot claims, the Iraq War stands in a long line of Anglo-American imperial violence in the global south in increasingly desperate bids to maintain Western supremacy. We need only to think of the Korean War, Vietnam (in which Labour leader Harold Wilson provided diplomatic and other support to the US), the first Gulf War, and support for repressive regimes the world over, including the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi and ensuing chaos in Libya since 2011, to see that the Iraq war and Tony Blair are part of a broader pattern of Anglo-American military violence. Focusing on Blair alone obscures the bigger picture and makes impossible, by venting against one man alone, a truly illuminating understanding of British foreign policy.    

"The UK's commitment of resources - financial, military, diplomatic - in support of US global priorities remains unparalleled", according to a (Wiki) leaked US state department cable. Britain, it went on, is able and willing to fight wars in faraway lands alongside the United States and mobilising allies. This makes Britain almost indispensable to the US. To former Conservative foreign secretary William Hague, America was the "essential" nation to which Britain turned. The Anglo-Saxon powers had broadly shared interests in the global order which, after all, they had constructed during and after the Second World War – Bretton Woods, United Nations, IMF, World Bank, Marshall Plan, NATO, among others. While these arrangements suited the West, global poverty in the ‘Third World’ continued apace. 

The foundations of the post-1945 order were laid during World War II. According to Cabinet papers, the key decisions were made in 1944 over whether to pursue a pro-empire or pro-American foreign policy. Choosing the empire “will be regarded by the Americans as a Declaration of War…” at a time when the empire itself was disintegrating and its parts leaning towards the USA. And the USA would “certainly make economic war upon us. So much has been made clear to us. And the armoury of the United States is a very powerful one.” Britain signed up to the US-dominated Bretton Woods system because it seemed the best means to preserve its global influence as its imperial power waned.

This is why ‘socialist’ Labour leader Clement Attlee sent to Korea thousands of British servicemen despite the military chiefs of staff indicating that Korea was of little economic or strategic value to British interests. The war – waged under the banner of the fledgling United Nations – lasted three years and led to over 3 million Korean and Chinese deaths, tens of thousands of American and British fatalities. It ended in stalemate – a cease-fire remains in place today dividing the north from south. Using the precise words used by Tony Blair in 2003, Attlee announced that Britain would stand “shoulder to shoulder,” with the US; wherever the Stars and Stripes flew, the Union Jack would be alongside it.

Two imperial powers – one in denial about its decline, the other hubristic, inexperienced imperial masters of the universe – trying to order the world to maintain a ‘liberal order’ through unrestrained violence – featuring napalm and relentless aerial bombing of a rural country with rudimentary weapons – teaching the communists a lesson, and repeating the same thing in Vietnam a few short years later.

Decades later, not much had changed. Concluding his unofficial enquiry into the first Gulf War, former US attorney general, Ramsay Clark, declared the Anglo-American bombing campaign as “the most sophisticated and violent air assault in history against a virtually defenceless people.”

Chilcot’s narrowness of vision is probably understandable – one could hardly expect it to look at a broader pattern of history or the place of Iraq in the world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But on that basis to declare the Iraq war exceptional and therefore no source of lessons for the future, and for the media to focus so intently on the person of Tony Blair, pivotal though he was, is a major flaw both practically and for our understanding of the dynamics of Anglo-American power. It renders Iraq unique, and places blame on one man, when it is plain to see that Blair’s behaviour fits a long historical pattern within an imperial world view that continues to saturate the British foreign policy establishment.

Britain’s Brexit Vote – One Kingdom, Divisible and Decayed

Britain’s Brexit Vote – One Kingdom, Divisible and Decayed

A version of this article was published in The Wire, 11 July 2016: http://thewire.in/50528/one-kingdom-divisible-and-decayed/  

Britain’s narrow vote to ‘Brexit’ – leave the European Union (EU) – has sent shock waves through the country, Europe and the wider world, except among some of the most right wing leaders such as Donald Trump and France’s fascist leader, Marine Le Pen. It signals continuing fragmentation and disunity at home as well as the general unravelling of the European project inaugurated by the Marshall Plan in 1948, a key building block of the US-led international order after the bloodbath of two world wars within a generation. There is a political legitimacy crisis deep in the heart of liberal democracies – such as the United States and Britain – manifest as a revolt against established political elites and big business. The political right in Britain, however, has mobilised, harnessed – and pandered to - better than any other force the anger, disappointment and alienation from the status quo that the EU referendum has brought to the surface, encouraging some of the most xenophobic elements of British society who reject “immigrants” and “refugees” as taking jobs, homes, and school places. The killing by a right-wing extremist of the pro-Remain (in the EU) Labour MP, Jo Cox, was the most extreme symptom of a rise of the right that now constitutes a threat to the national body politic. Racist attacks in general have increased in the wake of the Brexit votes.

