If god is capital all wars are holy (who cares who wins) (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Daily Telegraph (1 September) a Brigadier Ed Butler protested, claiming that prosecuting British special forces makes us vulnerable to the Russians. That recruitment numbers are down due to soldiers fearing ‘lawfare’ and that Andy Burnham is not ‘having the backs’ of our troops.

That this is not about national security is precisely the point. He is advocating state murder with impunity.

The British military does not exist to protect us. It exists to protect King Capital. The SAS are the sharp end of the stick. They exist to kill whoever the British state labels an enemy whenever King Capital requires resources, markets, or strategic advantage to be secured. When Brigadier Butler warns that accountability threatens the special forces, defending our safety is the last thing on his mind. He is defending the state’s right to commit murder abroad with no repercussions.

And the ‘witch hunt’ he is talking about does not even exist.

Since 2001, across two decades of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there has been precisely one prosecution of British armed forces personnel for a war crime under the International Criminal Court Act. Just one. Corporal Donald Payne was convicted of inhumane treatment in the killing of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian who died with 93 separate injuries to his body after 36 hours in British custody. He was hooded, forced into stress positions, deprived of food and water and beaten in a detention facility that used to be run by Saddam Hussein’s cousin. Seven soldiers were court martialled, six walked free. Payne was acquitted of manslaughter and only convicted of inhuman treatment. Sir William Gage the head of the public inquiry said it was ‘an appalling episode of serious, gratuitous violence on civilians’. The investigation found that the hooding and stressing techniques of detainees that had been banned by Heath’s government in 1972 had become written UK policy again.

That is the sum total of war crimes accountability for Britain’s 21st century wars.

But crimes are documented. A BBC Panorama investigation found that one SAS squadron alone could have unlawfully killed 54 people during a single six month tour in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. The ongoing public inquiry is looking into more than 80 suspicious deaths involving UK Special Forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013, including children. One ex-SAS member told the BBC that on some operations ‘the troop would go into guest house type buildings and kill everyone there… It’s not justified, killing people in their sleep’. Witnesses said that they saw detainees being handcuffed, taken back inside buildings and shot. They described ‘drop weapons’, AK-47s being brought into raids and planted on corpses to make executions look like combat, they described squadrons vying for body counts, they described children murdered.

The International Criminal Court found that there was a reasonable basis to believe that British forces had committed war crimes in Iraq, including wilful killing, torture, rape; the court only closed their preliminary examination because it accepted Britain’s promise that it would investigate itself. Britain did not.

Operation Northmoor and the Iraq Historic Allegations Team were the major UK military police investigations into war crimes committed by British armed forces abroad. IHAT investigated over 3,000 allegations, it spent £34 million, it secured zero prosecutions of soldiers.

And in Afghanistan it was the same story, Operation Northmoor was the Royal Military Police’s inquiry into 675 allegations of unlawful killing by UK Special Forces. No prosecutions. The inquiry was dismantled through leadership interference, digital evidence deletion, and strategic narrowing of scope.

But, Brigadier Butler calls this a witch hunt.

Sergeant Alexander Blackman was caught on camera executing a wounded, unarmed Taliban fighter in Afghanistan saying as he pulled the trigger ‘I just broke the Geneva Convention’. He was convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal, and released after three years – he was never charged with a war crime.

When Butler talks of ‘morale’ it is the kind of ‘morale’ of killers who think they are untouchable. The ‘backs’ the government is supposed to have is the back of an assassin. We’re told that Britain needs men who murder children, plant weapons on corpses and falsify reports in order to keep us safe from Russia but Russia does not threaten us because the SAS is short of recruits, Russia threatens British capitalist interests just as British capital threaten Russians. These are the wars of rival ruling classes fought with the bodies of workers on both sides.

The military industrial complex is not a conspiracy, it is the natural machinery of an economic system where a minority owns all wealth and requires violence to protect it.

The UK spent £89 billion on its military in 2025, that is 2.4 percent of GDP, the government will increase that to 3.5 percent by 2035. That jump alone would be equivalent to £36 billion a year, roughly £500 for every person in the country.

Weapons manufacturers make billions, UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia since the Yemen war began have been worth about £3.3 billion. Politicians wrap themselves in the flag, newspapers like the Telegraph sell the myth that questioning soldiers is treason and workers are told to salute, to enlist, to die, to look away when the bodies pile up

We don’t have to look away, we recognize this system for what it is. A worker in Basra and a worker in Birmingham have the same enemy, the class that sends one to kill the other for oil, for territory, for power.

Every demand for accountability, prosecution, inquiry, leaked document, is a crack in the wall of impunity.

There is no reform that will make the SAS moral, there is no law that will stop an army built for state violence from committing state violence. The only answer is the abolition of the system that requires violence to maintain it. That means socialism, common ownership of the means of production, production for use and the end of the nation state and its armies.

A.T.

Slings and Arrows: Empty Boasting (1952)

The Slings and Arrows column from the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Empty Boasting

The remarks of a London Magistrate on the case of a man charged with obtaining Public Assistance by false pretences have focussed some attention on the question of granting aid to workers who have started new jobs and whose wages are withheld until they have worked for two weeks or longer. The Magistrate expressed the opinion that it was a “scandalous state of affairs" and he hoped the authorities would “look into it.” The Manchester Guardian (27-8-52), in a fairly lengthy article on the subject quotes from a 1949 report issued by the National Assistance Board to show that this is not a new problem. The report reveals that the Board is troubled by the growing practice of employers in withholding the first week's wages. It admits that the complexities of modern book-keeping make this practice necessary, but suggests that Public Money should not be spent to support workers who could support themselves if they received in time what they earned. That this is not a small problem is shown by the figures adduced by the Board. In a sample week chosen at random 6,892 payments were made to meet the “urgent needs” of workers not in receipt of their first week's wages. We are not concerned with the fact that the National Assistance Board is, in effect, subsidising some businesses. What, however, does concern us is that it throws a light on the hollow claims of Labour leaders and “left-wing intellectuals" of the “New Statesman" breed that poverty in England has been abolished since 1945. Not all the social services, nor the increases in money wages have removed poverty from the experience of the working-class. One week's wages short and they must apply for National Assistance.

The Manchester Guardian and the Assistance Board suggest a solution. Firms should loan their workers money and take it back out of subsequent earnings. We do not doubt that this might solve the problems of the National Assistance Board, although they themselves are not quite sure that the repayment of the loans would not set up further problems. But these are troubles which leave us unmoved. The worker is still at the mercy of a lost week's wages, and whether he gets an advance from his boss or from the Assistance Board makes no difference to him. The Manchester Guardian does not point out the obvious answer—abolition of the wages system, but then it is not concerned with solving workers’ problems.

“When Mercy seasons Justice"

There are a number of views on the treatment of criminals which vary between the extremes of the iron fist and the kind-hearted sentimental approach. In between these views is the one which holds firmly that the criminal should not only be punished but helped to rehabilitate himself in Society. While Capitalism continues, crime will flourish and criminals will need to be dealt with in some way or another, and so it seems sensible that the criminal should be aided to re-establish himself. It is gratifying therefore, to learn that the Western Powers are taking this view. News is forthcoming of a criminal who was sentenced in 1945 to twelve years penal servitude and released after six years to find his property had been confiscated and that he had no place in Society. After a further six years struggle he has won back his position and has been granted £30,000,000 compensation by a dilatory but repentant Conqueror. Let it not be thought that the Allies are being quixotic or foolhardy. Not a bit of it. Although he is getting this cash he will not be allowed to control the undertakings which bear his name. This will keep him out of bad company and prevent him repeating his former crimes or getting into bad habits.

