Thatcher and Thatcherism didn't save Britain – They've caused the problems it has today ; the Falklands War was as avoidable as Iraq ; and Thatcher didn’t promote freedom but backed and armed dictatorships

I won’t celebrate anyone’s death, but Prime Minister David Cameron’s claim that Thatcher “saved our country” and the £10 million state funeral (of which taxpayers will pay at least half the costs) are party political propaganda and a slap in the face to all the unemployed and disabled people facing benefit cuts today (1) – (2). The message is “She mattered, you don’t”.

Thatcherites, like Thatcher, are not revolutionaries but reactionaries who want to go back to the 19^th century when there was no welfare state or government regulation

Thatcherites see themselves as radical reformers going up against “the establishment” and “vested interests”. For Thatcher this meant trade unions and public sector professionals like teachers, nurses, doctors and lecturers. For brave Chancellor George Osborne, a public school and Oxford University educated millionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer, it means the vast oppressive charities and churches who help the poorest (4).

Thatcherites aim to roll back all the progress made by Atlee’s post-war Labour government and take us back to the 19^th century with no trade unions, no employee rights, no welfare state and no NHS (these “only encourage dependency”) – back to the poorhouse, the workhouse and the poor dying of hunger, cold or illness and being blamed for their own suffering.

It’s new only in rejecting the One Nation conservatism of politicians like Ian Gilmour MP (who condemned Thatcher’s policies and record in his book ‘Dancing With Dogma) and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan.

From On Yer Bike in the 80s to Workers and Shirkers today –
Different Decade, Same Thatcherite attempt to impose ideology over reality

The current Conservative government even continues to claim that it hopes its welfare “reforms” will “encourage people to work” even when it’s own (fiddled) figures show over 5 times more people unemployed (2.52 million) than job vacancies (494,000) (5) – (6). (The actual ratio is higher as the unemployment figures are fiddled downwards by using methods including counting people on unpaid temporary “workfare” placements as “employed”  (7).)

So basic arithmetic shows there are no jobs available for over 80% of unemployed people in the UK ; but Thatcherites have never let facts or logic get in the way of an ideology which pretends that the most powerful and wealthiest have no responsibility for the massive effects of their actions, while the poorest and most vulnerable, who have no power or influence, are supposedly entirely to blame for every problem.

Osborne claims people on benefits are all “shirkers” who don’t work (when many do) and don’t work by choice (8) – (9).

So for the first time since 1945 benefits are being cut to punish all the supposed “shirkers” (inflation is 2.2%, but the rise in benefits this year is limited to 1% -a real terms cut) (10)

This is exactly the same crap that was shovelled by Thatcher and her ministers in the 80s, when, after being elected on a campaign that promised to get unemployment down, they increased it from 2 million to over 3 million – and then people like Norman Tebbit told the unemployed to “get on yer bike” and get a job.

Thatcher didn’t save Britain – she began the policies that led to our current problems

Far from saving Britain, Thatcher caused many of our current problems.

Setting  us on the road to the banking crisis

As the late Conservative MP Ian Gilmour pointed out, by raising interest rates to double figures to cool a financial sector boom in the South-East of England, Thatcher destroyed much of Britain’s manufacturing industry, which was pushed into recession by the resulting over-valuation of the pound (hurting exports) and unaffordable credit, leaving us over-reliant on the financial sector, which she began the deregulation of with the 1986 ‘Big Bang’ (this being the main cause of the boom, which was as much a bubble as the one that burst recently) (11) - (12).

Destroying key industries due to blinkered ideology

She closed down our steel industry, while other countries, like Germany, continued subsidising steel and other key industries, even under conservative Chancellors like Helmut Kohl. As a result Germany’s economy remains stronger and its unemployment lower than ours.

(And in fact as Nobel prize winning South Korean economist Ha Joon Chang has shown with copious historical examples, every single developed country got that way by subsidising and protecting industries until they were strong enough to compete internationally (13))

Selling off assets that provided revenue to government

She sold off valuable assets like British Gas and British Telecom, losing the government revenue which could have funded the NHS, public education and the welfare state.  While it’s likely ideology was the main driving force for these privatisations, they also funded short term income tax cuts which helped her win elections. No wonder former Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan accused her of “selling the family silver”. In fact it was worse than that. She sold the geese that laid the golden eggs.

Deregulation and privatisation leading to consumers being fleeced

Her privatisation and deregulation of every economic sector led not to greater competition but to oligopoly – sectors dominated by a few large companies which took over smaller firms or pushed them out of business, before charging customers whatever they like due to informal price fixing or simple profiteering. For instance today a handful of energy companies dominate Britain’s market for electricity and gas for the domestic and business markets.

While benefits for the poorest are cut and capped, these companies are allowed to charge whatever they like. They have doubled their profit margin by percentage on their average customer between 2011 and the first quarter of 2013 – under two years. The gap between their own costs and the prices they charge to customers rises constantly. The heads of these companies are rewarded with knighthoods (14) – (16).

This is Thatcherism again. Those who have wealth are assumed always to deserve it, while those who are poor are assumed to be poor because they are lazy or spendthrifts. In reality some of the wealthiest people in Britain started off with wealth or a family with connections to get them jobs on the boards of big firms – and then used their own wealth, or the company’s, or the bank’s, to buy political influence with donations to party funds, effectively exempting their company or their entire sector from any significant regulation. (And no, I’m not saying this is true of anyone who has more money than average, some did work hard for it and take risks and pay their employees fair wages).