The EU referendum was Prime Minister Cameron’s way of resolving the split in the Conservative Party, and heading off the challenge of the UK Independence Party, by making it a national and European question, and has had disastrous consequences. Brexit has consumed Cameron’s leadership because he spear-headed the defeated Remain campaign – he will leave office by the autumn; has severely dented the leadership of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn as almost a third of Labour voters supported Brexit, and given another excuse for the Blairite majority in parliament to challenge his leadership; laid low the leadership hopes of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne; tarnished the reputations of pro-Leave leaders Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, bringing to a grinding halt Johnson’s prime ministerial ambitions. Johnson famously attacked President Obama’s intervention in the EU referendum campaign by suggesting that the American leader was ‘half Kenyan’ with a grudge against British colonialism, echoing Donald Trump. The only party leader who’s come out more credible, but has now resigned due to his mission being accomplished, is UK Independence Party head Nigel Farage who promoted a poster falsely depicting a line of Syrian refugees clamouring to get into Britain. UKIP, as much as the Johnson-Gove Leave campaign, conflated and crystallised the threat posed by the outsider, the immigrant, the refugee, with the suspected suicide bomber dispatched by Islamic State to destroy British freedom and security. But there will be no end to the migration or refugee crisis with a Brexit.

Brexit cuts off Britain from the European Union but also divides the ‘United’ Kingdom - pro-Remain London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland from pro-Leave England and Wales. It threatens to inaugurate another referendum on Scottish independence and undermines improved economic and political relations with the lowering of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. English nationalism is rising even as the country fragments and cosmopolitan London becomes isolated from its national hinterland and looks to Europe and the wider world. And it has encouraged the right in Europe to demand referenda on EU membership across the continent. The forces of European right wing nationalism and chauvinism are on the march again while European elites try to manage Britain’s shock exit.  Britain needs a fresh constitutional convention and a written constitution for a federal UK to go forward into the twenty-first century. But given the debased character of its political elite – fully displayed for the world to see – anything of this sort is unlikely.

For all the identity politics that marred the referendum campaign, there is a hidden politics of growing class inequality and a race to the bottom. The immigrant, as ever, is accused of taking working class jobs and homes, working for less pay, undercutting British workers. Poorly paid British workers with falling living standards and declining public services – largely the result of the corporate colonisation of the British state since the Thatcherite 1980s and the Blairite ‘third way’ – were set against relatively low paid EU migrants taking scarce hospital beds and welfare benefits while corporate elites amass ever greater shares of national income and wealth, bleeding into corridors of political power. Owen Jones’s The Establishment – and How They Get Away With It – sums it up: “Behind our democracy lurks a powerful but unaccountable network of people who wield massive power and reap huge profits in the process...” Exposing the revolving doors that link these worlds, and the vested interests that bind them together, Jones shows how elites represent the biggest threat to democracy while wrapping themselves up in the emblems of freedom and people power.

Under the guise of identity politics, the prevention of a change in the fabric of British culture and values, and the promise of more funds for public services once the Brussels drain is removed, there is in preparation an even more draconian offensive against workers’ rights protected by the EU. There has been an unseemly retreat from the promise – plastered all over the Leave campaign bus - to channel to the National Health Service the weekly £350 million pounds allegedly flowing from London to Brussels.

Divide and rule did not only (try to) hold together an empire on which the sun never set – it remains the basis of national politics in Britain’s class divided society. And in such societies, election promises are like pie crusts – made to be broken. The EU referendum, rather than making Britain great again or taking our country back to some mythical golden age, has exposed a shallow and decaying elite political culture at the heart of what once was a mighty empire where post-truth politics rules, and sowing division and promoting and exploiting fear represent normal politics.

Blairite Coup Against Corbyn Exposed

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership are under pressure but nowhere near the levels of strain to which he's been subject since last September when he won the leader role with 60% support of Labour members and started building a new party to fight the neoliberal pro-austerity establishemnt within and beyond the Labour Party.

Keep an open mind on Corbyn – see this link for how well organised is the New Labour destabilisation of Corbyn: http://www.thecanary.co/2016/06/30/pr-company-manufactured-labour-coup-part-i/

Corbyn has shown great courage since his election by 60% of Labour members last September. I don’t know of any political leader in the western world who’s had to endure such systematic opposition from all parts of the established order including from the Blairites in his own party. This is normally the sort of thing western states do to the likes of Allende etc in Chile. Corbyn’s the only leader offering a viable programme against the established orthodoxy – economic or other, including a politics of truth as opposed to outright lies, and principles rather than one based on personal attacks. 

And that’s why he has received full frontal attacks from all sides. Look at the farce over anti-semitism in the Labour Party and the report exonerating him and the party, and how the BBC etc twisted it around to elide consideration of the report’s contents and the speech Corbyn made at the launch – which showed up the racist divide and rule politics of the powerful, inherited from the imperial era, and called for working people’s unity behind a principled politics that protects rights and empowers ordinary people, a lot of whom voted for Leave not through racism but because they have borne the brunt of Thatcherism and the 2008 crisis with no respite in sight.

Noam Chomsky writes in his work on mind control in western societies of consent is manufactured by various means including “flak from the Right”. The idea is for organised elites to throw as much mud as often as possible such that even supporters of a party or leader who offers any radical alternative begin to soften and turn away – no smoke without fire etc… and dress it up to appear to be a popular revolt against bad ideas, leadership, etc...

This is precisely what’s happening to Jeremy Corbyn under our very eyes and needs to be seen for what it is – an attempted coup against a democratically elected leader who dares to challenge the establishment and represent real people’s interests.