Greasy Pole: The Thick of It (2010)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundant evidence of how a grateful nation unstintingly cares for its military heroes as they return, too often less than complete, from the battlefields has been supplied by Defence Minister Kevan Jones. Anyone who in combat in Afghanistan is unlucky enough to lose their penis – shot off, blown to pieces, burnt away – can put in a claim for compensation which might amount to £9,000. As expected of a properly prudent minister of the crown, Jones made it clear that such generosity applies only when the entire organ is lost; in cases of lesser damage, when “partial use” remains, the payment will be something under £3,000. Naturally such claims will have to originate with the appropriate form, signed and witnessed by a suitably qualified person. No doubt supporting evidence will be required. Then the claim will be processed through an appointed panel of specialists in the regular stream of applications for council tax relief, job seekers allowance, home carers…

Cenotaphs

We have, in fact, been here before. After the guns had fallen silent in 1918 the then government did their best to live up to the infamous Lloyd George promise about post-war Britain being a Place Fit For Heroes To Live In by making payments to survivors of the horrors who had left bits of themselves out on the battlefields. Perhaps Kevan Jones learned something from this for the 1918 compensation was carefully calculated with an appropriate scale of payments – so much for a missing hand, a bit more for an arm above the elbow, more again for above the elbow and the same kind of arrangement applying to missing legs. It was thought prudent to make an exception for anyone with a mangled head or face – nothing would be paid for any damage above the neck. This was done in accordance with regulations made in the safety of the Commons to be implemented by bureaucrats in their offices; in neither place was anybody likely to lose any limbs. It conformed to sound actuarial principles, taking into account that a lot of injuries “above the neck” would effectively deprive a potential claimant of any lasting interest in compensation, or of the need for any recognition of their plight other than a place on the local war memorials which were already being designed up and down the country (Edwin Lutyens had quickly drawn on the back of an envelope a rough sketch for a temporary Cenotaph, made of wood and plaster, for London). But never mind – it was, after all, the thought that mattered.

Chilcott

A natural response would be, in bewildered rage, to consign the episode to a file marked Madness. Except that this does nothing towards unravelling the matter. We are compelled to deal with a social system which does not just tolerate the insanity of war but actually nurtures it as the most rational available way of purging itself of certain problems. As the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war – there have already been two others, both of them predictably unrewarding and dishonest – is already informing us, capitalism needs to be a society of conflicts, driven by a momentum of its own which is lubricated by a disregard of inconvenient facts. Infuriatingly, we need to accept that the mass of capitalism’s people – who fight in the wars, willing to be maimed and killed – readily comply with and justify the entire disreputable chaos. It is almost as if nothing more is expected of a system which shows itself capable of massive human progress were it not hampered by the priorities of property; all that is demanded is that the dead are disposed of with due ceremony and the wounded are compensated according to an official scale.

Government

And for all of this there is always the essential machinery of government – that organ which millions of its subjects vote for under the impression that thereby they are ensuring a benevolent eye will watch over their welfare. Supposedly fulfilling this function are the ministers and secretaries of state on one level after another down to the achingly ambitious bag carriers and beyond, whose function persuades them to be in love with the protection of their protocol, its systemic committees and pressure groups where back-stabbing is an essential way of life. One who was until recently employed in the service of this odious machinery – so devotedly that when he retired he was rewarded with a gleaming medal to hang on his chest from a dazzling ribbon – needs very little encouragement to lift a corner of the shrouded mysteries of what is called democratic government. A minister’s special adviser by trade, he recalls that if his boss was being harassed by too persistent a straggle of complainants his confidential advice would be to surprise them with an offer of a personal hearing when he could make any needful promises, to be ignored once the other side had gone trustingly on their way. This kind of tactic is possible because a government has a more enduring energy than the most stubborn of protesters, whose pre-occupation must be with getting their living.

Tucker 

Some flavour of this nauseous brew was the theme of the recent TV series The Thick Of It – the conflicting ambitions, the manipulation, the treachery…We should not be unduly influenced in our response to the series by it being too flagrantly a caricature, particularly in the odious spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (who will probably end up in the House of Lords).Tucker had to learn to communicate through unrelenting abuse to defend and assert himself and his career; it was just that he was more determined, more colourful, than the others. The affairs of capitalism must be conducted to meet its nature as a society – as abrasively as demanded by the privileges of class monopoly. It is in this process that predators such as Malcolm Tucker come to the surface.. And a lot more – the wars, the contemptuous treatment of the victims, the deception and cynicism with which it is all defended. Nothing can compensate us for this.