Selling off council houses without replacing them –
meaning we have to pay housing benefit for rent for private landlords

She began the sale of council houses, without buying or building replacements. Today, due to the shortage of council houses, councils spend a fortune renting social housing from private landlords or paying housing benefits that go to those landlords in rent.

This is the main reason for high benefits payments to some families – because most of it goes on housing benefit that goes straight into the pocket of private landlords – but David Cameron’s Thatcherite government is capping the benefits payments to people stuck in this situation as if this was their fault, rather than buying and building enough council houses (17).

Every Daily Mail or Sun headline about asylum seekers or people on benefits living in mansions is a result of this policy, begun by Thatcher, but rather than blame her and her successors in government, they blame weak, powerless, easy targets instead.

Thatcher and the Falklands War –
Not a war hero but either incompetent
or else deliberately engineering
a war that wouldn’t have happened otherwise

The attempt to present her as a great war leader in relation to the Falklands, with 800 members of the military to be present at her funeral, is especially hard to reconcile with the historical facts.

When the Argentinians began talking of taking the Falklands in 1977, Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Foreign Secretary David Owen were persuaded by military chiefs to send a Royal Navy fleet to the South Atlantic to signal Britain would fight any invasion. The Argentinians backed down. In a similar situation in 1982 Thatcher’s government withdrew the last Royal Navy ship from the area during spending cuts, leading the Argentine military junta to believe Britain would not fight for the islands (18) – (19). They invaded – and then Thatcher declared war. Hundreds died as a result.

Some suggest that Thatcher, then the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history, after increasing unemployment to over 3 million, wanted a war to restore her popularity (20).

It’s impossible to know whether this was the result of blind ideology in imposing spending cuts and incompetence in not caring where they were made, or whether Thatcher wanted the Argentinians to believe Britain wouldn’t fight in order to get a war to restore her political fortunes. Either way she was responsible for an easily avoidable war and all the deaths in it. By any rational standard she should be condemned for not preventing war as simply and easily as Callaghan did rather than lauded for winning a war against an inferior military.

In the case of the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq, which Thatcher committed British troops to shortly before her party got her to resign over the poll tax, there is no such doubt. The Bush (senior) administration and the Kuwaiti monarchy duped Saddam into war with the US over Kuwait. Bush and his advisers sought to repeat Thatcher’s feat of going from unpopularity on domestic unemployment and recession to election victory on a tide of war fuelled nationalism ; they failed.

The Poll Tax

The poll tax, which resulted in Thatcher’s resignation, was a local council tax under which everyone paid exactly the same amount irrespective of their income. It caused riots the last time it had been tried by an English ruler, in 1381, resulting in the peasants’ revolt. The Conservatives, who supposedly want everyone to know the history of Britain, seemed to be massively ignorant of it – they thought the poll tax was going to be hugely popular. Instead, as in 1381, it brought mass non-payment and riots. Thatcher, whose supporters claim she was acting on behalf of the “ordinary person in the street” showed she had no more clue what many of them wanted than medieval English kings knew of peasants’ needs.

A lover of freedom? Thatcher’s foreign policy

We’re told Thatcher was a “lover of freedom”. This is only true if you interpret freedom in the narrow neo-liberal sense of freedom for companies, banks and those with lots of money to do what they like – pay less tax due to tax cuts, avoid tax through tax havens, avoid regulation, charge customers whatever they want to, etc.

She certainly opposed Communism, but her role in it’s downfall, like Reagan’s, was negligible. Dissidents and protesters in the Soviet bloc did far more, as did Gorbachev – and before him Brezhnev by spending so much on the Soviet military that he drove the USSR’s economy into the ground. Her support for “freedom” elsewhere wasn’t just non-existent – she was supporting , training and arming the forces of many dictatorships.

General Pinochet aided the British war effort by allowing them to use Chilean ports. Thatcher treated him as an honoured friend after that, despite Pinochet having overthrown the elected government of President Salvador Allende in a military coup and having thousands of people tortured and killed.

She condemned Nelson Mandela’s ANC as terrorists and refused to place economic sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, though we are assured that in private she was putting verbal pressure on South African Presidents to free Mandela. Sanctions would have made considerably more difference and much sooner.

Thatcher’s government also provided training, tens of millions of pounds of money and dozens of jet fighter bombers to Mugabe’s military as he was massacring members of the tribes of his political opponents by the thousand. Perence Shiri, one of the officers who headed the genocide was subsequently allowed to come to Britain to train at the Royal Defence College. The massacres were played down by the Foreign Office as “exaggerated” (21) – (22).

She even armed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and right up until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the middle of 1990; including selling him chemicals used as ingredients for chemical weapons, spare parts for tanks and attempting (but failing) to sell him hawk jets which could be used to bomb ground targets (as they later were in Indonesia) while Saddam was using chemical weapons on Iranians and Iraqi Kurds and carrying out his Anfal campaign of genocide against the latter. (23) - (24)

On top of this, British taxpayers ended up having to pay the £1 billion bill for Saddam’s purchases from British arms companies, as after the 1991 Gulf War there was no chance of his government paying – and Thatcher had approved the exports under Export Credit Guarantees  (25).

She signed the Al Yamamah oil for arms deal with the Saudi monarchy, which continues to be an absolute dictatorship imposing a medieval version of Islamic law – and torturing confessions out of suspects before executing them by beheading. Her son Mark Thatcher had a £1 million house purchased for him by a company based on a tax haven and owned by Wafic Said, a dodgy Middle Eastern arms deal broker. Said also gave Mark a £14,000 Rolex watch. Said’s wife donated large amounts to the Conservative party before the 2010 election . Mark Thatcher has denied rumours that he received millions more as part of the deal (26) – (27).

