Lies, half-truths and weapons of mass destruction (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, September 4, 2002

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” George Bush, March 18, 2003

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.” Kenneth Adelman, US Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003

“Saddam’s removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction.” Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

In the months leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Blair regimes produced reams of documents to prove Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam could realistically fire them within 45 minutes. As they geared up for war they reiterated time and again that their intention was solely to rid Iraq of its WMD and make the world a more stable place for decent and god-fearing people to live in. They campaigned long and hard for their war – for the support of their peers in governments and for the backing of the US and British electorates and, convinced they had the mandate for war, invaded Iraq in March. Two months after the end of the fighting no “illegal” weapons have been found and the odds of finding any diminish greatly as the days go by.

The recent admission from a British security chief that the 50-page “intelligence” report on Iraq’s WMD presented by Tony Blair to Parliament on 24 September last year – and used as the Labour government’s evidence for Iraq’s illicit weapons inventory – was spiced up on the government’s instructions came as no real surprise for those who have scrutinised the unfolding of the US-UK war with Iraq and the Labour government’s desperation to be part of it. Since the transatlantic plan to invade Iraq was hatched it was apparent that Truth would again be the First Casualty of War.

For their part, the CIA and their British counterparts have tried to distance themselves from their respective governments these past few weeks, with unprecedented briefings and leaks to the press, desperate to avoid the backlash that has lead to some serious questioning in London and Washington.

On a visit to Poland on 30 May, Tony Blair told a press conference that finding the weapons in Iraq was “not the most urgent priority”. And yet, according to the claims of the dossier that he defends, Saddam Hussein “has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability” and that his “current military planning specifically envisages the use” of these weapons. For months we had the Blair government ramming the WMD issue down our throats, pleading for our support for his war with Saddam, who threatened the civilisation we cherished. Yet as Saddam and his military top brass, who presumably know about these WMD, which are yet to be found, are still on the run we are told that finding the weapons is not an urgent priority!

Also now discredited by the CIA is the evidence US Secretary of State Colin Powell eagerly displayed to the UN Security Council at the beginning of February. Powell provided explicit particulars of the key players in Iraq’s WMD programme as well as the sites that are now under US military control. Nevertheless, the biologically-armed “missile brigade”, which he claimed was situated outside Baghdad has proved to be a figment of his imagination and the weapons scientists he informed the world were afraid of talking because of Saddam’s reach have not yet disclosed any secrets. As with the alleged “poison camp” near Khurmal, its labyrinth of tunnels and complex chemical communication network, so too with the photos of twenty or so Baghdad-based al-Qa’ida members the UN was presented with. No evidence whatsoever.

In spite of every quality newspaper demanding answers from him in the wake of the secret services admission, Blair, it seemed, was learning nothing. Rather than running for cover he began blurting more lies, claiming that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the African state of Niger. The documentary evidence this fresh allegation was based on has since been confirmed as forgery by the International Atomic Energy Authority. Indeed, the Bush administration was aware that this evidence was bogus a year earlier – something Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have since admitted. Moreover, early last year Vice President Dick Cheney sent a former US ambassador in Africa to Niger look into the story. Although the latter brought back word that the documents were not genuine, this was not sufficient to prevent the use of these documents as part of Bush’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

The sorry situation becomes more pathetic. US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld has lately offered that the reason Saddam’s WMD can’t be found is because they were destroyed before the war started. In other words the US-Britain invaded Iraq to rid the region of weapons Saddam never had and indeed that Saddam claimed he never had and which the UN weapons inspectors suggested he never had. If this was the case, then Saddam could never have been in breach of the famous resolution 1441, which was the justification for war.

Critics might consider that in light of recent revelations Blair should resign and that Bush should be impeached. Surely politicians should not be allowed to lie like this! But hold on.

Lying is the trade of politicians under capitalism.

Back in 1925, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “This broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Blair and Bush are fully aware of the power of the big lie, so little wonder they thought they could get away with it. Moreover they are fully aware their support base swallows lies every living moment of the day. For the workers’ part they are lied to from the cradle to the grave: at school with distortions of history and the myth about a God up above; in the workplace, as producers, lied to by their bosses and at home as consumers bombarded with the myths perpetuated by the advertising industry.