Ivan

Pieces Together: A Frightening World (2010)

The Pieces Together column from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A Frightening World

“It is Europe’s dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those that have built their own weapons – Britain, France and Russia. The truth is that Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands store nuclear bombs on their air-force bases and have planes capable of delivering them. There are an estimated 200 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs scattered across these four countries. Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in time of conflict. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear war” 

(Time, 4 January).

The Oil Invasion

“British companies have benefited from the award of oil contracts in Iraq because of the decision to help to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Gordon Brown’s chief foreign policy adviser told the Chilcot inquiry yesterday. Simon McDonald said British companies had “done pretty well” in a recent auction of oil rights and that Britain had “privileged access” to the Government of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister” 

(Times, 6 January).

Merchants of Death

“Two UAE orders for military helicopters and guided bombs capped a remarkable year for procurement in which the Emirates became the largest foreign purchaser of US defence equipment, a Pentagon agency said. The UAE, which has peacekeepers in Afghanistan, awarded Sikorksy Aircraft a US$171 million (Dh628m) contract for 14 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which are used for tactical transport. Separately, the US defence security co-operation agency, a unit of the Pentagon, said last week it had notified Congress of a potential sale of enhanced guided bomb units, parts, training and support to the UAE for about $290m. The same agency said in November that in the last fiscal year the UAE became the largest foreign purchaser of US defence equipment with sales of $7.9bn, ahead of Afghanistan ($5.4bn), Saudi Arabia ($3.3bn) and Taiwan ($3.2bn)” 

(The National, 2 January).

Greasy Pole: Hoon or Buffoon? (2010)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

It may not have been too clear to him, in those anxious days when he was wheedling his fellow Labour MPs to consign Gordon Brown to a future spending more time with his memoirs, but Geoff Hoon was not alone. One of the many ways in which the Labour Party is not unique is that its history is cluttered with such plots which failed through a crucial hesitation to dispose of a leader who is sheltering behind the ramparts of Number Ten. The problem for the plotters – as it was for Hoon and Patricia Hewitt – was that they could not argue that their leader was responsible for unacceptable levels of poverty, sickness, massive casualties in war; instead they had to rely on the single calculation about electoral liability. If Brown was able to show that the majority of workers will still vote Labour in spite of all the stresses they have to face there would simply not be grounds for conspiring to change the leadership. As it is, Hoon was left to argue that he has the ideas to make him more attractive electorally than Brown. So how does he match up to this?

To begin with – Hoon or Buffoon? A rigidly principled, sacrificial leader inspired by an all-dominating obsession with human welfare? Or another one of those tiresome temporary left-wingers who in their youthful exuberance traded on the assumption that within the universal horrors of capitalism there is a simple remedy – trust them with the power to socially massage us with those uncomplicated policies which sounded so convincing at Labour Party conferences but which are always rather more complex in what turns out to be practice? According to a Diary item in the Guardian of 8 January an old associate of Hoon’s, an MEP with him in 1984, recalls where he fitted in then: “His reputation was that of a smart arse know-all…He would use other people’s faces as a stepladder to get what he wanted”.

Slick Lawyer 

In the beginning Hoon had a lot going for him; the son of a railwayman he was the first person in his family to go to university – to Cambridge to study law – then a lecturer in law at Leeds University during which time he qualified as a criminal barrister. Years later his fellow Labour MP Chris Mullin could comment that “. . . everyone knows that, like all slick lawyers, he could make the opposite case with equal dexterity”. Thus usefully equipped he followed his time as an MEP by election to the Commons and in 1999 his first big job as Minister of Defence. Perhaps too big, for his time in that office was notable for the attack on Iraq and all the lies, betrayals and bigotry which are yet again being glimpsed, painfully and bitterly, in the Chilcott Enquiry. How did Hoon deal with the pillage, savagery and fear in that desperate place?

In tune with the other cowed dummies on the Labour benches front and back he satisfied himself with a robotic insistence that, whatever the facts the invasion was necessary because Iraq had developed weapons which under the control of Saddam Hussein, were an immediate threat to other countries. On the BBC Breakfast With Frost on 2 February 2003 he asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which “. . . present a real threat not only . . . to the people of Iraq and surrounding regions . . . but also to the safety and security of the world”. On 23 June 2003 he stated in a Written Answer to the Commons that two trailers had been observed in Iraq which were mobile weapons laboratories. In fact information had been passed to weapons inspectors and to Dr. David Kelly, the scientist whose death later in that year remains a source of menacing controversy, that the trailers were for inflating hydrogen balloons to be used in artillery ranging and had been sold to Iraq by the British company Marconi.