Margaret Thatcher also sent the SAS to train the mass murdering Khmer Rouge’s monarchist allies in laying land mines in the 1980s (28).

Supporting mass murdering dictators, monarchist allies of ultra-nationalist regimes guilty of genocide and governments which gave black people no rights whatsoever seem like strange ways to promote freedom, but then Thatcher never really supported freedom or democracy in the sense that most people use the words.

A Prime Minister who divided Britain – just like Major and Blair and Cameron

Thatcher was the first post-war Prime Minister to divide Britain, largely through strident English nationalism thinly disguised as British nationalism, combined with constant attempts to divide the majority in order to make conquering them easier.

Those who had jobs were encouraged to hate those who were unemployed as supposedly all lazy scroungers, while Thatcher continued to drive unemployment higher and higher. Those who worked in the private sector were told they should disdain public sector employees and trade unions as supposedly selfish “vested interests” – and the working class were encouraged to hate the middle class as effete namby pamby liberals who were meant to be out of touch with reality and had more education than was good for them. Hatred of foreigners, minority nationalities, religions and ethnic groups, as well as refugees and asylum seekers was also encouraged.

This was all continued under Blair to some extent, with opposition to his policies also blamed on the “middle class” as if a bunch of former lawyers who were now on over £100,000 a year ministerial and Prime ministerial salaries weren’t middle class.

Under Cameron we are back to all the divide and conquer tactics used under Thatcher.

Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister did more than anything to boost support for Scottish and Welsh devolution and for independence for Scotland - and this has been cemented by the continuation of many of her policies by her successors.

If Thatcher’s supporters don’t want her death and funeral politicised they should stop trying to use it to re-write history as party political propaganda

The Conservative party claim no-one should denigrate Thatcher’s record at this time. If they didn’t want her death and funeral politicised perhaps they shouldn’t have tried to use it for party political ends and to try to justify their current shameful policy of taking from the disabled, the poor and the unemployed to fund tax cuts for millionaires.

Given the Thatcherite establishment’s shameless rewriting of history, politicisation of her death and funeral and attempt to use it to gain votes, the political opponents of the government have no option but to respond in kind. Margaret Thatcher has thousands of admirers who are senior politicians, journalists and editors telling her version of history and the present. They won’t be allowed to stop the millions of people who oppose Thatcherism, and those who suffered under Thatcher and her legacy under her successors, telling the other side of the story.

(1) = BBC News 08 Apr 2013 ‘David Cameron: Baroness Thatcher 'saved our country'’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22068771

(2) = Telegraph.co.uk 15 Apr 2013 ‘Margaret Thatcher's funeral: it would be extraordinary not to spend so much, says No 10’,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9994872/Margaret-Thatchers-funeral-it-would-be-extraordinary-not-to-spend-so-much-says-No-10.html

(3) = ITV news 16 Apr 2013 ‘Poll: 60% oppose taxpayer funding of Thatcher funeral’,
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-04-13/poll-60-oppose-taxpayer-funding-of-thatcher-funeral/

(4) = BBC News 02 Apr 2013 ‘George Osborne: Benefit critics talk 'ill-informed rubbish'’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21998784

(5) = Office for National Statistics 20 Mar 2013 ‘Labour Market Statistics, March 2013’,  http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/march-2013/statistical-bulletin.html

(6) = Office for National Statistics 20 Mar 2013 ‘Labour Market Statistics, March 2013 - Vacancies’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/march-2013/statistical-bulletin.html#tab-Vacancies

(7) = Guardian 15 Jan 2013 ‘Statistics cast doubt on coalition's '500,000 new jobs' claim’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/15/statistics-doubt-coalition-500000-jobs

(8) = BBC News 03 Apr 2013 ‘George Osborne: Benefit critics talk 'ill-informed rubbish'’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21998784

(9) = Guardian 22 Oct 2012 ‘Extra 10,000 working people a month reliant on housing benefit, says report’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/oct/22/working-people-housing-benefit-report

(10) = Guardian 01 Apr 2013 ‘The day Britain changes: welfare reforms and coalition cuts take effect’,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/mar/31/liberal-conservative-coalition-conservatives

 (11) = Ian Gilmour (1992) ‘Dancing with Dogma – Britain under Thatcherism’, Simon and Schuster, London, 1992, Chapter 4, pages 60 - 65

(12) = Observer 09 Oct 2011 ‘Big Bang's shockwaves left us with today's big bust’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/09/big-bang-1986-city-deregulation-boom-bust

(13) = Ha Joon Chang (2007) ‘Bad Samaritans’, Random House, London, 2008

(14) = Guardian 02 Dec 2011 ‘Big six energy firms face fresh accusations of profiteering’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/02/energy-firms-accusations-profiteering-electricity

(15) = Guardian 12 Apr 2013 ‘Big six energy firms accused of 'cold-blooded profiteering'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/12/big-six-energy-firms-accused-profiteering

(16) = BBC News 31 Dec 2010 ‘New Year Honours: Broughton and Carr business knights’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12093737

(17) = BBC News 15 Apr 2013 ‘Benefit cap 'will encourage people to work'’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22148764

(18) = BBC News 01 Jun 2005 ‘Secret Falklands fleet revealed’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4597581.stm

(19) = Freedman, Lawrence (2005) ‘Official History of the Falklands Campaign Volume 1’,
Routledge, 2005, chapters 8 – 9

(20) = Lenman, B. P. (1992) The Eclipse of Parliament: Appearance and Reality in British Politics since 1914 (London: Edward Arnold)