To be sure, the entire capitalist edifice depends for its continued survival on the promotion of lies, half truths and the distortion of facts. So powerful is the capitalist distortion machine that it takes all our powers of concentration, memory recall and skills of research just to separate the simplest of lies from fantasy. This constant digest of misinformation perhaps explains the amnesia the majority of workers appear to suffer from. And what is exasperating is that in spite of all the evidence revealing the architects of war to be the conniving and scheming rapscallions we always knew them to be, it is a fair bet that many workers will again be ready to believe their lies when Iran is found to be stockpiling WMD and harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists.

It may well be that WMD will be found in Iraq – but the assumption now will be that will have been planted there by corrupt Western regimes desperate to justify their invasion. And this evidence will likely be used not only to prop up the discredited Messrs Bush and Blair but also to malign the anti-war movement – which claimed this was a war for oil – and to further strengthen their case for a continuation of the “war on terror”.

In the months ahead be careful what you swallow.

John Bissett

Another futile Earth Summit (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The findings of a survey carried out by YouGov in the wake of the recent Earth Summit and published in the Observer (8 September) revealed that seven out of ten people think that the Johannesburg Earth Summit has made almost no difference to the future of the planet. And only one in 500 believes that the controversial £40 million meeting attended by leaders from more than 100 countries, with 60,000 participants, will make the world ‘a lot better’. This, of course, came as no surprise. In the run-up to the Summit, activists the world over had expressed little or no confidence that it would be noted for achieving anything tangible. And if developments since the 1992 Rio Summit were anything to go by, few were holding out for anything worth celebrating.

As the Summit closed, the UN, the British government and many world-wide delegations articulated their surprise that non-governmental groups had come away from the Summit feeling angered and cheated. Oxfam, for instance, had commented that the Summit had been a triumph for greed and a tragedy for people. Friends of the Earth remarked: Do not believe government spin doctors who claim success for this Summit. It is by any objective test a failure. And Christian Aid said: The overall winner of this Summit has been big business. It has triumphed in its bid to avoid any legally-binding regulation on its behaviour.

Yet more empty promises

The final text of the Programme of Implementation agreed upon at Johannesburg after nine days of deliberations contained but two new and explicit targets. The summit agreed to halve the number of people without sanitation (about 1.2 billion) by 2015 and agreed to plans to provide clean water for half of those without it. In other words, even by 2015 there will still be millions of people without sanitation or clean water.

With growing concern now about the destruction wrought on of the Earth’s life-support system, the bumbling negotiations were billed as being to map out a plan for reducing poverty and protecting bio-diversity. All they could agree on was to aim to reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010 and to increase funding and technical resources to developing countries as well as to strengthen forest law and to merely reduce not stop illegal logging. The Summit acknowledged that poverty and environmental degradation are linked and further adopted the aim of halving the 1.2 billion who exist on less that $1 per day. Another paragraph considered over-fishing, and thus the depletion of a main protein source for many living in coastal areas. Here the Summit only agreed to restore, where possible, the world’s fish stocks by 2015 and merely to urge attention on marine pollution and the establishment of protected areas by 2010.

Back in 1992 at the Rio Summit, the world’s wealthier countries pledged to greatly increase their development aid to poorer countries to 0.7 percent of GNP. This was never achieved. Indeed, prior to the Summit, across the industrialised world it stood at 0.22 percent. What did the Johannesburg Summit do? It promised to urge the developed countries . . . to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of GNP as official development assistance. This would appear a step back – a promise is suddenly demoted to a promise to urge – and is perhaps an admission by the promise-makers, and the urgers, that promises are there to be broken. The US delegation, in particular, blocked all proposals involving regulating multinational corporations or dedicating significant new funds to so-called sustainable development.