There are many disgruntled people who will complain at this magnanimity on the part of the allies. We feel sure that there will be many, knowing that the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society give ex-prisoners 5s. and a Railway Voucher, only too ready to draw odious comparisons. But a mere glance at the facts will suffice to show that such comparisons are invidious. Here is a man, Herr Alfred Krupp, owner of huge armament and steel industries who is charged, tried and found guilty of crimes of looting, conscription of slave labour, ill-treatment resulting in the deaths of hundreds of his slaves, and all sorts of plots and conspiracies, released from gaol after six years. In the first place it is obvious that he is not used to prison life. Is it not logical, is it not proper, is it not justice that he should be given enough to keep him on the straight and narrow path ? Should not also, a bonus be added to compensate him for his years in gaol £30,000,000 is hardly enough. It only gives him the greatest bank account in Europe, if not the world. As against this let us examine the common or garden burglar who has served his eighteen months, who was born in poverty and lived in poverty all his life. Of what use would £30,000,000, £30,000, or even £30 be to him ? 5s. and a Railway Voucher are quite enough to restore him to the place to which be is accustomed. That being the case we hope that no one will remind us that many millions of people were led to the slaughter in the belief that they were fighting to break the power of the over-privileged and introduce the “Century of the Common Man,” the Atlantic Charter, and the constitution of the United Nations. To mention this now would be unkind and leave a nasty taste in the mouth of Alfred Krupp.

Pot and Kettle

Mr. W. H. Chamberlin. American journalist and writer of several books on Russia has written to the Manchester Guardian (12-9-52) taking to task their reviewer of the book by Alan Moorehead “The Traitors.” The reviewer's sin lies, according to Mr. Chamberlin in the fact that he reproved the author for not having mentioned as traitors those Russians who had sold secrets to the Western Powers. According to Mr. Chamberlin those who sell Western secrets to the Russians are vile traitors, while those who sell Russian secrets to “us” are heroes and only doing what’s right. He says that this must be so because the West .stands for a “free and civilized society,” while Russia represents “Totalitarian Barbarism." He further states, that every crime and atrocity associated with nazism can be matched with examples from the record of “Soviet Communism.” This may well be true. But we go further. We assert that the atrocities inflicted by the Germans or Russians on those who stood in their way can equally be matched by the past and present conduct of the Western powers. One has only to read history to realise that ail nations who have to maintain their position in the capitalist world have from time to time been guilty of the vilest crimes. Therefore Mr. Chamberlin's thesis breaks down. We are sure that there must be a Russian Chamberlin who is proving that those who hand secrets to the allies are traitors, but those like Fuchs, Nunn May and Pontecorvo are heroic martyrs. It has always been the habit of the ruling class of each country to applaud the subversive elements existing in the enemy ranks. During World War 1, German Social Democrats who opposed the war were applauded in this country by the very people who were putting anti-war agitators at home, in gaol. Why should we be interested in who sells what secrets to which power ? Whoever does the spying does so in the interests of the ruling class of his respective country.

S. A.

Material World: Standing by your trained killers (2025)

The Material World Column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 2020, the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force published its long-awaited findings on the behaviour of the nation’s special forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. It became widely known as the Brereton Report, after Major General Paul Brereton, the investigation’s lead.

Its findings were simple: Australian special forces had committed murder in Afghanistan. Thirty-nine cases were identified. The report found evidence of collusion to cover the atrocities up. Troops carried ‘throw down weapons’ to plant on their victims, to claim they were actually insurgents and the slaying was within the terms of engagement. New recruits were ‘blooded,’ ordered by their officer to kill prisoners to get their first kill. The report identified 25 individuals responsible, and stated that no-one above the rank of sergeant was involved or had knowledge of these atrocities.

So far, only one man has even been charged with murder, and is still awaiting trial. The Office of The Special Investigator, set up by the Australian Government, has noted the difficulty in reliably investigating the incidents, especially with the Taliban in power.

It is likely that only political obsessives in Australia, let alone around the world, will have even heard of the very serious findings of the report. It is unlikely that the culture of the Australian forces evolved on its own.

The British government, for its part, sprang into action and passed The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, which created a

‘presumption that it is to be exceptional for a prosecutor to determine that a Service person or veteran should be prosecuted for alleged offences on operations outside the UK […] These measures do not apply to allegations of sexual offences, torture, crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes’.

(Although the law as originally drafted would have included them – tinyurl.com/spgbBRE3).

The BBC has been picking up stories of abuses by British forces. The 2022 Panorama programme, ‘SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime?’ observed that: ‘British special forces killed hundreds of people on night raids in Afghanistan’, and asked, ‘but were some of the shootings executions?’ More recently, the episode ‘Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes’ (May 2025) relayed stories from service personnel:

‘Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said’.

And:

‘The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.’

The story sounds almost exactly the same as the Australian one.

The BBC has, inevitably, received pushback for this reporting from the usual ‘support the troops’ types, usually of the ‘so what, war is hell’ variety, or ‘who are we to judge the actions of soldiers under pressure’. But the main response has been crickets. There has been no full bore coverage or outrage on the front pages of the national press. The stories have been simply left to sink down into the archives to be quietly forgotten.

This is the propaganda tool of ‘worthy versus unworthy victims’: the crimes of the British state will receive less attention than the crimes of official enemies. A genuinely democratic press interested in holding authorities to account for the citizenry would operate on the opposite principle.

This is hardly new. In her book Legacy of violence Caroline Elkins explores what she calls ‘legalized lawlessness’ which involves ‘legalizing, bureaucratizing and legitimating of exceptional state-directed violence when ordinary laws proved insufficient for maintaining order and control.’

One example she gives is of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in India in 1919. The event saw Brigadier General Dyer order his troops to open fire on a crowd, killing around 400 and wounding around three times as many. Despite the outrage around the world, Dyer stood by his actions, as producing a salutary terror to prevent an uprising.

His only punishment was dismissal (though the press and well-wishers raised a substantial sum of money for him). In a debate in the House of Commons on the incident, Winston Churchill depicted it as ‘a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’, that is, as an exceptional one-off, out of character with the spirit of the British army.

The House of Commons passed a resolution of censure of Dyer, but the House of Lords passed a motion condemning the lower house’s resolution. In that debate, Elkins quotes one noble peer, Viscount Finlay stating:

‘One of the mainstays of our Empire has been the feeling that every officer, whose duty it was to take action in times of difficulty, might rely, so long as he acted honestly and in the discharge of his duty, upon his superiors standing by him’.

Looking at Elkins’ narrative, this is a recurring theme: violent excesses by imperial forces are met with official investigation and sanction, only for the perpetrator to be let off after a vociferous public campaign. The most recent example of this being Sergeant Blackman, who was convicted of murder in Afghanistan.