(21) = Campaign Against The Arms Trade ‘UK Arms Exports to Zimbabwe’ by Emily Mitchell, Section 3, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe , http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/zimbabwe/ and
http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/zimbabwe/#3

(22) = Programme Transcript – Panorama, "The Price of Silence" , RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC 1-10 Mar 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_10_03_02.txt

(23) = Financial Times 29 Jul 1991 ‘Britain Exported Poisonous Gas Ingredients to Iraq’

(24) = Financial Times 30 Dec 2011 ‘UK secretly supplied Saddam’,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/52add2c4-30b4-11e1-9436-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2QfcSoZKo

 (25) = Guardian 28 Feb 2003 ‘How £1bn was lost when Thatcher propped up Saddam’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/28/iraq.politics1

(26) = Guardian 13 Apr 2013 ‘Mark Thatcher's return to the spotlight’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/11/mark-thatcher

(27) = Guardian 28 May 2010 ‘Questions raised over Conservative party donations by businessmen's wives’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/28/donations-tory-wives-businessmen

(28) = Pilger , John (1998) Hidden Agendas Vintage , London , 1998, pages 33-34 , 260-261 of paperback edition

Thatcher’s Falklands War got hundreds killed due either to incompetence or cynical manipulation – Callaghan avoided a war in identical circumstances 5 years earlier by sending a small fleet to the South Atlantic

The attempt to present Margaret Thatcher as a great war leader based on the Falklands War, with 800 members of the military to be present at her funeral, is bizarre once you know the historical facts.

When the Argentinians began talking of taking the Falklands in 1977, Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Foreign Secretary David Owen were persuaded by military chiefs to send a Royal Navy fleet to the South Atlantic to signal Britain would fight any invasion. In a similar situation in 1982 Thatcher’s government withdrew the last Royal Navy ship – the HMS Endurance - from the area during spending cuts, leading the Argentine military junta to believe Britain would not fight for the islands (1) – (2). They invaded – and then Thatcher declared war. Hundreds died as a result.

Some suggest that Thatcher, then the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history to that point, after increasing unemployment by over 50% to over 3 million after promising to reduce it during the 1979 election campaign, wanted a war to restore her popularity (3).

It’s impossible to know whether the decision to recall HMS Endurance was the result of blind ideology in imposing spending cuts and incompetence in not caring where they were made;  or whether Thatcher wanted the Argentinians to believe Britain wouldn’t fight in order to get a war to restore her political fortunes. If the latter she was betraying members of the British armed forces just as much as Blair with Iraq. Either way she was responsible for an easily avoidable war and all the deaths in it. By any rational standard she should be condemned for not preventing war as simply and easily as Callaghan did rather than lauded for winning a war against an inferior military that could have been avoided.

In the case of the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq, which Thatcher committed British troops to shortly before her party got her to resign over the poll tax, there is no such doubt. The Bush (senior) administration and the Kuwaiti monarchy duped Saddam into war with the US over Kuwait. Bush and his advisers sought to repeat Thatcher’s feat of going from unpopularity on domestic unemployment and recession to election victory on a tide of war fuelled nationalism ; they failed.

(1) = BBC News 01 Jun 2005 ‘Secret Falklands fleet revealed’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4597581.stm

(2) = Freedman, Lawrence (2005) ‘Official History of the Falklands Campaign Volume 1’, Routledge, 2005, chapters 8 – 9

(3) = Lenman, B. P. (1992) The Eclipse of Parliament: Appearance and Reality in British Politics since 1914 (London: Edward Arnold)

Time for a debate on the system of private donations to party funds, public schools and Oxford University that creates vile politicians like George Osborne, David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith

Some might say that Chancellor George Osborne's use of the Phillpott case to try to justify taking benefits from the most vulnerable people in the country is a lot like when Bush used 9-11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, or when Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to seize power and carry out the Holocaust - and if that seems like an outrageous statement to any of Osborne's supporters you'll now know how the rest of us feel about Osborne trying to use a psychopath’s crimes to take from the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country (1).

His attacks on the welfare state are morally wrong as they take from the most vulnerable people in the country while cutting taxes for the wealthiest and allowing tax evasion by them, big banks, or big firms through UK government approved tax havens in UK dependencies like the Channel Islands.

On top of that they are economic stupidity, especially in a recession, as people on benefits will spend every penny as they’re struggling to get by, boosting demand in the economy. By comparison tax cuts for the wealthiest will often lead to them saving more money, or transferring it to investments in other countries. So common sense and justice would suggest the government should be increasing taxes on the highest earners, closing down tax havens in UK dependencies and increasing benefits. Instead they’re doing the opposite.

So it’s time we had a debate on the systems of public schools and Oxford University, along with big private donations to political parties from billionaires big banks and big firms, that create vile politicians like David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne who attack the poorest to cut taxes for wealthy donors to party funds – and who try to use the deaths of children at the hands of a lunatic to try to justify this.

Philpott would have been a violent, manipulative and “vile” man whether the welfare state existed or not. George Osborne would also probably be a vile man whether private donations to party funds were allowed or not, but he might not be Chancellor of the Exchequer and he , Cameron and Duncan Smith might not have the power to take from the poorest to give to the richest.

There are plenty of sociopaths who have got to much higher positions than Philpott ever attained – for instance Roger Carr, the head of Centrica, who was given a knighthood for supposed services to the public in 2010 while his energy company is one of those which has been shown by studies by Manchester University to systematically over-charge customers over years. So we have a system where organised theft results in knighthoods.