The only outcome of the negotiations on sustainable consumption – the Holy Grail of the summit – was agreement to develop an action programme within 10 years, to publish indicators that evaluate progress and to give shoppers instructive eco-labels. The Summit failed in its proclaimed mission of setting definite targets and a timetable for increasing the use of renewable energies. Paragraph 19(e) watered down the Kyoto Protocol to combat climatic change by promoting clean fossil fuels. This said, the Kyoto Protocol was given a little more legitimacy with Russia and Canada promising to ratify it.

So, there was little or nothing to applaud at this Summit. The world’s leaders – and there were many on show – simply recommitted themselves to agreements they had already committed themselves to elsewhere. It was an affirmation by the global executive of capitalism that the Programme of Implementation should have carried the subtitle: Sorry, but there’s profits to be had.

Big corporate interests

In the past ten years, the real change has been the even more prominent role in negotiations given to business, predominantly multinational corporations. As never before, corporations are centre stage, with governments backing their interests. It was just naïve of the NGOs to imagine that the Summit was ever going to decide on a regulatory framework to try to make that the activities of corporations serve the interests of those in greatest need.

Entirely predictably, all that happened was that, with the blessing of the UN, multi-nationals negotiated a number of partnership agreements – quite simply voluntary commitments by corporations to respect the environment and protect human rights. But in an increasingly globalised world, where there are mega-profits to be made, and wherever these profits will come into conflict with environmental and human rights issues, any directors not seen to have profits forefront in their minds will be shown the door pretty damned quick. Thus, such promises are in truth not worth the paper they are written on. Insane? Yes. But this is actually capitalism functioning efficiently.

The relevance of the meeting was perhaps best revealed by the absence of George W Bush who, despite massive international lobbying for him to attend, decided that a war with Iraq was more important. This was understandable considering the numerous oil giants and weapons manufacturers he is indebted to, and not least because his advisers were all too aware he would have been heading for the mother of all heckling bouts and would undoubtedly have proved an embarrassment to the US delegation. Moreover, as US Capitalism plc was aware, they were going to get their way anyway at Johannesburg, so why send Dubya who was more valuable at home beating the war drum?

The debating aside, this was a meeting at which US Secretary of State Colin Powell was booed and jeered by US environmental campaigners and by many delegates and at which Tony Blair was lambasted from the speaker’s platform by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Namibian president Sam Nujoma as an interfering colonialist.

Were he not such an arrogant, murderous, hypocritical and corrupt agent of capital, Mugabe’s five minute bluster could have been applauded as sound socialist criticism. Apart from his much publicised anti-Blair broadside he angrily declared:

“The programme of action we set for ourselves at Rio has not only been unfulfilled but it has also been ignored, sidelined and replaced by a half-baked unilateral agenda of globalisation in the service of big corporate interests. The focus here is profit, not the poor; the process is globalisation, not sustainable development, while the objective is exploitation, not liberation.”

Mugabe was, for once, right.

Bearing in mind that previous world summits – and there have been several in recent years, all analysed in this journal – have been subordinated to the interests of big business and have consequently proved to be a waste of time in so far as addressing the problems of the planet was concerned, is it any wonder that not only NGOs, but the wider public have little faith in them? You would have to be very naïve to imagine that profit-driven corporations in a world subject to intense world market competitive pressures would, or could, be forced by the UN, take care of the planet in a responsible manner.

We can perhaps salvage one thing from Johannesburg that will serve the interests of humanity, and that is the fact – reinforced by this Summit – that capitalism cannot be trusted to run the world in the interests of humanity; that governments, including the UN which is made up of governments, serve the interests of profit first and that, if we are ever to take control of this planet and run it in the real interests of its inhabitants, then we must do so ourselves, without leaders and with a view to establishing a global system of society in which production is freed from the constraints of profit and in which each person will have free access to the benefits of civilisation.