After a strenuous campaign, the charge was downgraded to manslaughter, and he was released after serving four years in prison. Appeal judges accepted he had a stress-related mental illness leading to diminished responsibility.

The British state has opened a public enquiry under Justice Haddon-Cave. This will likely be a full and conscientious enquiry that will shed some light on the operations of the British forces in Afghanistan. The most likely outcome will be that junior heads will roll (gently), and the report will join others on the shelf, forgotten except by historians

The interests served by the British state create a need for killers, and it is unsurprising when they cross the line. What is harder to understand is the minds of people who will determinedly keep violence and slaughter available as a policy option.

Pik Smeet

Playing by the rules of war (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Millions of people are horrified by the Israeli war on Gaza. Protests have hit the streets in countries around the world, to the point where armed police battled students on university campuses across the US for occupying in protest against the war and America’s role in backing it.

Many protestors shout that the war is ‘illegal’ and that Israel is committing genocide, pinning hopes on international authority putting an end to malefaction. It should be noted that genocide is a crime of intent, and is not synonymous with mass homicide. That narrow legal definition, though, does trigger international and domestic legal requirements to act against it: hence why America and allied governments are determined to deny that it is genocide, and will continue to do so until the International Court of Justice makes a determinative ruling, which could be years away.

People should not put their faith in the split hairs of legality, but instead on sound analysis of the causes of conflict and action built on that analysis. The faith in the power of legality is misplaced against the tremendous value of the interests at stake in being able to secure and control the supply of oil. It is worth noting, as Tony Blair pointed out in his speech at the George Bush library in 2002, that it is not about monopolising oil, but ensuring that no one state can monopolise and thus threaten the supply of oil:

‘The western world is import dependent. We base our policy on diversity of supply. You in the US import from 50 different countries, no one of which supplies more than 15 per cent of total imports. The EU pursues roughly the same policy.’

Beyond that, it is important to note that international law is not set up to prevent war, but in fact to structure and enable wars to take place. It seeks to limit war and codify its conduct, but the powers that drafted those wars would simply not allow themselves to put aside the tool of war. As Michael Walzer, the theorist of just war writes, alongside Jo-Ann Mort: ‘It is a maxim of just war theory that the rules of war cannot make it impossible to fight a just war. There has to be a way to fight’. Walzer has also said in a recent interview ‘I think the IDF has been trying to adhere to the rules in an environment that probably requires some loosening of the rules.’

As we reported in our May issue part of this ‘loosening’ has been to deploy the Lavender AI targeting system to co-ordinate targeting of Hamas operatives and officials based on mass intelligence gathering. The military doctrine that civilian casualties are permissible in pursuit of a legitimate military objective has been broadly applied (more broadly than in the past). Israel undoubtedly has enough military lawyers to build a broad permissive case for its actions (or to construct one retrospectively where necessary).

It is abundantly clear that Israel is not acting out of absolute necessity: Hamas will never have the capacity to destroy Israel. If the intelligence failures that meant that Israel knew that Hamas was drilling for a 7 October-style operation were fixed Hamas could be securely locked back up. For a fraction of the cost spent on the war, Israel could have bought a bucket load of informants to finger high-level Hamas commanders for reprisal.

Everyone agrees with the concept of the right to self-defence to protect your own and your loved ones’ lives, but most would agree that going after the friends and family of someone who attacked you would be taking it too far; and every human society has mechanisms to stop violent disputes escalating in a spiral of tit for tat. And, of course, it is possible to engineer a situation where a claim of self-defence allows an actor to pursue the use of violence to achieve other ends.

As Arthur Ransome once wrote:

‘It has been said that when two armies face each other across a battle front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a single army engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when countries, each one severally doing its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do their utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are witnessing something very like the suicide of civilization itself.’

Israel is not unique in this. Indeed, their propagandists have been pointing out that there are mass refugee and humanitarian crises being created by savage wars in Sudan, Congo and Ukraine, but that Israel and its actions are being singled out. Possibly this is so, at least in part because of the focus of the western media (spurred on in part by the interest of their states and their capitalists in the Middle East region).

Indeed, in terms of Israel’s tactics, they seem to be following exactly the same military doctrines as were used by the Sri Lankan government when they crushed the Tamil Tigers in 2009:

‘The Sri Lanka Army (SLA) advanced its military campaign in the Vanni, using large-scale and widespread shelling, at times with heavy weapons, such as Multi-Barrel Rocket Launchers (MBRLs) and other large artillery, causing large numbers of civilian casualties. It shelled in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, and after it had indicated that it would stop using heavy weapons.’

Likewise, the Tamil Tigers violated human rights by using human shields and forced labour. Sri Lanka was protected from human rights allegations at the UN by allied states.

War is not some inherent feature of humanity. Billions of us live lives without waging war upon one another. War emerges from a social and technological architecture that enables it, and if the marchers who rightly hate war want to put a stop to it, they need to look to action that will make war impossible, not illegal.

Pik Smeet

Pathfinders: Death by algorithm (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world held its breath last month as April showers of Iranian missiles descended on Israel, only to be blown out of the sky by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system. Would regional war flower as a result? Iran has around ten times the population of Israel, but Israel has an elite air force, courtesy of the USA, and some of the best technology in the world. Now insiders have revealed that it has been using AI in the war in Gaza.

According to a non-profit magazine run by Israeli and Palestinian journalists, Israel has been using AI to identify ‘tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. According to six Israeli intelligence officers involved in the Gaza war, some of them actually in the targeting rooms, the AI system, known as Lavender, is designed to remove the ‘human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets’. The officers say that, in the early stages of the war, the Israeli Defence Force almost completely relied on Lavender to identify the domestic homes of up to 37,000 high to low-ranking Hamas and Islamic Jihad military personnel for potential drone strikes. Such was the cursory nature of IDF oversight, which is demanded by international law, that Lavender’s outputs were treated ‘as if it were a human decision’, and the kill lists given ‘sweeping approval’ without anyone checking the raw intelligence data. This was despite it being known that the system had a 10 percent error rate.

Moreover, the AI system was designed to target militants at their most vulnerable, when they had returned to their domestic dwellings to be with their families. A second AI system, chillingly known as ‘Where’s Daddy?’, identified when the militants actually entered their family homes. ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,’ one intelligence officer said. ‘It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

For lower-ranking militants, the army decided not to use smart bombs, which can take out an individual or a car, but unguided ‘dumb’ bombs which destroy entire buildings or apartment blocks on top of the target individual. ‘You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage’, said one officer. Two others added that the army had also agreed that ‘for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians’, while for a battalion or brigade commander, the permissible civilian deaths could be over 100.

This explains why the number of women and children killed has been so enormous. In previous operations, the IDF had strict rules of proportionality, in compliance with international law, and requirements to cross-check, verify, incriminate and confirm the target’s presence in real time. Because human targeting generated limited results, it was feasible to stick to these rules. Since October 7, targeting has been given over entirely to AI, which has produced gigantic kill lists, and all the verification rules have gone out of the window. Who the system identifies as a target depends on where the users set the bar. It could be little more than changing one’s address or mobile phone. ‘There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs.’

To call this unprecedented is an understatement. Nothing like it has been known before in Israel’s military operations, nor that of anybody else’s including the USA, not even against high-ranking targets like Bin Laden. A US general and former commander of operations against ISIS said, ‘With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.’ For the Israeli Defence force however, things were different. ‘There was hysteria in the professional ranks,’ said one officer, ‘They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen.’