Tony Blair, who got tens of thousands killed for nothing and ordered British forces to co-operate in US-led torture is similarly rewarded with a paid position as a UN envoy – and his bodyguards and their hotel rooms and flights are paid for at public expense while he works for the dictators of Kazakhstan (where protesters are shot dead) and Kuwait among others as a public relations adviser (4).

Time for a debate on the system that rewards these sociopaths with not just thousands a year but tens of millions and which allows them to gain positions of power so easily.

(1) = guardian.co.uk 04 Apr 2013 ‘Mick Philpott's benefits 'lifestyle' should be questioned, says Osborne’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/04/mick-philpott-benefits-lifestyle-questioned

(2) = BBC News 31 Dec 2010 ‘New Year Honours: Broughton and Carr business knights’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12093737

(3) = Guardian 02 Dec 2011 ‘Big six energy firms face fresh accusations of profiteering’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/02/energy-firms-accusations-profiteering-electricity

(4) = Independent 29 Dec 2011 ‘Bullets, beatings and Blair's brutal friend in Kazakhstan’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bullets-beatings-and-blairs-brutal-friend-in-kazakhstan-6282490.html

Why sanctions on Iraq could have been ended without any war of invasion or occupation ; no threat from Saddam’s regime to Iraqis or other countries existed by 2000; the genocide against the Marsh Arabs was largely over by the late 90s and could have been ended by air strikes in the Southern No-Fly Zone

The tenth anniversary of the Iraq war has seen the repetition of many excuses for the invasion. One of the commonest is that UN sanctions on Iraq killed millions of Iraqi civilians, with the pretence that sanctions which killed millions of Iraqis through shortages of food and medicines couldn’t be lifted or else Saddam’s regime would become a serious threat. Another is that it was necessary to end Saddam's genocides and massacres. These are lies; the US could have stopped Saddam's genocides and massacres but either kept supporting him (while he committed genocide against the Kurds) or did nothing (while he massacred Shia and Marsh Arabs); and sanctions could have been lifted at any time ; here’s why.

Saddam couldn’t even defeat Iran in the 8 year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s; and that was with almost the entire world’s governments supporting him with arms, funding, intelligence and political support. This included as Saddam used chemical weapons on Iranians and in his genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, even after Halabja (see post on this link for sources and more details).

(The Halabja attack used US Apache Bell helicopters, whose sale was approved by the Reagan administration, supposedly for “crop spraying”, even though they already knew Saddam was using chemical weapons (1) – (3). After Halabja the US government issued one statement of condemnation, then continued supporting Saddam and suggested that maybe the Iranians had done it (4).)

Saddam showed during the 1991 war that he didn’t dare to use chemical weapons on other countries or the Iraqi Kurds after 1991. He had chemical warheads for his scud missiles, but only used conventional warheads (5).

He could only massacre Shia rebels and their families in Southern Iraq (including Marsh Arabs) at the end of the 1991 war because Bush senior ordered his troops not to intervene ; a massacre that would never have happened if Bush hadn’t given Iraqis the false impression that his forces would aid them if they rebelled (he actually wanted a military regime to replace Saddam) (for details and sources see this post).

Saddam did carry out one horrific campaign of torture, massacres and genocide against Iraqis after 1991; against the Marsh Arabs and other Shia rebels and their families who fled to the southern marshes in 1991 (6).

However US and British aircraft patrolling the Southern No-Fly Zone could have stopped most of this by bombing Saddam’s artillery, trucks, tanks and bulldozers; but made no attempt to do so, probably for the same reason Bush senior didn’t help the other Shia rebels ; the Marsh Arabs are also mostly Shia and so they were seen as potential allies of Iran (7).

Throughout the 1990s Saddam’s forces shelled Marsh Arab villages and towns with tanks, artillery and mortars, including chemical weapons according to some reports, drained the marshes by diverting rivers, killed many rebels, bulldozed houses, left many civilians to die in deserts; and forcibly relocated most of those who didn’t leave to live elsewhere in Iraq, or weren’t among the unknown number who were killed (one estimate being 120,000), or the estimated 40,000 to 120,000 who fled to Iran (8) – (11).

By comparison dozens of Coalition offensives on Iraqi cities during the occupation killed hundreds of civilians in each assault – e.g  600 in the April 2004 assault on Falluja alone (12). Coalition offensives, Saddam’s earlier campaigns and sectarian fighting had left 2.8 million Iraqis “internally displaced people” (homeless refugees inside Iraq) and 2.2 million refugees in other countries at the highest point (during the occupation in the late 2000s). Today an estimated 1.3 million Iraqis remain “internally displaced” and 1.4 million are refugees in other countries While some have returned home , unfortunately other reasons for the reduced numbers include Iraqi refugees who fled to Syria deciding it’s even more dangerous there (13) – (15).

By the end of the 1990s Saddam’s campaign of genocide against the Marsh Arabs was complete. All but an estimated 20,000 Marsh Arabs were gone from the area they had lived in, compared to an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 in 1991, the last major rebellion being crushed in 1998. Only 1,600 still lived in their traditional reed houses on floating platforms in the marshes (16) – (18).

That’s why Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch concluded in 2004 that the 2003 invasion of Iraq “was not a humanitarian intervention” as no massacres or genocide were being planned or carried out by Saddam’s forces (19).