Cluster Bombs

When it was suggested to him in an interview on BBC Radio 4 that an Iraqi mother whose child had been killed by one of the hundreds of cluster bombs which had been dropped there might not thank the British army Hoon dismissed the matter: “One day they might.” In October 2001, commenting on civilian casualties in the invasion of Afghanistan Hoon boasted about “the astonishing accuracy of the bombing” and when he was asked how it came about that in the small hamlet of Kumar as many as a hundred people had been killed he brushed the question aside as Kumar was “…not a village in any normal sense of the word”.

But “astonishing accuracy” was not a phrase used by Hoon when he was under pressure to explain some apparent discrepancies in his expense claims. These claims were completed, in a manner by now familiar, with a keen regard for detail with the popular “flipping” between one home and another but in this case with some individual embellishments. For example putting in a variety of claims for a whole year in advance for a home in Derbyshire (his constituency is at Ashfield) before stating that another house was his second home. For example when he was allocated – for security purposes – a luxurious rent-free grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House he let out his other home in London which, as he had registered it as his main home, he had been allowed to claim for. When these affairs came to light Hoon said it had all been caused by an “inadvertent overlap in bill payments” or an “inadvertent administrative error”. Amid rumours of a possible police investigation he repaid £384.

Memorial

Last October, as a former Defence Secretary, Hoon joined other callous and ruthless cynics from what are known as the great and the good at St. Paul’s Cathedral in a memorial service for the British service men and women killed in Iraq. It was a typically cruel display of the contempt in which the working class, who do the fighting and dying at such times, are held by their rulers. And Hoon, in case anyone had any wrong ideas about what was happening in that cathedral, and about what had happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and in all the other outrages in 21st century capitalism, contributed by checking his mobile phone during the service. There is, unhappily, no reason to hope that he received the kind of message which he and the others deserved.

Ivan

Sanctions: Waging war without bullets (2019)

From the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Western powers promote sanctions as an alternative to war, holding that if sanctions can impose costs that exceed the benefits of objectionable policies of another country, there will be a change of those policies and if the targeted government declines to change, the affected population will protest, forcing their government to change. Economic sanctions are viewed as a useful tool to apply pressure on another country to mend its ways or as a punitive measure for its behaviour which avoids outright war. No matter how devastating the detrimental effects on the economy and the civilian population, sanctions are not as successful as claimed in achieving its objectives.

Who now recalls the cost on ordinary people of the UN-imposed sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq? Who remembers when the then US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, was asked, ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright answered, ‘we think the price is worth it’. The half million figure has since been judged as inflated but at the time it was seen as a credible figure.

Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator, resigned after a 34-year career explaining he no longer wished ‘to be identified with a United Nations that is… maintaining a sanctions programme …which kills and maims people through chronic malnutrition… and continues this programme knowingly’, saying ‘I don’t want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide’. Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, subsequently also resigned in protest, calling the effects of the sanctions a ‘true human tragedy’. The resignation of Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, soon followed, stating, ‘I fully support what Mr von Sponeck was saying. It is a true humanitarian tragedy what is happening here and I believe any human being who looks at the facts and the impact of the sanctions on the population will not deny that he is right.’ Agam Hasmy, Malaysia’s UN Ambassador, remarked at the UN Security Council in 2000 ‘How ironic is it that the same policy that is supposed to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction has itself become a weapon of mass destruction!’ Throughout history, starvation and disease have killed more people than all other weapons of war.

Too often sanctions are applied to soften up a foe and is a precursor of war. Sanctions can even be used as a justification for war such as when Tony Blair, in his testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry, argued that ending the sanctions was one of the benefits of the war.

Economic warfare has been part and parcel of conflicts since time immemorial with city sieges and naval blockades. We can date economic sanctions back at least to the Megarian decree of Athens in 435 BC, before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. But later we had the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars, the American long-enforced trade embargo on Cuba and the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Presently there are sanctions against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. This article is not concerned about bans on financial transactions of named individuals but those that inflict suffering on the general population. Sanctions are viewed as an instrument of diplomacy, designed to pressure and to undermine a ruling regime. The purpose of sanctions is to cause a breakdown in the fabric of civil society.

On 23 March 2018, the Human Rights Council condemned unilateral coercive measures by a vote of 28 in favour, 15 against and 3 abstentions, because economic sanctions created economic crises, disrupted the production and distribution of food and medicine, and resulted in refugees.