John Bissett

“A lame duck” (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the date for the World Summit on Sustainable Development drew nearer, the UN advised participants not to be seen to be extravagant during the Summit since about 13 million people were facing starvation in the immediate environment of the venue. Kofi Annan’s plea was unnecessary, not just because those millions would still starve (they have always starved) but also because the conferees would not see their normal lifestyles as extravagant and so would not heed the advice. On the other hand, it was important because it reveals the hypocrisy of Annan, the UN and their masters in the big business community. So even before delegates started arriving the whole world was told, in the warning Annan gave, that the summit was just another forum to disseminate lies and lip service.

Like any other phenomenon, the money-based system is not static. It has to continue to change its rules and methods of operation. The world summit in Johannesburg was one such example of the ongoing trend in the development of capitalism. On the face of it, however, it was a conference designed to bridge the widening chasm between the North and the South, a conference aimed at seeking solutions to environmental pollution. But in reality the Summit was nothing other than a business breakfast meeting; a market place where the owners of the means of living and their cronies met and discussed how to enhance their business in the form of loans and investments. It was organized by the world class business executives through their main agent – the UN – with the sole aim of increasing the scope and area of trade and commerce. The capitalists would then enhance their objective of concentrating capital.

Victor Menotti of International Forum on Globalisation wrote the following in his book Exporting Enron Environmentalism: The Bush Vision for Johannesburg:

“The Bush vision for Johannesburg shows more strategic foresight than almost anything the unilateralist, free trader has proposed in any international arena to date. What has been revealed on the road to Johannesburg is a grand plan to permanently incapacitate the United Nations as an institution to meaningfully address the twin crises of global poverty and ecological decline.”

It is not surprising therefore, that at the end of the party on 4 September the Heinrich Boll Foundation summed up the summit thus:

“The Johannesburg World Summit has ended. Governments deliberated on their declarations and the Johannesburg Action Plan; developing countries fought for market access and increased foreign aid; the United States blocked meaningful targets and timetables; and NGOs feared that not even the achievements of the Rio Summit ten years ago would be reaffirmed” (http://www.worldsummit2002.org/start.htm).

The Summit also provided a deep insight into the role and therefore the position of the corporate media in the class war. Paid to do the dirty public relations work, most of the journalists instead of exposing the hypocrisy of the powers-that-be merely trumpet what they’ve been fed to publicise. Of course the mention of certain obvious instances and events were unavoidable like the booing and heckling of the US delegation and the presence of anti-capitalist demonstrators. But even here only scant journalism was applied. Months before the meeting, groups with vested interest created channels through which the media would be guided as to what aspects of the deliberations should be highlighted. Websites were opened by these groups and lots of biased but very subtle information could be accessed by the media and NGOs. Through out the summit a group called Sustainable Development Issues Network (SDIN) held ‘daily NGOs strategy discussions’ in Johannesburg. Their co-ordinators worked very hard adding content, news and event links to the SDIN issue pages. In fact they encouraged and urged journalists to “use the links as a resource” (http: //www.sdissues.net/SDIN/).

But perhaps the aspect of the conference that interests us socialists most was the presence there of the ubiquitous anti-capitalists. This Summit, organised to enhance the capitalist caste’s dominion over the rest of mankind, only succeeded in drawing attention to the rising hatred of the masses against the stinking hypocrisy in the status quo. Many thousands of protesters, including victims of the Union Carbide disaster in India in 1984, converged in Johannesburg from all over the world. They made a loud noise throughout the summit. They even embarrassed the world policeman that the US has turned itself into by rudely interrupting Colin Powell’s speech. However, these anti-capitalists run the risk of being seen as agents provocateurs since their actions lack direction thus rendering their objectives truncated and meaningless. It is not enough to hate or speak against the inhuman capitalist system. It is much more important to articulate an alternative to it, an antidote to the malaise. And this is where the anti-capitalists are handicapped. They make all that noise only to appeal like the Shakespearean Shylock to the insatiable capitalists to have mercy on the masses. This is no solution.

If the anti-capitalists had pondered over the outcome of the Rio Summit a decade ago from a scientific and genuinely people-centred considerations, they would have gone further than begging our unwilling capitalist group to have pity. Ten years after the Agenda 21 was adopted, the situation of the environment has only travelled from bad to worse. Sustainable development remains an empty slogan eluding everyone. The masses continue to experience an alarming rate of marginalisation. The anti-capitalists have failed to ask themselves why the US and other powers have openly refused to accept the Kyoto Protocol on environmental pollution. If they had asked themselves, they would have realized that where money and profits are concerned people and environment are secondary, nay expendable.