He could have added that none had been carried out or planned for over a decade. Any war was now bound to kill far, far more Iraqis than Saddam was killing. That’s before we even get into the constant firing on civilians and ambulances in many US offensives on Iraqi cities during the occupation which led western aid workers and Iraqi doctors and civilians to conclude they were being deliberately targeted – e.g Fallujah in April 2004 and in Samarra in October 2004 ; or the US trained Iraqi paramilitary torture and death squads, of which more in my next post  (20) – (21).

(Many Marsh Arabs, who have survived only by becoming bandits or extortionists, also went to war with Coalition forces after the invasion in a rebellion against attempts to disarm them – many joining Al Sadr’s Madhi army or other anti-occupation militias. (22)

Dennis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck, two successive heads of the sanctions programme who resigned in protest over it, said it was not Saddam's regime causing the starvation and shortage of medicines under sanctions, but that the sanctions imposed a limit on oil sales too low to support Iraq’s population ; both opposed the war (23) – (25).

The UN sanctions on Iraq had been demanded by the US and British governments at the end of the 1991 war – a war which began with an invasion of Kuwait which resulted largely from US and Kuwaiti co-operation to put economic pressure on Iraq by slant-drilling across the border into Iraq, by Kuwait exceeding it’s agreed OPEC quotas for oil sales and by it demanding immediate repayment of loans made to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (see this post for sources and details).

We’ve already shown that their reason for not wanting them lifted was not that this would end Saddam’s “containment” and allow him to conquer the Middle East or massacre Iraqi rebels again.

The real reasons were avoiding loss of face; and ensuring US and British firms got oil contracts on favourable terms. The US had punished Saddam in 1991 and put him on their enemies list. If his regime now survived, the US would look weak and this would encourage other governments to defy it.

Even worse, after the 1991 war Saddam had negotiated oil contracts with Russian, French and Chinese oil companies. If sanctions were lifted and Saddam survived in power they would get the oil contracts, with US and British firms excluded.

As the Washington Post reported on the 15th of September 2002 ‘A U.S.-led ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could open a bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq, scuttling oil deals between Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries, and reshuffling world petroleum markets, according to industry officials and leaders of the Iraqi opposition...."It's pretty straightforward," said former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who has been one of the leading advocates of forcing Hussein from power. "France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them." But he added: "If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them."’ (26).

The US however failed to get the Oil Law it wanted the Iraqi parliament to pass during the occupation (it’s main reason for it’s war with the Shia Iraqi nationalist Al Sadr, whose Shia Sadrist MPs joined Sunni parties’ MPs in opposing the oil law;) and as a result failed to get contracts on the terms it wanted for most US oil companies (27).

Anglo-American oil giant BP  has managed to get a very lucrative contract for one giant Iraqi oil field on terms extremely favourable to it ; and is seeking others in Iraqi Kurdistan which is in disputes with the central government in Baghdad over the regional government negotiating oil contracts rather than the central government ; and over how favourable the terms of contracts are to oil companies (28) – (31). BP took over the US oil firm Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana and one of the ‘Seven Sisters’ oil giants) in 2001.

Oil and arms company profits and global power were the US aims in Iraq, not protecting Iraqis or promoting democracy – as I’ll show in my next post on how US and Coalition forces and the new Iraqi government still torture and kill Iraqis using all Saddam’s methods short of actual genocide.

 (1) = Mark  Phythian (1997) Arming Iraq: How the U.S. and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine, Boston: Northeastern University Press

(2) = Washington Post $1.5 Billion in U.S. Sales to Iraq; Technology Products Approved Up to Day Before Invasion’,

(3) = LA Times 13 Feb 1991 ‘Iraq Arms: Big Help From U.S. : Technology was sold with approval--and encouragement--from the Commerce Department but often over Defense officials' objections.’, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-02-13/news/mn-1097_1_commerce-department-approved-millions/3 , page 3 of online version of article

(4) = Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting 01 Sep 2002 ‘The Washington Post's Gas Attack -Today's outrage was yesterday's no big deal’, http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/the-washington-posts-gas-attack/

(5) = Nye , Joseph S. & Smith , Robert K. (1992), ‘After the Storm' , Madison Books , London , 1992 , - pages 211-216 (Nye is a former member of the Clinton administration)

(6) = Chicago Tribune 05 Aug 1993 ‘Briton: Iraq Is Wiping Out Arabs In Marshes’,
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-08-05/news/9308050117_1_marshes-chemical-weapons-arabs ; 3^rd Paragraph ‘She said doctors and other experts aiding the Arabs estimate that 120,000 may die from the terror campaign being waged against them by the regime of Saddam Hussein. There are an estimated 200,000 marsh Arabs, and she said more than 300,000 other people from nearby towns and cities fled to the marshes for refuge when Hussein crushed a Shiite Muslim uprising after the Persian Gulf war.’

(7) = Guardian.co.uk 19 Nov 1998 ‘Rebellion in southern marshes is crushed’ ,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1998/nov/17/2

(8) = See (6) above

(9) = See (7) above

(10) = BBC News 03 Mar 2003 ‘Iraq's 'devastated' Marsh Arabs’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2807821.stm ; 6^th to 7^th paragraphs

(11) = The Oregonian 14 May 2003 ‘IRAQ'S MARSH ARABS, MODERN SUMERIANS’,
http://www.simplysharing.com/sumerians.htm

(12) = Iraq Body Count 26 Oct 2004 ‘No Longer Unknowable: Falluja's April Civilian Toll is 600’, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/press-releases/9/

(13) = Internal Displacement Monitoring Center ‘Iraq: Response still centred on return despite increasing IDP demands for local integration’,  http://www.internal-displacement.org/countries/iraq

(14) = 2013 UNHCR country operations profile – Iraq,
http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e486426.html