What will be the long-term upshot of this policy of indiscriminate, AI-assisted slaughter? The Israeli whistleblowers are under no illusions: ‘In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.’

So, never mind rules, never mind international agreements, this is the shape of wars to come, where the critical factor is not law but LAWS – lethal autonomous weapons systems which track, target and destroy human life with no human oversight at all. The irony is that capitalism’s technological revolutions have created a global productive capability that could put us all beyond any need for outdated capitalist trade relations, where we could live in peace without markets, prices, wages, debts – or wars. Yet capitalism’s internal logic is to compete for profit, to grow or die, and the inevitable extension of that logic is war. Now AI targeting and LAWS are genies out of the bottle. If we don’t abolish capitalism soon, the human race could end up being obliterated by its own technology.

Paddy Shannon

Terror: the students ape their masters (2004)

From the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a University Challenge for thugs, students confront their teachers, from the world’s top school for terrorism, run by the CIA – the masters of their craft.

American capitalists and their puppet regime in the White House, world satellite states, proxies and missionaries, toadies in the media – all those who go to fill up the ranks of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – conduct a war in Iraq to liberate the country for free expression and sound political activity, for the continuous spreading of the ‘American dream’ with lashings of apple-pie. 

    

Well, that is what they’ve been telling us ever since the first tall story for the war, to clear out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, blew up in their face. Now other lies are meeting the same fate, with the recent publishing of evidence of systematic programmes of torture meted out by the military and secret agents of the ‘liberating forces’ against their former detractors in Iraq. Not to mention the continuous bombing and murder of innocent Iraqis on a daily basis which could run as high to 35,000 deaths to date, and the kidnapping of thousands of foreign nationals (Arab,  Asian and North African) to be held at Guantanamo Bay and numerous jails throughout the world. This exposes the sham claims that this war is to liberate the country for free political activity.

    

Socialists were never in any doubt that this war more than just being ‘in’ Iraq was ‘over’ Iraq. The business of the war is neither ethical, nor cultural, but based on commerce and the advancement of the American economy in its quest for worldwide dominion, as the conqueror takes the spoils. It is not just the oil that is at stake here. That is a major prize, but also there are the extremely lucrative contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq itself, both civilian ($100 billion says the Economist) and military, Iraqi and regional trade, cultural and social influences across the region, property and cheap labour for American corporations, as well as the theatre testing of weapons of small, medium and mass destruction. We are just as sure of this fact as we are of another: that the  tune to which Bush and Blair and world leaders dance is nothing other than that of capital.

    

The bourgeois media, as they monitor the progress of the war, marked the first day of August with the milestone of one thousand US soldiers being killed since the invasion of Iraq eighteen months or so ago and the news that the situation there has deteriorated sharply in recent months. We are all familiar with the daily news headlines depicting another US campaign in trouble. We hear that there is an average of 87 attacks on coalition forces per day, up from 40 in August; there are 25 car bombs a month on average; we have seen 120 kidnappings of civilian workers; the rate of US personnel now being injured stands at 1000 per month and unofficially at 20,000 in all. Both Bush and Colin Powell now admit that they misjudged the post-war state of Iraq. Powell also admits there are no-go-areas in Iraq for coalition forces (termed: “areas we avoid”).

    

The situation developing in Iraq is similar to that in Afghanistan, where the US now controls less of the country than did the Soviet regime under its client Najibullah. The CIA reports that in Iraq the insurgency forces, which have come from all over the Muslim world could number as much as 50,000 at one time, and total of possible recruits could be unlimited. It is becoming clear that planned elections due for Iraq in January 2005 are being called into question. The funds for the reconstruction of Iraq presently standing at $18 billion dollars have hardly been spent. Indeed, a substantial amount of this money ($4 billion) has been diverted to security budgets as the situation deteriorates. Over in Afghanistan, Taliban forces are now regrouping and gaining in strength. Back in Iraq the US, which shunned the United Nations in its invasion is now, in an attempt to maximize the rewards for American big business, desperate to extricate itself from the worsening conditions there. Body bags of homecoming dead are kept off camera, and official injured lists for soldiers in both Afghanistan and Iraq have still not been published.

    

Now, all this talk of failure, particularly in Iraq, has led to the linking of this looming disaster to that dreaded word, that highly sensitive word, that word that hurts so bad in the US as it portrays one of the biggest foreign policy failures in US history to date – ‘Vietnam’. The word which sounded like a whisper before, is gradually becoming louder and louder as the winter draws in and Iraq spirals out of control.

    

The Vietcong, who saw off the US in the jungles of Asia, were trained and supplied by a highly respected enemy of the time, the Soviet Union. Now in the desert of Iraq, the US is up against Iraqi Sunnis, Al-Qaeda, and Moqtada al Sadar’s Shi’ite Mahdi Army forces. These disparate groups may appear like the colourful mix of the ragtag and bobtail militias of the region, and not the highly disciplined army of the Vietcong, but they have all been to school and have been taught well by the CIA, the masters of the craft of covert terrorism. The US taught and supplied these forces for foreign policy missions thought too dangerous for US professional forces in the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviets against the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan.

    

As we said after 9/11 in the article ‘Terrorism versus terrorism’ in the October 2001 Socialist Standard:

“The US is now reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam, but the capitalist globalisation process, which the US has pursued obsessively, has served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.”

One is led into the impression that we are spectators in a University Challenge for thugs, where students confront their teachers from the world’s top American school for terrorism, run by the CIA in a bloody trial to the death with thousands on each side being killed. In addition, as is the way with all wars, innocents who have got in the line of fire are indiscriminately killed.

Similar tactics

The American secret services and their students are using similar tactics in these wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Are the insurgent students’ actions just copycats or is it all in the training? The US has kidnapped Arab, Asian and North African nationals and held them at Guantanamo Bay and numerous jails throughout the world, dressed them in orange suits and abused them, shown them on camera and on occasions have killed them – so too have the students. The US has used a policy of indiscriminate bombing to take out their enemies where innocents are killed – so too have the students. The US hand out leaflets, use video and TV and the Internet to persuade their enemies and supporters to change their mind or to surrender – so too have the students. The Taliban have mass leafleted in the coming Afghanistan elections.

    

Most decent humans, socialists and not, will be sickened by all this death and destruction reported daily on our TVs and in our newspapers. However, as socialists have been reporting to you in the Socialist Standard for 100 years, war and terrorism are simply bloody extensions to the everyday activities in capitalist society, whether for outdated concepts of national and cultural determinations of peoples, or the covert civil war in society – the battle for profits among companies, individuals and states. This brings into play labour, technology, cunning and deceit in a “commercial war” with others in the same business both within and beyond national borders, and may lead on to open military conflict using all the resources of a state. Not on every occasion does commercial war lead to military war, only when a vital interest is at stake (such as oil for the USA). Military war may proceed from a “trade war” where government-activated subsidy (to help their own side compete) and tariffs (to encumber their foreign competition) have failed to impress.