Another fact that people generally failed to understand is that tackling individual issues such as environment; health; education; terrorism; wars; hunger; etc will lead no one anywhere. There is one fundamental cause that runs through all problems that face mankind – the ownership of the main resources of the world. Here we are talking about the tools with which wealth is produced: factories, land, transport and communications, etc. When only a few people control these, as is the case now, they use every vile means to maintain their stranglehold over them even if it means destroying the environment and by extension the masses. They can never listen to appeals; they only know their profits. A profit-oriented system can never be made to work otherwise; it is impossible to reform it to benefit the masses. The best bet for mankind, therefore, is to do away with such relations of minority ownership and replace it with a common ownership which will lead to a democratic way of managing these resources in the interests of mankind as a whole.

Suhuyini

“A damp squib” (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The docility of the world population has contributed greatly to keeping intact the increasingly unequal, barbaric and rapacious society that is global capitalism. Because people believe there is no alternative to capitalism, it keeps on existing while the reformists in the EU, UN, AU, World Bank and so on seek to distract us from such an alternative by pretending they can manage capitalism in the interests of everyone. In reality, capitalism can only ever be run in the interest of the tiny minority which effectively owns the world’s means of wealth production.

In a society based on the profit motive what has been achieved as a result of the efforts of these reformists? We see before us a polluted planet, war, rampant poverty and the exploitation of the majority. Such problems show no sign of abating. It is against this background of persistent failure that international representatives of the capitalist class have periodically sought to organise summits to address the issue of development. One such was the recent Earth Summit held in South Africa which attracted some 60,000 delegates from the around the world but which proved to be a huge let-down to those nations hungry for development.

Truly, this World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) ended up a damp squib. It was simply a 10-day event of misleading the world with vacuous statements of good intent while the needs of the planet and the global poor continue to play second fiddle to the interests of global capital.

The pre-summit arrangement was to focus on a global plan to tackle problems like AIDS, depleted fish stocks and so on as well as finding ways of providing help for the Third World to have clean water and to halve poverty by 2015. Considering the US position on environmental issues, it was a pity that the US president G.W. Bush didn’t bother to avail himself of this opportunity to explain his position. Instead he sent a representative, Colin Powell, who also happened to arrive late and at a time when other leaders were leaving.

America is generally acknowledged to be the world’s worst polluter. It is all too apparent that this, the richest country on the planet is quite unwilling to make a solid commitment to fight such pollution or ease the poverty of billions of people and promote environmental conservation. Instead it decided to concentrate on what it calls its “war on terrorism”, in particular its threat to launch a military attack against Baghdad. It was for reasons such as this that the summit ended up such a hopeless shambles. Whatever commitments on paper there may have been to bring about sustainable development, these were blunted and rendered ineffectual by the divergent and conflicting interests of different capitalist groupings. Not that it would have made much difference had those commitments been sincerely meant; there are other reasons why sustainable development has not been able to take off which have little to do with the lack of political will on the part of capitalist governments. After all millions of people go to bed hungry for no other reason than that it is simply not profitable to feed them.

True to form, this summit lost sight of what it was meant to be about and ended up as an excuse for political grandstanding. While US Secretary of State, Colin Powell was booed and barracked after remarks about the famine in Southern Africa and Blair hit back at Mugabe for his remarks about Britain, the war of words steadily escalated. The divisions amongst the global capitalists seemed as pronounced as ever just as their system seems no less incapable of offering practical solutions to the very problems it continues to generate. In short it is a case of business as usual.

Bigboy Musemwa

(Zimbabwe)

Aftermath of the Tsunami: Querying ‘American Values in Action’ (2005)

From the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

  The tsunami in South-East Asia provoked very different responses from western governments and the populations they supposedly represent. The US state was obliged to raise its donation more than 20- fold in the light of public reaction, but arguably too late to disguise the politicians' real agenda.