(15) = BBC News 29 Oct 2012 ‘Iraqi refugees flee Syrian conflict to return home’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20131033

(16) = Juan Cole (2008) ‘Marsh Arab Rebellion : Grievance, Mafias and Militias in Iraq’ Fourth Wadie Jwaideh Memorial Lecture, (Bloomington, Indiana : Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, 2008),   Page 7,
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/iraq/iraqtribes4.pdf

(17) = BBC News 03 Mar 2003 ‘Iraq's 'devastated' Marsh Arabs’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2807821.stm ; 7^th to 8^th paragrahs

(18) = Guardian.co.uk 19 Nov 1998 ‘Rebellion in southern marshes is crushed’ , http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1998/nov/17/2

(19) = Human Rights Watch 26 Jan 2004 ‘War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention’,
http://www.hrw.org/news/2004/01/25/war-iraq-not-humanitarian-intervention

(20) = BBC News 23 Apr 2004 ‘Picture emerges of Fallujah siege’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3653223.stm

(21) = Independent 04 Oct 2004 ‘Civilians Bear Brunt as Samarra 'Pacified'’,
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1004-02.htm (no longer exists on the Independent newspaper’s website – is this connected to Tony Blair’s biographer and apologist John Rentoul being the paper’s Politics Editor?)

(22) = Juan Cole (2008) ‘Marsh Arab Rebellion : Grievance, Mafias and Militias in Iraq’ Fourth Wadie Jwaideh Memorial Lecture, (Bloomington, Indiana : Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, 2008),   Pages 7-17,
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/iraq/iraqtribes4.pdf

(23) = BBC News 30 Sep 1998 ‘UN official blasts Iraq sanctions’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/183499.stm

(24) = BBC News 14 Feb 2000 ‘UN sanctions rebel resigns’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/642189.stm

(25) = Guardian 29 Nov 2001 ‘The hostage nation - Former UN relief chiefs Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday speak out against an attack on Iraq’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/nov/29/iraq.comment

(26) = Washington Post 15 Sep 2002, 'In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue : U.S. Drillers Eye Huge Petroleum Pool',
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/177755831.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Sep+15%2C+2002&author=Dan+Morgan++and++David+B.+Ottaway&pub=The+Washington+Post&edition=&startpage=A.01&desc=In+Iraqi+War+Scenario%2C+Oil+Is+Key+Issue%3B+U.S.+Drillers+Eye+Huge+Petroleum+Pool ; or read full version at
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0915-03.htm

(27) = Greg Muttitt (2011) ‘Fuel on the Fire – Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq’, Bodley-Head 2011

(28) = Observer 31 Jul 2011 ‘BP 'has gained stranglehold over Iraq' after oilfield deal is rewritten’,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/31/bp-stranglehold-iraq-oilfield-contract

(29) = Wall Street Journal Online 27 Jan 2013 ‘Iraq, BP Considering Kirkuk Field Deal’,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578247013430825632.html

(30) = BBC News 20 Mar 2013 ‘Kurdish oil exports stall in row over revenue-sharing’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21793783

(31) = CNN 12 Dec 2011 ‘Oil power struggle as U.S. leaves Iraq’, http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/12/world/meast/iraq-oil

Joining Politicus

This is just a short post to recommend the Politicus website. It’s a blogging and news website on UK politics which I found out about and joined recently.  Excellent for news and a wide range of political opinions from all kinds of viewpoints ; and you can remove any news or blog source you don’t want to read from your newsfeed on it. You can join here if you like the sound of it ; and if you’re a blogger then after joining you can also apply to add your blog to the newsfeed on the site if you want to.

US polls showed Bush couldn’t have invaded Iraq without Blair’s support ; and the Kosovo war cost at least as many civilian lives as it saved

The common claim by Blair’s supporters that Bush would have invaded Iraq whether Blair had supported the war or not was disproven by polls of Americans before the invasion, which consistently showed around 60% opposed to the US invading Iraq without the support of its allies, while 60 to 80% were in favour if allies supported or participated in the invasion (1).

Bush simply could not have got public support for an invasion if none of the US’s key allies supported the decision and none sent troops – and would practically have guaranteed himself a single term Presidency if he’d invaded without the support of the majority of Americans.

 The support of the British government under Blair, the Australian government under Michael Howard, the Spanish under Aznar and the Portugese government gave Bush enough long established allies supporting the invasion to point to to get public backing.

That’s why Bush held a televised joint press conference with the three main western European Prime ministers who backed the war 4 days before the invasion (2).

This makes David Milliband’s recent claim that Bush was “the worst thing that ever happened to Tony Blair” even more ridiculous. British Prime Ministers do not have to do whatever whoever currently happens to be President of the United States says they should do. Blair had the choice of what to do and chose to parrot Bush and Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s lies and get British troops and Iraqi civilians killed and tortured in a war that cost many lives but saved not one. Senior Labour MPs still talking as though they must do whatever the US government tells them to do suggests any future Labour government could have all the faults Blair’s did (3).

Milliband went on to add another ridiculous claim – that the NATO intervention in Kosovo “saved a lot of lives”. In fact it involved bombing from such high altitudes that it mistakenly killed many of the Albanian refugees it was supposed to protect (4) – (6). It also involved targeting civilian targets like party headquarters, television stations and the centres of towns and bridges on market days in Serbia, killing hundreds of Serb civilians in addition (7) – (11) .