    

The eventual winners of this tussle in Iraq will do nothing for the workers there, or anywhere else. No matter the nationality of both the exploiter and the exploited, the result is the same. Iraqi Sunnis, Al-Qaeda, and the Mahdi Army forces, are capitalists in their world outlook and will just as willingly and as easily, as the US, employ violence against their own “cultural peoples” when profits and the very economic system is threatened by workers erroneously using violence. Workers cannot hope to win anything from war, commercial and military, or terrorism, and should organise themselves to disengage from these injurious capitalist activities. We should answer this university challenge for thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq which is played out daily on our TV, with a democratic and universal challenge to the backers of terrorism and their armies with our demands and campaign for the abolition of the wages system!

William Dunn

Tiny (URL) Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some women who were raped at the US’s Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq were later “honor killed” by their families, says a Jordanian reporter who writes on women’s issues. “In Abu Ghraib, women were tortured by the Americans much more than the men,” Lima Nabil told The Independent. “One woman said she witnessed five girls being raped. Most of the women in the prison were raped – some of them left prison pregnant. Families killed some of these women – because of the shame.” Nabil, who has reported extensively on the status of women in the Arab world and runs a home for runaway girls, made the comments to renowned foreign correspondent Robert Fisk in an article on honor killings in Jordan. Nabil did not expand on her comments in the article. Fisk reported that a “very accurate source in Washington” in close contact with military personnel has confirmed “terrible stories of gang rape” by US forces at the now-notorious prison:

[Dead Link]

Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland:

[Link]

The new “saddle” seat, to be unveiled at a conference this week, increases the number of seats an airline can have in its economy class. Shaped similar to a horse saddle, passengers sit at an angle, with their weight taken on by their legs. It allows seats to be overlapped. The seats would also offer storage space including a shelf for carry-on bags and hooks to hang a jacket or a handbag…The makers say the seat would allow budget airlines, such as Ryanair, to cram more passengers into their tight cabins:

[Link]

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary has for years endured complaints from passengers about his famously no-frills Irish airline. Now a senior Ryanair pilot has taken the rare step of publicly challenging his boss after the outspoken chief executive said he was trying to convince authorities to let his aircraft fly with only one pilot. A flight attendant could do the job of a co-pilot if needed, Mr O’Leary said last week, because “the computer does most of the flying now”. Captain Morgan Fischer, who trains other pilots at Ryanair’s Marseilles base, says he knows the airline is dedicated to keeping its costs as low as possible, so why not go one better – and replace Mr O’Leary with a junior flight attendant? “I would propose that Ryanair replace the CEO with a probationary cabin crew member currently earning approximately €13,200 net per annum,” Capt Fischer has written in a letter to the Financial Times, which reported Mr O’Leary’s comments last week. “Ryanair would benefit by saving millions of euros in salary, benefits and stock options,” the captain said, and there would be no need for approval from the authorities.

[Link]

September 11, 2001: reflections on a somewhat unusual act of war (2006)

From the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack on New York and Washington, we reflect on this act of war and try to place it in its true political and moral context.

As an act of war, the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre was somewhat unusual, though not unprecedented, in three respects. 

First, the method used was non-standard. Standard military practice is to blow things and people up by dropping bombs or firing shells and missiles on them. But flying planes right into the target has been done before. Japanese kamikaze pilots used the technique against US warships in the Pacific during World War Two.

Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor. Such actors rarely have the capacity to carry through such a complex and costly operation. Therefore al-Qaeda must have had financial backing from wealthy sponsors – Osama bin Laden himself comes from an extremely wealthy family – and the support, or at least complicity, of one or more powerful states. In general, arranging wars is a pastime for members of the capitalist class, though they get hirelings to do the dirty work for them. Working people don’t command the necessary resources.

Finally, it is a little unusual for the US to be on the receiving end of a military assault from abroad. For a comparable attack on the continental United States, you have to go back to 1814, when the British army entered Washington and burned down theWhite House and the Capitol.

In other ways the attack was not unusual in the least. As an atrocity it was par for the course. The death toll, initially estimated at 6,500, was later revised downward to about 2,800. Atrocities on a similar or larger scale are committed routinely by the US in other countries.

To take just one example, 3-4,000 civilians were killed in the invasion of Panama in December 1989. Even if we start the reckoning with September 11, we find that the US was quick to even the score. According to an independent study, 3,767 Afghan civilians (hardly any of them connected with al-Qaeda) had been killed in bombing raids by 6 December, 2001. This figure does not include the far more numerous indirect casualties resulting from the creation of refugees and the disruption of food and other supplies.

Betrayal

The attack should not have been a total surprise, a bolt out of the blue. After all, it was merely the next step in a war that Osama bin Laden had formally declared on the United States in August 1996. He had built up a far flung network of front companies, banks,”charities,” and NGOs (e.g., the World Union of Moslem Youth) to raise funds and recruit young fighters for the war. He had already attacked American assets abroad, notably the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, and there was ample intelligence warning that a major attack on US soil was in the offing. So the parallel with Pearl Harbor is pretty weak.

And yet September 11 clearly did come as a shock to Bush. That was because the attack came from forces that the US, its sidekicks Britain and Israel, and the Bush family in particular had long regarded as friends, allies and partners. This explains why Bush ignored the warnings – just as Stalin ignored warnings of impending attack by Nazi Germany in 1941 and felt “betrayed” by Hitler when the attack came American, British, and Israeli ruling circles saw the main threats to their economic and strategic interests in the Moslem world as coming from “communists” and secular nationalists backed by the Soviet Union (e.g. Nasser in Egypt, Ghaddafi in Libya, the PLO). When Khomeini’s theocracy took power, Iran was added to the list of enemies, together with associated Shi’ite Islamist movements in other countries. Sunni Islamist movements, however, were encouraged – largely on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” although also because they seemed more interested in imposing ritual conformity on their own communities and in fighting “communism” than in challenging the substantive interests of the “infidel” powers.

The Islamists were also beneficiaries of the “neo-liberal” economic policies of Western institutions. In Pakistan, for example, the secular state schools collapsed in the 1980s as a result of IMF-mandated public spending cuts. This left the Saudi-financed religious schools (madrassas) as the only educational option available to boys who were not from wealthy families. (Girls, needless to say, didn’t even have that option.) It was from these madrassas that the Taliban drew its recruits.

Moreover, relations with the leading Sunni Islamist power, Saudi Arabia, were and still are vital to Britain and the US in economic terms. The Saudi capitalist class, led by the royal family and influential families like the bin Ladens, not only sells these countries’ oil but uses much of the proceeds to buy arms from them and invest in their economies.

There are close and long-established personal and business ties between wealthy Saudis and British and American capitalists and politicians, including the father of the current US president and several members of his administration.

The Saudi-US alliance also entailed close military cooperation, above all in the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden went to Pakistan in 1979 as an official of the Saudi intelligence service to finance, organize, and control the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance in collaboration with the CIA. It was here that Osama, who had trained as an engineer and economist with a view to taking part in the family business, acquired his taste for war. 

Osama fell out with the Saudi royal family in 1991 when they allowed the US to set up military bases on the “holy” soil of Arabia following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But even in exile Osama received frequent visits from relatives, who provided a channel of communication between him and the royal family. An understanding appears to have been reached. Osama would abstain from attacking targets inside Saudi Arabia and in return no action would be taken against his Saudi supporters, who included various members of his own and of other wealthy families (such as Khalid bin Mahfouz, the “banker of terror”) and even certain royal princes. And the Saudi authorities did protect these people, refusing to provide US intelligence agencies with any information that might compromise them. 