Realising that upwards of 100,000 of the then estimate of 165,000 victims of the Tsunami disaster were Muslims, the US wasted no time in sending US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the scene of the devastation. There was much to gain from this mission at a time when the US has been accused of an anti-Muslim crusade in the wake of the devastation it has wrought on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Powell was keen to show the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims that the Bush administration is not islamophobic, even if its military machine did seem to have a penchant for the slaughter of Muslims. He said “We’d be doing it [participating in the relief effort] regardless of religion, but I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action.”

As for the US “values” Powell’s mission aimed to promote, we need only mention Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay for starters before moving on to the myriad international treaties, on gun control, nuclear proliferation, the environment, human rights etc. that the Bush administration has flicked the proverbial two fingers to since 2000.

US “values” have prompted successive White House administrations to support dictators and tyrannical regimes on every continent, from Pol Pot and Suharto to Saddam Hussein and Papa Doc Duvalier. Between 1945 and 1999, this same defender of global well-being toppled forty governments and helped crush thirty populist movements, assassinated scores of prominent individuals and perverted elections in every corner of the globe. During this period the US armed terrorists, trained right-wing guerrilla movements in the art of torture and financed armies intent on overthrowing democratically elected governments. Some values!

When asked on US television whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children as a consequence of Western sanctions was acceptable, Madeleine Albright, Powell’s predecessor under President Clinton, replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

It seems there are American “values” and “values”. Those Powell is charged with furthering are those of a corrupt elite operating in the interests of corporate America. He was certainly not sent to Indonesia on a show of hands of the US public. His attempt to seek political capital out of present US offers of help to the disaster region is thus opportunistic and utterly despicable, nay, nauseating.

Powell further commented in Indonesia: “I’ve been in war and I’ve been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”  This from the man who rose to prominence trying to cover up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when US forces slaughtered 500 Vietnamese women and children, part of a larger conflict that left 2 million dead, many from the use of napalm and agent orange. We can only assume that Powell is suffering from selective amnesia.

While he feels a surge of pride in the knowledge the US government has promised $350 million to the stricken areas, what is to be made of the fact that this is only a minute fraction of the amount spent on the US invasion and occupation of Iraq? Or, to put it another way, the world is meant to applaud the Bush administration for paying out $350 million with one hand to help people in Asia, while forking out $150 billion (http://costofwar.com/) with the other to kill people in the Middle East.

If you consider that we err in comparing the war in Iraq with the rescue mission in the Indian Ocean, then remember the reason for the invasion of Iraq. Bush and Blair both claimed that this was a humanitarian intervention, a rescue mission, aimed at restoring democracy and freeing the Iraqi people from years of oppression. On this count it stands as the most expensive humanitarian mission in history, considering the size of the Iraqi population — and what does this make of the people who opposed that invasion, the 35 million across the world who marched and protested at the Bush/Blair rescue mission to Iraq in February of 2003?

When Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief co-ordinator, criticised the initial US offer of $15 million in aid as “stingy”, Bush’s response was to claim Egeland was “very misguided and ill-informed”. Bush later had the figure raised to $35 million, with this figure later increased tenfold – a figure, incidentally, now dwarfed by private donations in the US. All Egeland was saying was that in times of disaster Western governments do in fact appear parsimonious.

Many radical commentators backed Egeland’s “stingy” claim, pointing out that the Bush administration would be spending far more on the president’s inaugural celebration on January 20th and how the Republican Convention in New York last year cost a staggering $166 million (inclusive of $70,000 for donuts and coffee for the press). We can perhaps better set the US aid promise in context by  considering that the occupation of Iraq is costing the US an estimated $270 million per day, and that the Pentagon’s military budget is $1.5 billion per day – this spent with a view to killing people, not saving them. What else are guns and bombs, tanks and warships for? One F22 Raptor fighter costs $225 million. It does not carry food parcels and medicines but surface to air missiles and cannons. According to the US-based International Action Centre’s estimates, “for what the US is spending for less than one second of bombing and destruction, it could construct a system that could have prevented thousands of needless deaths [caused by the Tsunami].”