It did have one effect – while before NATO ground forces went in more Albanian civilians were being killed or forced out of their homes by Serb forces or militias than Serb civilians killed by the KLA, afterwards it was mostly Serbian civilians in Kosovo killed or ethnically cleansed by the KLA (who include plenty of terrorists, drug runners and kidnappers; and who were classified by the US state department as a terrorist organisation until shortly before the Kosovo war) (12).

The KLA also disappeared at least 2000 people after the war, mostly Serbs, many having had their organs removed to sell on the black market (13).

When the Blairites can’t even face the truth about their past actions and their effects, how can we possibly trust their judgement to deal with current or future ones? Calling them ‘Walter Mitty types’ (their usual insult for people who disagreed with them, including Dr Kelly) would be an understatement, because Walter Mitty didn’t regularly get large numbers of people killed.

(1) = World Public Opinion ; Regional Issues ; Conflict With Iraq ; Importance of Multilateral Support, http://www.americans-world.org/digest/regional_issues/Conflict_Iraq/multilat_support.cfm

(2) = The American Presidency Project 16 Mar 2003 ‘The President's News Conference With Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso of Portugal, President Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom in the Azores, Portugal’, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62764

(3) = ITV 4 Mar 2013 ‘David Miliband: 'Bush the worst thing to happen to Blair'’,
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-03-04/david-miliband-bush-was-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-blair/

(4) = Knightly, Phillip (2000) ‘The First Casualty’ , Prion, London, pages 501-526

(5) = BBC News Online 15 Apr 1999 ‘Nato Pilot bombed refugees’ ,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/319943.stm

(6) = Independent 17 Apr1999 ‘This atrocity is still a mystery to Nato. Perhaps I can help...’,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/this-atrocity-is-still-a-mystery-to-nato-perhaps-i-can-help-1087593.html

(7) = See (4) above

(8) = guardian.co.uk 31 May 1999 ‘Planes buzzed overhead - and then death came’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/may/31/balkans

(9) = Independent  7 Feb 2000 ‘The bloody truth of how Nato changed the rules to win a 'moral war' in Yugoslavia’,
http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=article&articleid=10344(I’m forced to use a link to another website as The Independent newspaper’s website has not kept any link to this article)

(10) = Guardian 15 Mar 2000 ‘TV's silent warning - 15 died but no apology for bombing broadcasters’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/mar/15/balkans2

(11) = guardian.co.uk 16 May 1999 ‘Was she a human shield or just a Nato mistake?’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/may/16/balkans1

(12) = Independent 24 Nov 1999 ‘Serbs murdered by the hundred since `liberation'’,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/serbs-murdered-by-the-hundred-since-liberation-1128350.html

(13) = Human Rights Watch 04 Apr 2008 ‘Letter to Albanian Authorities Calling for an Investigation into Serbs Missing Since 1999’, http://www.hrw.org/news/2008/04/03/letter-albanian-authorities-calling-investigation-serbs-missing-1999

None of the inquiries that found Blair didn't lie on Iraq were independent - they were all full of political appointees ; John Rentoul and Tony Blair try to pass off political fixes as independent inquires

John Rentoul, Tony Blair’s biographer and mini-me, and politics editor for the Independent,  added another disingenuous denial that Blair and his associates were dishonest about Iraq last September. This time he echoed Blair’s claim that “every independent analysis” has found he did not lie about Iraq (1). Rentoul helps out by specifying what these supposedly independent analyses are

‘Foreign Affairs select committee inquiry, 2003.

Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry, 2003.

Hutton inquiry, 2004.

Butler inquiry, 2004.

General election, 2005.’ (2)

Yet not one of these supposedly “independent” inquiries was actually independent at all – they were all headed by appointees of Blair or had a majority of members appointed by Blair’s government.

The heads of the Hutton and Butler inquiries were appointed by Blair, who also decided what powers they would have, what their remit would be (i.e what they could as about) and what evidence they could and could not see. Not surprising then, since the accused got to appoint the judges, decide the charges and limit what evidence they could see, that the accused was found not guilty on all charges. If all trials were conducted that way, no one would ever be found guilty of anything no matter how much evidence there was of their guilt.

(The Chilcot Inquiry is similarly made up entirely of people who supported the war or who owe their positions in the House of Lords to Blair or Brown)

Parliamentary Select Committees like the Foreign Affairs and intelligence and Security Committees have MPs as members, in proportion to the number of MPs of that party in parliament. As Labour had a big majority after the 2000 General Election, that would mean that in 2003 the majority of MPs on those committees would be Labour – and so not inclined to criticise their own party leader too much. On top of that, in 2003 Select Committee members were still appointed by party leaders – so all the Labour members of those committees were appointed by Blair, so would not be rebels on Iraq. Most other MPs on those committees would be Conservatives – and the vast majority of Conservative MPs voted for the war. So the idea that these were independent inquiries is utterly ridiculous.

Citing the 2005 General election is particularly ludicrous, as an election is not an inquiry into anything ; and as no British general election in the last century has been decided by any foreign policy issue. Many people who voted Labour in 2005 were completely against the Iraq war and thought Blair had lied about it, but voted Labour as they thought Labour were less bad than the Conservatives on domestic policies.

It seems that the Independent newspaper’s politics editor doesn’t know the difference between independent inquiries and political fixes – at least certainly not where his hero Tony Blair is concerned.

(1) = John Rentoul ‘Eagle Eye’ blog 5 Sep 2012 ‘Monbiot: the big coward’,
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/09/05/monbiot-the-big-coward/

(2) = Observer 02 Sep 2012 ‘Tony Blair should face trial over Iraq war, says Desmond Tutu’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/sep/02/tony-blair-iraq-war-desmond-tutu