So September 11 originated in a “betrayal” by the Saudi capitalist class of their American friends, allies and partners. How can we account for such strange ingratitude to those to whom they owe their vast riches? It probably has to do with the circumstances in which the Saudi capitalist class came into being. It did not make itself through independent entrepreneurial activity. It was made when oil was discovered in Arabia (in 1938) and property rights in that oil were vested in the pre-existing royal house. It is a class of bedouin patriarchs turned rentiers who became capitalists by investing their revenue. As a result, it retains to some extent a pre-capitalist mentality that it expresses in religious terms, and has a deeply ambivalent attitude to the capitalist world in which it now operates.

The endless “war on terror”

Despite the shock effect, US ruling circles did not necessarily regard September 11 as an unalloyed evil. In his book The New Crusade, anti-war analyst Rahul Mahajan draws attention to a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think tank with links to the Bush administration. The authors call for increased military spending to preserve US “global pre-eminence,” but add that such a programme will be politically impossible unless there is a “catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor”.

The purposes for which the fear generated by the al-Qaeda attack was exploited suggest that it filled this bill. The threat of “terrorism” has been used to push through military programs ranging from anti-missile defence to germ warfare. Thus, a vast lab is being built near Washington called the National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Center, where in violation of the 1972 biological and toxin weapons convention the most lethal bacteria and viruses are to be stockpiled (Guardian Weekly, 4-10 August, 2006). What a tempting target it will make for terrorist infiltration or attack!

The “war on terrorism” unleashed in the aftermath of September 11, against first Afghanistan and then Iraq, is not – so Mahajan argues – a war on terrorism, just as the “war on drugs” is not a war on drugs. Combating terrorism and drugs are both low priorities, and the “wars” against them are covers for the pursuit of higher-priority interests.

In Afghanistan the US had turned against the Taliban (previously welcomed as a force for “stability”), mainly because they were unwilling to host oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Pakistan, and was looking for a pretext to overthrow them. Capturing Osama was that pretext, for it was obvious that the chaos of war would create ideal conditions for him to escape.

Iraq was invaded to secure control over its oil and in the hope of establishing a new strategic beachhead in the Middle East. Saddam had no ties with Islamic terrorism, just as he had no nuclear weapons. To the likes of Osama he was not even a genuine Moslem. Bush demanded of his experts that they find ties between Iraq and terrorism; when they replied that there were none, he pretended not to hear and reiterated his demand. In October 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney declared that the war on terrorism”may never end — at least, not in our lifetime”(Washington Post, 21 October, 2001). Am I alone in finding this suspicious? Ordinarily in a war it is considered important for morale to hold out some prospect of victory, however remote. Does Cheney want and need the “war” to go on forever?

The torture system

To sustain the facade of the “war on terror” it is necessary to arrest lots of people. As there is no real evidence against them, they are held without trial in secret facilities throughout the world, where – like the victims of Stalin’s purges – they are tortured to extract the non-existent evidence. In her book The Language of Empire, Lila Rajiva describes for us the sickening tortures at Abu Ghraib, the prison complex outside Baghdad that the US occupation authorities took over from Saddam. The accounts and photos (some taken as exposés, others as souvenirs) are monotonous in their sameness. This is a clue: it strongly suggests that the torture is not a spontaneous practice of jailers and interrogators but a system designed by government experts and approved at the top.

The system goes by the code name R21 and is taught to British and American military intelligence personnel at the British Joint Services Interrogation Centre at Gilbertine Priory, Chicksands, near Bedford (Guardian, May 8, 2004). It is designed to shock Moslem cultural sensibilities. Victims are stripped naked and hooded, savaged by dogs, and forced under threat of beatings to masturbate and simulate sexual acts in front of sniggering female soldiers (another triumph for sexual equality). That’s just for starters, of course; it gets worse. I leave it to the reader to ponder what this means for the relative merits of Western and Middle Eastern “civilization.”

And yet the people who authorize all these horrors know very well who is responsible for terrorism (the Islamist variety, that is) and where they are to be found. But no bombs have been dropped on the wealthy suburbs of Riyadh. No scions of the bin Ladens and bin Mahfouz, no princes of the House of Saud have been stripped naked, set upon by dogs or sexually humiliated. That’s class justice for you! A few incidents, however regrettable, can’t be allowed to spoil British and American relations with a vital ally and business partner.

Stefan

Slings and Arrows: “Qui s’ecuse, s’accuse” (1952)

The Slings and Arrows column from the September 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Qui s’ecuse, s’accuse”

The return of the Dean of Canterbury from his recent visit to Peking has aroused an outburst of fury from the Press. Enormous quantities of newsprint have been devoted to the publication and denial of the germ warfare charges made against the Allied forces in Korea. While we have no doubt that both the Allies and the Chinese or any other warring power in the capitalist world would not hesitate to use germ warfare if it suited their interests, we would say that the Dean has not made out his case on sound evidence. We are not, however, concerned with taking up the cudgels on behalf of the Allied powers. They have quite enough apologists without our joining their ranks. What does interest us is the fact that those who drop atom bombs, and Napalm bombs, and indulge in the most fiendish forms of mass destruction, hold up their hands in such pious horror and appear in the white sheet of innocence. Is burning a Korean peasant by a bomb which is so speedy in its action that he retains in death the last postures of his life any better than dropping bacteria on him? Why does the Chinese Government and their supporters make such vehement protests against the use of infected missiles? Is it because they have been outsmarted in their search for effective weapons? Note that neither side has anything to say, other than the usual pious platitudes, about war itself, and note also that though the Chinese Government are alleged to have established Socialism, or, to use the latest fashionable term, “people’s democracy,” they say nothing about the causes of war. Of course, the allies talk about the “rule of law ” and “freedom and democracy,” in order to justify themselves. In the welter of charges and countercharges we may be sure of one thing. Both sides are concerned with maintaining or improving their position in the world of Capitalism.

No Room at the Inn

When Marx wrote that “the Church of England would sooner give up 38 of its 39 principles than one thirty-ninth of its income,” he was not indulging in mere rhetoric. The Daily Express (15.7.52), reporting a case of eviction relates how the family spent the night in a church, and although they refused to leave when asked to do so, church officials took no action. It appears that the householder had been the church sexton and occupied a house that went with the job. When he was unable through ill health to continue working he was asked to vacate his house. Having nowhere to go he did not comply and the Vicar applied for possession in the Courts. This was granted and with all the ruthlessness of a profit-making capitalist, he called in the bailiffs, evicted the family, and in his desire to show Christian Charity allowed them to sleep unmolested in the church. Non-socialists may be surprised that the Church should behave in such a callous manner. We are not. Acquainted as we are with the Church’s defence of Capitalism and its constant affirmation of the “sacred rights” of private property, this behaviour neither shocks nor amazes us. In spite of the high-sounding platitudes with which Bishops and their ilk sermonise, the Church has ever been in the forefront in defence of the prevailing system. It imitates with faithful accuracy the actions of those in whose interests it functions. And so, when they say to an ex-employee, “You are unable to work for us. so on to the streets with you,” they are being quite consistent, and behaving as all capitalist institutions do.