Alfred De Zayas, a former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council, has said ‘Sanctions kill’ and that they fall most heavily on the poorest people. ‘Modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns with the intention of forcing them to surrender. Twenty-first-century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees. A difference, perhaps, is that twenty-first-century sanctions are accompanied by the manipulation of public opinion through “fake news”, aggressive public relations and a pseudo-human rights rhetoric so as to give the impression that a human rights “end” justifies the criminal means’ (LINK).

Siege economy

John Pilger’s conclusion was that the sanctions were ‘One of the greatest acts of aggression: the medieval siege of Iraq.’

Patrick Cockburn wrote on the sanctions affecting Syria: ‘Economic sanctions are like a medieval siege but with a modern PR apparatus attached to justify what is being done. A difference is that such sieges used to be directed at starving out a single town or city while now they are aimed at squeezing whole countries into submission. An attraction for politicians is that sanctions can be sold to the public, though of course not to people at the receiving end, as more humane than military action. There is usually a pretence that foodstuffs and medical equipment are being allowed through freely and no mention is made of the financial and other regulatory obstacles making it impossible to deliver them’ (LINK).

The difficulty in processing SWIFT transactions, the banking system’s clearing house for international money transfers, has hindered the import of medicines and other necessities so many of the biggest pharmaceutical companies refuse to do business with the country.

The Spanish economist Alfredo Serrano, head of the Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica, drew attention to the reluctance of banks to process Venezuelan international transactions, creating an obstacle in obtaining insulin and other medicines such as anti-retroviral and anti-malaria drugs.

The Lancet medical journal reported in July 2018 that sanctions against Iran jeopardised cancer patients and cancer research.

Sanctions have a snowballing effect. Foreign businesses, fearing they might unknowingly cross a line into impermissible activities, prefer to shy away even from authorised trade. Transaction costs particularly related to food and medicine escalate, while access to foreign currency to trade has diminished. Sanctions lead to unprecedented levels of inflation and spikes in the price of basic goods like milk and vegetable oil.

Sanctions can and do kill the innocent. Sanctions rarely harm the decision-makers but have caused extreme hardship to those who are the weakest, the most vulnerable and the least political. Members of the elite with greatest access to government privileges are best positioned to survive and can even thrive. Under the sanctions, there are those who are savvy enough to exploit others’ deprivation for a profit. They function as middlemen and brokers becoming wealthy. Smuggling and clandestine networks arise and result in a shadow economy in which corrupt officials are fully complicit.

Between 1945 and 1990, the UN had imposed sanctions only twice but now sanctions are being imposed with increasing frequency, with the United States either the key player in instigating them or taking the initiative by imposing its own sanctions unilaterally. The United States uses its global economic power as leverage to pressure other nations into compliance with its sanction policies. The United States has the sovereign right to refuse to enter into commerce with other states, but not to exercise pressure on third-party states in order to harm their targets, and attempting to do this is a violation of the United Nations Charter. But as always ‘might is right.’

Obvious Vengeyi from the University of Zimbabwe makes a direct comparison with siege warfare:

  ‘The desperate conditions that the besieged populations of Samaria and Jerusalem were exposed to are similar to what Zimbabweans experienced as a result of sanctions… Similar to the sieges of Samaria and Jerusalem therefore, the Western siege of Zimbabwe through economic sanctions affected the ordinary people more than the so-called targeted individuals… As the military siege on Samaria and Jerusalem, Western sanctions were imposed on the ordinary people of Zimbabwe. The intention was to starve the ordinary people of Zimbabwe in order for them to vote out the ruling party… The logic was to incapacitate the state to provide basic services to the ordinary people in order to instigate a revolt against the government… As observed with ancient Near Eastern military strategy of siege, this is usually the intention of the besieging aggressor; to create tensions in the besieged society in order to weaken it’.

Collective sanctions

There exists a glaring anomaly. It is illegal in war-time, a violation of the Geneva Convention e.g. the 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibit any wartime measure that has the effect of depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to its survival; Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in wartime, for example, prohibits ‘collective penalties’. Yet under peace-time conditions economic sanctions are perfectly valid. Economic sanctions inflict collective punishment upon ordinary people when they have no connection to or control over the actions of the government whose actions have led to them being punished. Sanctions are inherently anti-humanitarian. As in siege warfare, it is the population and those least responsible for the state’s action – children, the elderly, the sick – who bear the worst consequences. When countries are called ‘rogue states’ or ‘the axis of evil’, Western countries proceed to put economic sanctions on them. But the victims are invariably the common people and not the ruling dictator they have been complaining about – whether it was Saddam Hussein then or Assad or Kim Jong-Un now.