As in Britain, so too in the US have the general public humiliated their governments with their generosity. If we accept that the invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian step, that Bush and Blair were motivated solely by the plight of the suffering Iraqi people under Saddam, why did they not set up a charity and see how much the public would have donated to this mother of all rescue missions? Simple, because they realise that people, though often conned at election time, are just not that stupid, and that they couldn’t have collected enough to feed a regiment’s mascot goat.

The generosity shown towards the victims of the Tsunami disaster is not the Bush administration’s “values”, which Powell seems to have been implying in his damage limitation exercise in Indonesia, but rather the basic values of human beings in America, indeed the world over. Unlike other animals, humans are endowed with the ability to sympathise and empathise with their fellow beings. Humans derive great pleasure from doing good, are at their best when faced with the worst and will go to extraordinary lengths to help alleviate the suffering of others. Across the US, as in other countries, there have been all manner of fundraising events, in all sections of society, inclusive of nursery schools, prisons, universities and impoverished communities. In some instances people have queued for over an hour to put money in a plastic collection bucket.

Americans are generous with their time as well. According to a survey by Independent Sector, a US coalition of non-profit organisations, the percentage of volunteers in America is the largest of any country, almost 56%. The average hours volunteered per week by an individual is 3.5 hours. According to Charity America, donations to charity for 2002 were $241 billion, 76.3 per cent of this given by individuals.

If governments depended for their existence on us promoting our real values, they wouldn’t last a week. That is why they spend so much time trying to divide us as a class, lying to us, instilling in us false needs, a false consciousness, appealing to patriotism and the rest of the rot. When it comes to values, there are only class values, ours and theirs. That Powell had to go to Indonesia to try to hijack any US-initiated relief effort, before it was credited to the workers of the US, shows perhaps that they fear not only class solidarity across the world but the very values that have come to the surface in recent weeks.

John Bissett

World View: Yes, inaction is not an option (2002)

From the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

“What the Pentagon has done with this is sound military conceptual planning.” This was the US Secretary Colin Powell commenting on the leaked 50 page Pentagon report entitled: “Nuclear Posture Review” – proof, if ever it was needed, that the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum.

What was so special about this “Review”? It contained contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons on seven countries that the US claim are the biggest threat to world peace: China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya. It orders the US military to plan for the use of smaller nuclear weapons, suggests the arming of Cruise missiles with nuclear warheads and identifies four instances when the US must launch a nuclear attack: an Arab-Israeli conflict, war between China and Taiwan, an attack by North Korea on South Korea and an attack by Iraq on any of its neighbours.

Coming within a year of the US trashing of numerous international treaties regarding weapons proliferation and, bearing in mind the US response to the 11 September attack on mainland USA and the belligerent tone of President Bush’s recent State of the Union Address, this is news to be taken seriously. It hints at US unilateralism and a new era of unchecked US aggression in defence of the interests of its corporate elite.

Such US aspirations, however, are not recent, for they can be traced right back to the 1820s and the “Monroe Doctrine”, which announced that the Americas belonged to the USA. Now, all US excesses can be rationalised by a quick thumb over the shoulder in the direction of Ground Zero. The US, having suffered considerable loss of life in the 11 September attack last year, have found in that atrocity the pretext to pursue their goal of “full spectrum dominance” – military domination of the world.

No sooner was this news out, when US vice president Dick Cheney flew off for a ten-day tour of the Middle East. Though ostensibly the trip was an attempt to iron out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, few commentators did not suggest that the real reason for the visit was to drum up support for a full-scale attack upon Iraq . Prior to his visit to the Middle East he stopped over in Britain to ask a complacent Tony Blair whether he could afford any US attack on Iraq 25,000 British troops.