Who Supports Who?

In a debate in the House of Lords on the Housing Bill, Lord Silkin, former member of the Labour Government, observed that he was alarmed at the growth in the amount of subsidies and then went on to say that the position would arise where “90 per cent. of the people would be housed at other’s expense.” (Manchester Guardian, 15.7.52.) Why should Lord Silkin be disturbed at this prospect? Was it not part of his Party’s policy to “redistribute” income. As it has been established by indisputable figures that a small minority of people own the lion’s share of the national wealth, surely here was Lord Silkin’s opportunity to see in this housing subsidy a means of carrying out Labour’s policy. But he does not see things in this light. He says that it is a “National and not a Party problem.” Thus does he betray the fact that the Labour Party is merely another political organisation pledged to the efficient running of Capitalism. If he knew anything at all about Socialism he would realise that at the moment a small minority of people are being kept and subsidised at “other's expense.” If he knew anything at all about economics he would know that subsidies whether for housing or for food are devices introduced to help Capitalism run more smoothly, for the capitalists. It is not by subsidies, great or small, nor by the substitution of government for private ownership that present-day problems will be solved. And this situation where “90 per cent. of the people would be housed at the expense of others ” is hardly likely to arise since those who produce the wealth from which these subsidies are drawn are the very people who are allegedly subsidised.

S.A.

Quiz – Ten questions to answer (2003)

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

All these quotations are genuine comments, made by the people named – except that we have put in a single sentence in each interview what the person did not say. See if you can guess which is the made-up sentence we have put in.

1. Jack Straw, British Foreign Minister, speaking after a suicide bomb attack in Haifa which killed fifteen people (Times, 6 March): “There is no justification for attacks on innocent civilians. Except, of course, if we carry out the American generals’ plan to send 800 cruise missiles in to Baghdad in the first 48 hours of the planned war.”

2. Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s spokesman, speaking after the same attack in Haifa (Times, 6 March): “We will continue to pursue the path of peace in the Middle East. Except, that is, when we pursue the path of war against Iraq.”

3. Prince Philip (Observer, 29 December): “If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate how much more comfortable aircraft have become; that is, unless you travel on something called economy class, which sounds ghastly. Of course, most things about the lives of poorer people are ghastly, which is why it is so surprising that so many of them turn out at each election and vote for capitalism.”

4. Senior Vatican official (Observer, 29 December): “Illness is a consequence of sin. So the Pope is going to live for ever.”

5. Tony Blair (Times, 1 March): “At some point, you have a duty if you are to offer any leadership to your country in saying why it is we believe there is a real threat from terrorism and these appalling weapons to the security of our countries and to the wider world. Unless, of course, we had Socialism, when neither Iraq nor America nor Britain would have any appalling weapons, and there wouldn’t be any ‘leadership’ either, since people would be able to think and act for themselves.”

6. The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of Westminster, head of the Catholic Church in Britain (Times, 20 February): “It is vital, therefore, that all sides in this crisis engage through the United Nations fully and urgently in a process, including continued weapons inspections, that could and should render the trauma and tragedy of war unnecessary. An even better way to render not only this planned war but all future wars unnecessary – in fact, impossible – is to establish Socialism.”

7. President Bush (Eastern Daily Press, 19 February): “The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security – in this case, security of the people. And if you don’t like leaders, taking decisions which may kill thousands of innocent people, you could always get rid of them by having Socialism.”

8. In an opinion poll, 65 percent of people questioned in the UK (Times, 12 February) said that “although it is right in principle to accept genuine asylum-seekers, we have now accepted our fair share, and cannot accept any more. It is not as if any British people have ever gone to live in other countries, like Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on.”

9. The Pope (Times, 10 February): “One cannot do nothing in the face of terrorist attacks, but equally we cannot be idle in the face of the threats now on the horizon. War is not inevitable. But even if we avoid this war, there are plenty of violent conflicts round the world now as I speak, and there will be a lot of wars in the years to come – you will have to establish Socialism if you really want to make war impossible.”

10. Rezan Fakhraden, a woman badly gassed at the age of five, when Saddam Hussein dropped poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing over 5,000 civilians and injuring many more (Times, 22 February): “I cannot climb more than ten stairs. I cannot run. Sometimes my lungs bleed. I cannot stop coughing and I am often sick. I don’t trust Britain or America at all. They have said nothing about our plight due to the gases for fifteen years. They even supported Saddam then. We have received no medicines from Britain or America in all that time to help us, and now we have no more protection against chemical attack than we had then. Yet we may be the first to get struck. But, of course, hypocrisy is an essential characteristic of all capitalist politicians, including those now using the Halabja gassing to justify attacking Iraq.”

Answers: We have made up the last sentence, and only the last sentence, in each of these statements. All the other quotations on this page are genuine.

Score: 1 – 9: Keep trying. 10. You must have read the Socialist Standard before.

Alwyn Edgar

Letters: No opposition worth mentioning (1995)

Letters to the Editors from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

No opposition worth mentioning

Dear Editors,

Politics is the art or science of administration of affairs; and not the art or science of government as most people think, because the whole concept of government is thrown overboard by all serious students of politics ever since the law of social change was discovered in the middle of the last century.

The concept of "unfolding of productive forces" stands today unchallenged and unassailable; that is: factories, mills, workshops and farms in every country in the world are waiting ready to produce all we need abundantly; in other words, we have a potential plenty today. This is not at all a controversial issue; but only a fact acknowledged by all experts in the field of science and technology.

But why can’t we unfold these productive forces and produce all we need abundantly, and then distribute all over the world?

The real barrier to the unfolding is the lack of knowledge of a new alternative on the part of working people all over the world, and not the opposition of the owners of those productive forces as most people think. That was an old idea held by many in the early stage of the present economic set-up. in the last century, because democracy as we see it today had not developed then, i.e. universal franchise, freedom of speech, and the separation of the executive and the judiciary. After the development of democracy in its full form, it was taken for granted that any minority will be compelled to leave the scene on the emergence of a new majority, with any new idea.

In those days some groups, here and there, held that even an armed conflict is likely between working people and those owners of productive forces in order to defeat them. Now we are in an entirely new situation where we tragically fail to realise the simple truth that there is an alternative to the present way of living. Once this alternative is widely grasped by people everywhere, there is no question of any opposition worth mentioning.

Each and every reader is cordially invited to think over this matter very deeply on the line of discovering any new concrete proposal, which can be implemented in present-day society, through which we can break new ground from where we shall straightaway drive into a new set-up without buying and selling. and producing only for use. 

M. J. Panikkar, 

Kerala, India

Cardboard cut-outs and “collateral damage”

Dear Editors,

Remember the bellicose drum-beating of the Tory cabinet in the Gulf War; or the cheapjack nationalism of their lackeys in the right-wing press; or the American general like some grotesque cardboard cutout from MASH, talking of "collateral damage” in the bombings of women and children?

Of course it was in the interests of all those people in the UN to show illiteracy of our historical culpability in this region. This war was all about oil and less about justice: the little Mussolini still remains, savaging his own people—the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs.

