Invading Iraq is what we did instead of tackling climate change

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Original article well said by Adam Ramsay republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

OPINION: Instead of launching a war, the US and UK could have weaned us off the fossil fuels that pay for the brutal regimes of dictators

Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George 'Dubya' Bush
Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George ‘Dubya’ Bush

Twenty years ago today, [20 March] war was once again unleashed on Baghdad. In the UK – and much of the rest of the world – people sat in front of their TVs watching the skies above the ancient city flash with flame as buildings were rendered to rubble, the limbs and lives inside crushed.

The real victims of George Bush and Tony Blair’s shock and awe were, of course, the people of Iraq. Estimates of violent deaths range from a hundred thousand to a million. That doesn’t include the arms and legs that were lost, the families devastated, the melted minds and broken souls, trauma that will shatter down generations. It doesn’t include anyone killed in the conflict since then: there are still British and US troops in the country. It doesn’t include the poverty resulting from crushed infrastructure, the hopes abandoned and the potential immolated.

And that’s just the 2003 war: Britain has bombed Iraq in seven of the last 11 decades.

But in far gentler ways, the war was to shape the lives of those watching through their TVs, too. The invasion of Iraq – along with the other post-9/11 wars – was a road our governments chose irrevocably to drive us down. And we, too, have been changed by the journey.

The financial cost of the Iraq war to the US government, up to 2020, is estimated at $2trn. The post-9/11 wars together cost the US around $8trn, a quarter of its debt of $31trn. Much of the money was borrowed from foreign governments, in a debt boom which, some economists have argued, played a key role in the 2008 crash.

It was in this period, in particular, that China bought up billions of dollars of US government debt. Just before Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Beijing had overtaken Tokyo as the world’s largest holder of US Treasury bonds. Today, America’s neoconservatives are obsessed with China’s power over the US. What they rarely mention is that this was delivered by their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Britain’s financial contribution was more meagre – in 2015 the UK government estimated it had spent £8.1bn on the invasion of Iraq, and around £21bn on Afghanistan. But these are hardly figures to be sniffed at.

Also significant, in both cases, is where this money went: the Iraq war saw a revolution in the outsourcing of violence. In 2003, when the war began, the UK foreign office spent £12.6m on private security firms. By 2015, just one contract – paying G4S to guard Britain’s embassy in Afghanistan – was worth £100m.

Over the course of the wars, the UK became the world centre for private military contractors – or, to use the old fashioned word, mercenaries. While many of these are private army units, others offer more specialist skills: retired senior British spooks now offer intelligence advice to central-Asian dictators and, as we found out with Cambridge Analytica during the Brexit vote, psychological operations teams who honed their skills in Iraq soon realised how much money they could make trialling their wares on the domestic population.

This vast expansion of the military industrial complex in both the US and UK hasn’t just done direct damage to our politics and economy – affecting the living standards of hundreds of millions of people across the world. It has also distorted our society, steered investment into militarised technology when research is desperately needed to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

Similarly, the war changed British politics. First, and perhaps most profoundly, because it was waged on a lie, perhaps the most notorious lie in modern Britain, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Acres of text have been written about the rapid decline in public trust in politicians in the UK in recent years. Very few grapple with the basic point – that, within the memory of most voters, a prime minister looked us in the eye, and told us that he had to lead us into war, based on a threat that turned out to be fictional. There are lots of reasons people increasingly don’t trust politicians – and therefore trust democracy less and less. But the Iraq war is a long way up the list.

Obama – who had opposed the war – managed to rally some of that breakdown of trust into a positive movement (whatever you think of his presidency, the movement behind it was positive). So did the SNP in Scotland.

But often, it went the other way. If the war hadn’t happened, would Cleggmania have swung the 2010 election from Gordon Brown to David Cameron? Probably not. And this, of course, led to the second great lie of modern British politics, the one about tuition fees and austerity.

Without the invasion, would Donald Trump have won in 2016? Would Brexit have happened?

There is a generation of us – now approaching our 40s – who were coming into political consciousness as Iraq was bombed. Many of us marched against the war, many more were horrified by it. The generation before us – Gen X – were amazingly unpolitical. Coming of age in the 1990s, at the end of history, very few got involved in social movements or joined political parties.

When I was involved in student politics in the years following Bush and Blair’s invasion, student unions across the UK were smashing turnout records. Soon, those enraged by the war found Make Poverty History, the climate crisis, the financial crisis and austerity. A generation of political organisers grew up through climate camps and Occupy and became a leading force behind Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, helping organise a magnificent younger cohort of Gen-Zers which arrived after us.

