Morning Star June 09, 2003
In favour of peace
Andrew Murray calls for a broader understanding of the motives driving US and British military aggression
By Andrew Murray
IRAQ was not the war. Iraq was just a battle. The war continues. So said one John Pike, the head of a US defence policy think-tank, speaking at a conference organised by the Guardian three weeks ago.
He could not have been clearer. Syria had been elevated into the notorious "axis of evil." Iran was in the firing line, as were North Korea and Libya.
Washington would, he said, give stronger support to the ultra-right government in Colombia in its struggle against its own struggle.
The CIA would be unleashed as never before against Cuba.
This was the implications of the Bush administration's new doctrine spelt out with brutal clarity. And it was not just a piece of wishful thinking on the part of an academic hawk.
Barely had he spoken than the Pentagon was making clear its demand for "regime change" in Iran.
All the familiar - and false - arguments caused to justify the Iraq war were trotted out once more. Illegal weapons, links with terrorism and so on.
There was only one novel reason for "regime change" in Teheran advanced by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was that the Iranian government was allegedly interfering in Iraq.
You might think that, since Iran is a neighbour of Iraq, it has a good deal more right to take an interest in the nature of a post-Saddam regime there than do the US or British governments.
How Rumsfeld can lecture anyone else about "interference" is beyond imagining.
But what the Pentagon uber- hawk was really objecting to was the apparent rise in support for Islamist political forces among the Iraqi people themselves.
Iraqi democracy is one of the targets of the anti-Iran threats.
In fact, overthrowing the Iranian government has long been an open and explicit objective of the Israeli government, whose influence on the Bush administration's Middle East policy is obvious.
Now Iran is nearly surrounded by an Iraq and an Afghanistan, both under US armed occupation, it may seem as good a time as any.
Syria, too, is being brazenly targeted.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has told Damascus that it must take account of the new "strategic realities" in the region, by which he means the return of a militaryimposed colonialism to Arab lands.
The objective is clearly to replace any regime in the region which does not fall into line with these new realities.
Point one will be abandoning any support for the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli occupation and point two will be opening up their economies and natural resources to monopoly exploitation.
Not for nothing did Rumsfeld, in an article in the Wall Street Journal last week, spell out that support for a free market economy was going to be an inescapable foundation of the new regime to be imposed in Iraq.
The same will hold good, no doubt, for Iran - another oil-producing power - and Syria.
Since the US and British forces are planning for a prolonged military presence in Iraq - an indefinite one in the case of the US - they will be well-placed to attempt to bully and threaten neighbouring regimes into compliance.
So the Middle East is now a tinderbox, with the US government embarked on a campaign of destabilisation and illegal regime change throughout.
Blair shows no sign of wishing to disengage Britain from this project.
But, as Mr Pike's remarks show, the "endless war, " which is now official US policy, does not threaten the Middle East alone.
There are targets in Asia, Latin America and, if Blair gets his way, Africa too, with Zimbabwe to be favoured with imperialism's intentions.
This has been all spelt out in the national security doctrine off i c i a l l y adopted by the US government last September - a charter for imposing US power and, behind it, US economic inter - ests, on every part of the world, in defiance of existing arrangements and alliances, not to mention international law and the sovereignty of independent states.
It is hardly surprising that other powers - France, Russia and Germany among them - see in this doctrine a threat to their own interests and are resisting accordingly, placing great power rivalry back at the centre of international politics in a way unseen for nearly 60 years.
But new Labour, itself rather taken with the idea that a "new imperialism" is just what the world needs, is the principal military help-make and ideological sponsor of the Bush hardliners'agenda.
How the historic political expression of the British labour movement came to act as global front-man for hard-right, religiously-bigoted, business-backed US conservatism is a story in itself - and a standing challenge to our movement to act to remove this bloody blot on its traditions and its international reputation.
It also imposes definite obligations on the peace movement. The movement against the Iraq war was historic in its breadth and radicalism.
It came very close to stopping British imperialism's war plans in its tracks - and, perhaps, precipitating the resignation of Blair himself.
It is clear that the Stop the Wa r Coalition needs to maintain its cohesion, its alliances and its fighting strength in the face of the real danger of further war in the not too distant future.
Such conflicts will present different political demands. The states in Washington's sights are very different - some have a Muslim population, some are socialist, some are secular, some religious.
They all, however, seek to uphold their own independence and resist the imposition of Washington's order.
They all, therefore, deserve the support of the mass movement in resisting AngloAmerican bullying.
War against any of them, if that is what it comes to, should be resisted as the Iraq war was.
The very complexity of this situation demands a still deeper level of anti-imperialist understanding in the mass movement, which must be won to oppose all colonialism and all neocolonial wars, no matter what pretext they are fought under.
It is particularly important to win a still wider and more active labour movement involvement in the Stop the Wa r Coalition.
If this is part of a broader break with new Labour, the war- and - privatisation faction which has seized hold of the party, then so much the better.
But a firm position in favour of peace, the traditional demand of labour the world over, will be enough.
Cementing the unity of the anti-war movement - and maintaining its political capacity - remains the central issue facing the left in the present international situation.
It is in defeating the Anglo-American policy of war without end that the general movement for a better future for humanity can take its first steps.
dot Andrew Murray is chairman of the Stop the War Coalition.
Copyright © 2003, People's Press Printing Society Ltd