The early 1920s and the British Empire reigns supreme. My late father recalled as a boy, after the First World War, the maimed and blinded veterans of the trenches begging in the streets of Watford. As one of a poor family with eight children, he enlisted at 18 in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. That was in September 1923. Scores of young men in towns throughout the land would have done the same—to face a life of harsh discipline, gruelling 25-mile route marches and abysmal pay of two shillings a day. to escape the crippling unemployment of those times.

In November 1924, the Bedfords were despatched to Iraq, the men travelling like cattle for two days in open trucks, with the bitter desert cold, arriving at the largest British aerodrome east of Suez.

Oil was being discovered in large quantities in Iraq and British military operations were being carried out with a planned and ruthless precision. Patrols of 60 men would guard the huge airfield and Rolls Royce armoured cars would race though villages, with rocks being hurled by the angry local people. In 1925 a Company of the Bedfords (2nd Battalion) became the world’s first airborne troops, when they were flown up to Kurdistan in Vickers Victoria bombers. Here they occupied a ruined fort captured from the Turks in World War One.

One day an order came to despatch a platoon of 36 men into the hills to punish a remote Kurdish village. The Desert Police who dressed like arabs and were a sort of archetypal SAS had alleged that the villagers had shot down a small bi-plane and tortured its geologist pilot to death. My late father was a heliograph signaller in this small punitive force, which by dawn on the third day’s march from the fort surrounded the village. No real resistance was made: yet the village was burned to the ground, hidden underground stores of grain and water destroyed, some men in the village were hung and women, children and old men were driven out into the hills. It was October 1925, with winter coming on. Back at the fort, a brigadier had been flown up from his safe office job and congratulated the platoon on their return, ending with the words: "in three months, that village will cease to exist”.

Those who dispute the authenticity of this engagement will doubtless find it documented in the archive material of the "Bedfords" regiment. More importantly, those who boast about the Gulf War might digest and reflect on with a little humility the incidents described here. As our historical stupidity in Ireland formed a security platform for the IRA, so former arrogance and greed in Iraq, aided by subsequent collusion in arms sales, sowed the seeds for the bullying rise of Saddam.

The incident described here is an extreme and nasty example of the sort of militarism which must have been commonplace enough throughout the colonial Empire—an unwholesome collusion between the thuggery of emerging multi-nationals and right-wing politicians—with the soldiers "at the sharp end" doing their dirty work for them. It is this same rapacious greed— fuelled by "market forces" thinking—which is allowing the extermination of indigenous peoples and millions of acres of rain forest. treasure houses of irreplaceable bio-diversity beyond mere price, which must be checked by sane people at the present day. 

John Sears, 

Egremont, Cumbria

Reply:

One point. It was not us workers who were responsible for bombing the Kurds. It was our ruling class. So it's their "historical culpability" not "ours".

Editors

Ernie rides again?

Dear Editors,

In reply to the Scavenger’s “Bimbos for Christ's sake!”, (February Socialist Standard) please would you print the following: "Scavengers for Christ’s sake!

Beer bellies and bald heads are currently the fashion for those men who give slobs a bad name. But now sexism is becoming fashionable too.

Men like Benny Hill and "The Scavenger" (still reactionary after all these years) have embraced a few dodgy assumptions and bared a few prejudices in their time. But now, apparently, they are embracing misogyny and baring their ignorance as well. Let's face it, it’s got to be true if the bigots believe it.

Veronica Clanchy, Kate Rigby, Ann Rigby,

Poole, Dorset

Reply:

We can assure you that The Scavenger is not a Benny Hill loving misogynist.

Editors

World view: Courting trouble (1998)

From the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

On numerous occasions in recent years, this journal has highlighted the shortcomings of world summits and conferences, revealing just what impotent set-ups they are when it comes to addressing issues of global importance. The Rome Conference, which concluded after five weeks of negotiations, giving preliminary approval to set up an international criminal court pursuing “the worst crimes in the world”, proved to be no exception.

After more than a month of intense debate, representatives of 160 states and 200 NGOs agreed, on 18 July, to a permanent global court charged with investigating and prosecuting crimes of genocide and aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the face of it, however, the newly-formed International Criminal Court (ICC) looks to have a precarious and somewhat dubious future.

While 120 votes for the implementation of the treaty carried the day, there were seven votes against the ICC. Although the vote went unrecorded, those that admitted to an objection were China, the USA and Israel (the latter two, interestingly, have sided alone on countless occasions against majority decisions at the UN). Those strongly suspected of opposition, while keeping schtum about the fact, include Libya, Algeria, and Yemen—the type of company you’d hardly expect the US and Israel to keep!

Many have argued that the ICC is flawed from the start. US Senator Jesse Helms announced it would come into effect over his dead body and US Ambassador, and delegate to the Rome Conference, David Scheffler announced that the US would “actively oppose” the court from its inception (Guardian, 15 July). The US had hoped its military forces would get immunity for their actions overseas, but the conference was having none of it. The US was of course all too aware that past instances of US aggression—the invasion of Panama and Grenada, the bombings of Libya, the mass bombing of Laos and Cambodia etc.—could mean officials all the way up the chain of command being called to account. And it doesn’t take much reasoning to work out why so much hope was pinned on US acceptance of the court—they after all have a bigger say in global affairs than any other country.

Further restraints and loopholes make one wonder why the court was set up at all. The use of nuclear weapons, for instance, is not to be judged a “war crime”—something India’s delegates vehemently argued against—and Gulf states reserve the “right” to use chemical and biological weapons. Suddenly, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s words that “the victims of past crimes and potential victims are watching us; they will not forgive us if we fail” sound hollow.

Whether or not the ICC will ever become operational is anyone’s guess. For one thing, it can only come into existence once the treaty has been ratified by 60 countries and some delegates have suggested this may take up to five years. Undoubtedly, those countries known for their human rights abuses will be reluctant to sign up. Moreover, a further ICC clause means that the court is powerless to act if a crime is committed in the same country as the perpetrator.

One is left wondering why thunderous applause greeted conference chairman Canadian Phillippe’s remarks that “we cannot let ourselves destroy the essentials of an international criminal court that gives hope to the entire world” (Observer, 19 July).

For a century now, the world has tried to codify war—to attempt to bring in etiquette in the art of murder—The Hague (1899 and 1907), Nuremberg and Tokyo (1945-6), Geneva (1949) and up to the tribunals that followed conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda. Yet for all these attempts at curbing bellicosity, the 20th Century will end with 220 millions having lost their lives through war in the previous 100 years and we will enter the 21st Century with more weapons of mass destruction stockpiled than at any other time in our history.

And would an ICC trial bring the dead back? No. No more than Nuremberg did; no more than Tokyo prevented further atrocities.

Surely those five hot weeks spent in Rome could have been better used finding out what causes war, indeed the cause of other crimes against humanity, looking for the real villain of the peace?

For is the capitalist system not guilty? Does its profit-driven market-oriented logic not cause war? Does it not allow millions to die of starvation while food is destroyed? Does 13 million children dying from curable diseases each year not amount to a genocide? Is global poverty in the face of the means for abundance not a crime against humanity? Yes! A thousand times yes.

And it is we, the world’s working class, all of us victims in some way, who are the jury that must try the present order. For humanity’s sake, we must find capitalism guilty, with no recommendation of mercy.

John Bissett