Economic sanctions imposed on authoritarian regimes often fail to bring about the political change they are meant to create even though the people had to bear the pain of sanctions.

Lee Jones, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, stated that according to the accepted figure, sanctions succeed in about one third of instances. But a political scientist, Robert Pape, looked at these figures and argued that often the outcome was not caused by sanctions; it was caused instead by domestic insurgencies or by military threats, and if you take away those cases, then sanctions only succeed in fewer than 5 percent of cases. The ‘success’ story of South Africa is often cited to show that sanctions can work yet many commentators have suggested that the end of apartheid was due to internal political movements as much as to international sanctions. Politicians employ economic sanctions despite the evidence that they do not work – simply because the cost of military action is too high a price to pay. Cheaper to incite the civil population to revolt by driving them to take desperate measures.

It is generally accepted that you should not be a judge in your own case; that the law must be clearly stated, and consistently applied; that individuals can only be punished for their acts, not their nature or their potential acts. However, states interpret and impose the law as they wish, without restraint. This means that a whole population is harmed with the approval of ‘international law’. Sanctions imposed on a whole nation share all the characteristics of siege warfare such as blurring the distinction between the battlefield and by-standers, engulfing civilians in the violence of war through the destruction of society’s infrastructure. Those who defend sanctions share the same belief as a kidnapper who refuses food and water to his victim because the victim’s family declines to pay the ransom demand. The siege tactic  deliberately targets a civilian population with fatal consequences by withholding supplies and starving them yet it is a form of warfare which is considered legal and acceptable.

ALJO

Terrorism and War: Is There Any Difference? (2016)

From the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We say terror is terror whether unofficial and illegal terrorism or legalised state-sponsored terrorism through conventional warfare.

Since the turn of the century, rarely has a day gone by where there are no terror related stories in the news. Whether it is the Taliban, Al-Qaida or Islamic State, the perceived threat of terrorism against the United Kingdom has always appeared to be a real and ongoing danger to our lives. Whilst such media stories use the term ‘terrorism’ rather freely, they do so with no clear definition of what terrorism actually is. Such is the perception, exacerbated by tabloid news outlets, many individuals could be forgiven for believing that the majority of terrorist acts are committed by those of a radical Islamist background. However, the reality lies deeper than just Islamic State.

Trying to find a definition for terrorism is not easy, as there are a number of differing perspectives of what terrorism truly is. The official government definition in the United Kingdom can be found in the Terrorism Act of 2000, a summary of which is given as;

 ‘The use or threat of the action of violence against a person, serious damage to property, endangerment to a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the action), or serious interference with an electronic system, where the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public and the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.’

This definition can certainly be linked to Islamist terrorist acts such as 9/11, 7/7, and the recent surge of attacks in Paris, but the general interpretation of this definition fails to acknowledge such acts committed by a state. Violent government responses to the threat of terrorism have been commonplace throughout history, with the wars in Iraq and airstrikes in Syria being recent examples. These have been framed as ‘counter-insurgency’ operations as part of the ‘war on terror’, despite involving acts identical in nature to those committed by radical Islamist terrorists.

The only significant difference between the acts of ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-insurgency’ is their purpose. Whilst groups such as Islamic State are pushing the ideals of radical Islam, capitalist governments from states such as Britain and the United States strive to achieve a change of government in countries which stand in the way of them pursuing their interests. To disguise the real aim, the American military is said to have been forced to rename their operations in Iraq from ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’ to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, due to fears of suspicious glances towards the acronym OIL.

It is also an expression of the globalisation mentioned by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the constant requirement for accumulation of capital resulting in the need for capitalism to spread everywhere: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’

Whilst the threat of terrorism often haunts a conflicted society like capitalism, the heightened media coverage inflates the issue. This fear-mongering allows the state a justification for military action. For the media, any politically or religiously influenced violent act perpetrated by opponents of a capitalist state is defined as terrorism, while the violent acts committed by capitalist states are praised as ‘fighting terror’. This confirms the view of the early 20th century Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger, that acts are only defined as criminal when the resulting damage is to capitalist interests. Violent and destructive state intervention is not regarded as criminal as it is aimed at defending the interests of the ruling class and capitalism as a whole.