But I shouldn’t end on a positive note. The disaster predicted by the millions across the world who marched against the war has played out. Hundreds of thousands have died. The Middle East continues to be dominated by dictators.

This war was justified on the grounds that Saddam was a threat to the world. But while his weapons of mass destruction were invented, scientists were already warning us about a very real risk; already telling us that we had a few short decades to address the climate crisis.

Rather than launching a war that would give the West access to some of the world’s largest oil reserves, the US and UK could have channelled their vast resources into weaning us off the fossil fuels that pay for the brutal regimes of dictators. Instead, we incinerated that money, and the world, with it.

Original article well said by Adam Ramsay republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingInvading Iraq is what we did instead of tackling climate change

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Tony Blair, paedo
Tony Blair, paedo

 

Knox Cunningham …
Cliff Richard …
Jeff Gannon …
Falconer …
Janner …

Blair to Janner “I shall do my best to get you there [the Lords]. It’s not just that I’m fond of you, which I am. It’s not just that you’ve helped me a lot, which you have. It’s because you deserve it.” (you paedo)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3085573/Mandy-lobbied-Blair-Janner-peerage-sex-abuse-claims-Grandee-said-asked-Labour-leader-ennobling-ahead-1997-election.html

It’s as if it was electioneering … as though it was support me, I’m a paedo …

later: Blair’s message is safe hands because I’m a paedo too, I’ll look after you. Blair is safe hands for establishment paedos.

 

Which Blair minister intervened in supporting a paedo in Lambeth in adopting boys? Was it Blair? We want to know and we deserve to know. Please leak it (& also the Chilcot report).

later: to the Labour Party: He’s a paedo & it’s going to be catastrophic for you. It’s going to be factual. I tend to have a hateful regard of the Labour Party and you will have to deal with it or not. It’s yours. you c**ts. I fought back.

You useless c**ts – the Labour Party allowing a f***ing absolute psychopath to be do so much damage. I curse you with all my might. Get it?

The Labour Party, I salute you

2332596

So that there is no mistake, I am calling you classic original Fascist scum.

You’re all sh**s but there are some that I had contact with. That would be in Newport and Cardiff. Yes, you’re Labour sh**s that I had contact with, particularly that two-faced one in Newport.

So, if you defer to your authoritarian leader – ring his office for instructions, maybe get a little payback for your constituency. If you defer to your glorious, wonderful master does that make you a Fascist? Following orders, supporting the glorious leader. Does that make you a Fascist too? I think so.

Isn’t that what Fascism is? Deference to a glorious war leader? Isn’t that eXactly what you – and the wider Labour Party – did?

Twat Ian Blair with a gun
Twat Ian Blair with a gun

Tony Blair, apparent saviour but soon to be coffin-nail of the UK Labour Party (when exposed as a n***e)
Tony Blair, apparent saviour but soon to be coffin-nail of the UK Labour Party (when exposed as a n***e)

Cressida Dick
Cressida Dick, promoted to IPCC (to handle complaints …)

 

 

 

Er, have we had enough of this shit?

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Tony Blair, Terrorist (2)

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The BBC reported Building 7 was demolished / fekked / collapsed 23 minuted before it did. I can’t understand this except that it was scripted and Building 7 was late in being collapsed / fekked / demolished. Can it be anything other than following a script? Please explain.

edit: That there was a script to 9/11 that a section of BBC was actively participating in i.e. that would be according to UK government direction. That would be the UK government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

ed: Please explain. The BBC editors tried …

ed: Just to make absolutely clear: The BBC reported that the Solomon Building also known as Building 7 collapsed. The BBC report was premature and the Soloman building collapsed 23 minutes later.

The BBC reported the premature collapsuation of Building 7 a full 23 minutes before it collapsed – is that a record premature collapsuation?

11/7/14. The purpose of this post is to suggest that the BBC and by extension Tony Blair’s UK government were complicit in the attacks in New York known as 911. I am suggesting that by prematurely announcing the collapse of Building 7, the BBC was following a pre-planned script and that Building 7’s collapse or destruction was delayed according to that script. How else is it explained.

While the BBC is the UK’s state broadcasting corporation, I tend to understand it as comprising of 2 parts: the normal news reporting operation and another section concerned with state propaganda. I do think of these two parts as separate and distinct although the news reporting arm is sometimes biased and misleading.

 

Continue ReadingTony Blair, Terrorist (2)