The signs of a coming US attack upon Iraq have been visible for some time now. For months, US military instructors have been in northern Iraq training Kurdish fighters. Five thousand mothballed military vehicles in Kuwait have been overhauled and 24 Apache attack helicopters have arrived in Kuwait. Moreover, In the wake of the recent anthrax scare, investigators worked round the clock in a desperate and futile bid to find the Saddam link, before concluding it was probably the work of a home-grown crank. And in recent weeks, Washington has continually reminded us that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and must be prevented from using them, whilst negligent of reports from the UN Special Commission that Iraq’s arsenal is now down to 5 percent of its 1990 level and seemingly oblivious to questions relating to how he has amassed such deadly weapons, considering the stringent sanctions which even outlaw the export of ping-pong balls to Iraq.

Twelve years after the war with Iraq, the US now looks serious about “regime change”. Back then though the overthrow of Saddam was not part of the US agenda. Having initially led the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Marsh Arabs of the South into believing that they would get US support if they rose up against Saddam, they then sat back and watched as Saddam almost annihilated them. It had occurred to them that Saddam might be holding the country together, stopping the spread of militant Islam, and that an Iraq minus Saddam might divide into warring factions and further threaten US interests in the region.

US allies in the Middle East – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – have shown little enthusiasm for US plans for Iraq, all voicing reservations and fearful of the consequences. Turkey, another US ally, who has many times loaned its airfields to the US for its operations against Iraq, believes its economy could be damaged by any such conflict, and King Abdullah of Jordan has warned of the “catastrophic effect” that any aggression towards Iraq would have on the Middle East. Seemingly, only Tony Blair, George Bush’s cheerleader, has agreed that Saddam must be stopped, citing, in Republican fashion, Saddam’s elusive weapons of mass destruction and, like the true political amnesiac, never querying the weapons of mass destruction the US and Britain have stockpiled or the nuclear weapons in the hands of another Middle Eastern aggressor – Israel.

While the defenders of “freedom” attempt to whip up support for another Gulf War, on the pretext that Saddam Hussein is a terrorist, the rest of us can recall that both the US and Britain backed Iraq in its war with Iran, even providing it with arms, and that they were silent when Iraq used chemical weapons on Iranians in 1984 (four months later the US even reopened its embassy in Baghdad) and again when Saddam used chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabjah in 1988, killing 5,000 civilians.

And remember the ferocity of the first US war with Iraq, when Saddam invaded Kuwait and threatened US oil interests in the region? It lasted 42 days, during which time 110,000 “Coalition” aerial sorties were flown and 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped. It left an estimated 100,000 dead, including tens of thousands burnt to death retreating from Kuwait along the Basra Road. Sanctions imposed since then have devastated Iraqi civil society and have killed over 1.5 million including 500,000 children under the age of five – results the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide classifies as “genocidal conduct” and a convention the US refuses to comply with.

When asked what he estimated the number of Iraqi dead were after the first Gulf War, Colin Powell remarked: “Frankly, that’s a number that doesn’t interest me much”. His predecessor, Madeline Albright, when asked to comment on the half a million Iraqi children that had died of starvation disease and replied: “the price is worth it.” These are the type of people calling the shots in Washington, working closely with the Pentagon and the White House and in the interests of world peace!

When we recall the horror of the first Gulf War and juxtapose it with the statements of successive US Secretaries of State and indeed the recent revelation that the US will hit with a nuclear weapon whoever it wishes, regardless of international opinion, we realise that the job of securing world peace can never be left to politicians. Defending the belligerent stance of the US, George Bush recently said that “inaction is not an option.” It’s a sentiment shared by socialists. For it is the inaction and complacency of the working class that enables such horrendous injustices to go on. For almost a century we have warned of the dangers of political apathy, of trusting in leaders, of accepting all that governments say without question. Our silence, more than anything, is what Bush and Blair and Co. will depend on in coming months, that same silence the master class toasts each day. Our inaction is an important element in our continuing exploitation, for the master class see in it our consent for their excesses.

As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Capitalism may well breed war, but our apathy is very much a part of the process. Bear the above in mind in coming months when the US fleet heads off to the Gulf.

John Bissett