Bonger’s theory was also confirmed by the Chilcot report released earlier this year. Despite the decision of Tony Blair to go to a war with Iraq being illegal under international law, no criminal charges have been bought, in spite of the 500,000 civilian lives that were lost as a result of this action. All that the report finds on this is that ‘the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted’.

Clearly there are double standards applied when it comes to defining what a terrorist is, with the media choosing to marginalise a single group of people and to turn a blind eye to what the political elite in charge of the state does. However, it is not the current definition itself of terrorism that is problematic, but the interpretation of it by an international media platform owned by rich capitalists expressing the viewpoint of the rest of the ruling class.

William Horncastle

Tony Blair and the Chilcot inquiry (2010)

From the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does it matter whether the Iraq War was legal or illegal?

Socialists are opposed to war because under capitalism wars are always about capitalist access to sources of raw materials, markets, trade routes, investment outlets or strategic points and places to control these. The Iraq War was clearly about oil, mainly about the threat that the regime there posed to oil supplies to Western capitalism from the nearby Gulf States but also about establishing military bases there to control access to Caspian Sea as well as Gulf oil.

So it was a capitalist war but was it an ‘illegal’ war? The concept of an illegal war only came in following the defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War when it was applied retrospectively to the leaders of the losing side and incorporated into the UN Charter. Before that, states simply went to war whenever some vital capitalist interest was deemed to be at stake.

The UN Charter outlaws all wars unless authorised by its Security Council except wars of self-defence including coming to the defence of an attacked state. Thus the Korean War was a ‘legal’ war because decided by the Security Council. America declared the Vietnam War legal under the self-defence clause. In fact, the US doesn’t really care what the UN Charter says and, as now by far the strongest military power in the world, doesn’t need to.

On Iraq, the US government had decided to invade and topple Saddam whatever the other members of the UN Security might think, putting its allies under pressure to decide whether or not to join in this. The evidence to the Chilcot inquiry has revealed that Blair said in effect to Bush “Britain will go along with whatever America decides”.

As the Prime Minister of a Labour government Blair couldn’t take the same cavalier attitude to the UN as the Bush administration. After all, the Labour Party had long posed as the champion of the UN. So, once the decision to wage war on Iraq together with America had been taken, the search for a ‘legal’ basis in international law had to go on alongside the military preparations.

The government’s lawyers advised that “regime change” would not be legal as the UN Charter didn’t allow this as a reason to go to war (not surprisingly as there are so many unsavoury regimes represented there). That left Iraq’s apparent refusal to abide by a previous UN Resolution instructing it to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction. The government’s spin-doctors played this for all it was worth The media went along with this, publishing a map of the Eastern Mediterranean showing the British military base in Cyprus within range of the WMDs Iraq was supposed to possess (just in case the ‘self-defence’ clause might have to be invoked). It later turned out of course that no such weapons existed.

Faced with Blair’s determination and the ongoing military preparations for invasion, the poor Attorney General had no alternative but to come up with some legal basis, however flimsy. And he duly did (apparently a previous UN Security Council Resolution allowed any State that fancied it to invade Iraq). Blair then used this to get agreement to the war through his Cabinet (only former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned) and Parliament (only 149 voted against, with 412, Tories as well as Labourites, with blood on their hands) in time to fit in with the US military‘s timetable. And the war was on.

The whole business of finding a legal basis was a charade. The UN Charter is just a scrap of paper which has never stopped, and never will stop, any war. Its only effect has been to make governments that want to go to war find some loophole somewhere to wage a war they had decided on anyway.

Another interesting, and perhaps surprising, revelation of the Chilcot inquiry has been that the demand for legal cover came not just from those who believed in the illusion of an “ethical” foreign policy, but also from the chiefs of the armed forces. It was unlikely that they were afraid of ending up before a war crimes tribunal as the war was won before it even started. What it showed was that they had qualms about setting the killing machine in motion illegally, so confirming that in Britain the military is subordinate to the civilian government.

Blair’s miscalculation was to lead Britain into a war that had very little popular support. He is on record as justifying this on the grounds that leaders must lead by sometimes taking unpopular decisions. It is quite true that governments must do this. This is because they are governing a class-divided society on behalf of one of the classes – the capitalist class – which often requires them to take action against the interest of the other class – the majority wage and salary working class. Wage restraint is one. Going to war is another.

People were right to oppose the war, but the sound basis on which to oppose it is that it was a capitalist war rather than that it was an ‘illegal’ war. Even if the UN had provided a legal cover for it, it would still have been a capitalist war and should still have been opposed. No war for capitalist ends can justify the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.

Adam Buick