Invading Iraq is what we did instead of tackling climate change

Spread the love

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

Shall we start a new series ~ A DECADE AGO TODAY?

Spread the love

W(h)ell it’s coming up for it, no?

A decade ago today …

I’ts coming up for G8 at Gleneagles, 7/7 and you can’t go down here, we haven’t let those undesirable lefties die yet, terrorism BS, the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.

There is an issue here. It is that corporate media participated in this absolute BS. Corporate media participated – it’s more than participated in – more like were ever so willing and ready to usurp democracy and support Fascism.

edit: Corporate Media loved that Alasister Campbell BS. Well he was still there wasn’t he – Alasister the people’s princess Campbell?

It’s terribly dangerous down there. There are people dying and we’ve got to let them die to get the numbers right. Oh not those sisters from Kentucky of course. No, we only let those people die that we want dead. Don’t imagine that we don’t have such terrible trouble identifying who we want to die of course – they don’t have wallets full of credit cards or mobile phones. Oh no, we couldn’t possibly identify who takes a day or two to die.

and we’ve got to get the numbers right

for the

53rd victim

of the Londond bombings

17/6/15 I think that I’m probably not going to do that actually. It’s there for anyone to investigate – I think that it’s actually quite blatant. I find it very weird that people are wanting to believe people that have proved themselves repeatedly to be totally untrustworthy. Isn’t that weird? I think that it is.

Perhaps the real point is that if you want to know the real truthy reality about things it is not at all difficult. Basically you investigate for yourself. A tiny bit of your own investigation is often enough. Don’t we know that nation states do terrorist atrocities? 911? There is one state where their speciality is bus bombings … and then they take it on tour.

Why do people want to believe such so discredited sources? Think about it for a moment. This person has been proved to be so divorced from the truth and yet you want to accept it without question? The SAS caught in Iraq dressed as Iraqis with a car bomb? That John Reid is such an evil bstard. Charlie Hebdo? Oh FO. It’s almost as if you deserve it.

Don’t you realise that the governments are the terrorists? They do it so that they stay in power by keeping you scared. Can’t you see that?

Terrorism provides them with a distraction to so absolutely useless they are. Iain Duncan Smith with universal credit that hasn’t worked for so many years. Do you think that perhaps he just wants to kill disabled people? That may be a more realistic conclusion. The Health and Social Care Bill. What absolute nonsense that was. Was it intended to FU the NHS? Was that the intention – just feck it up so much?

3am 17/6/15 I do hope that people recognise that the BS they get from corporate sources is exactly that, that governments are evil and rule through using deception and fear, that democracy is an illusion, etc.

I used to refrain myself by the concept of democracy. When you analyse it, it seems just an illusion of representative democracy – voting machines with hanging chads and the New Labour tarty’s promotion of absentee (postal) voting.

The police have been killing people with impunity.

A foreign state has been killed a poor innocent person on the tube and Ian Blair, Tony Blair and all the rest of them have covered it up …

Hardly a democracy, is it?

3.25 Total cnuts: Ian and Tony, Reid, the blind cnut, Clarke, I’ll think of some more. They were in government, they’re not anymore. I wonder if they thought they had omniscient loins when they were in government. Tonee and his flatmate are paedos. Er, I’m not just saying that because I hate them.

3.32 I want hard techno

Continue ReadingShall we start a new series ~ A DECADE AGO TODAY?

SHALL WE DO SOME TERRORISM BULLSHIT?

Spread the love

LIQUID EXPLOSIVES TERRORISM BULLSHIT

BE AFRAID

John Reid, 99

later: Well be awfully afraid. You can’t possibly take more than 100ml of anything because you’re a terrorist unless proved otherwise.

Total bullshit. Be afraid you plebs.

Shall we discuss the impossibility of Hydrogen Pyroxide bombs?

Shall we discuss dust explosions?

later later: I think that’s the ABSOLUTE impossibility of Hydrogen Pyroxide bombs. I can engage you with this because it is absolute bullshit.

20.40 There are mistakes. I do claim that the notion of liquid bombs that can be concocted in minutes … leading to bans of materials on aircraft … is absolute terrorism bullshit / fake manufactured terrorism … courtesy of former Home Secretary John Reid.

16/7/14 John Reid made a big issue of his first 100 days when he was made Home Secretary. On the 99th day we get liquid explosives bullshit. There have never been liquid explosives – it is a total fantasy manufactured to make you afraid.

Continue ReadingSHALL WE DO SOME TERRORISM BULLSHIT?