How Can We Deal With the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons?

There are six options - four military and two non-military - but only one option is viable

Has Iran’s government said it wants to develop nuclear weapons?

No. The problem is not that the Iranians have said they are determined to make nuclear weapons. In fact they’ve said they only intend to use nuclear power for civilian electricity production (thus allowing them to use less oil for this purpose and sell more, boosting their economy). Iran’s religious and political ‘Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Khameini, has also re-issued the late Khomeini’s fatwa condemning the production, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons as ‘un-Islamic’. The problem is that there is no way to verify this is true and many people disbelieve them, especially given elements of Iran’s nuclear programme which it only revealed and gave access to the IAEA in the last few years.

This is exacerbated by statements by past and present Iranian Presidents on the destruction of Israel. The most worrying of these was not actually Ahmadinejad’s but Akbar Rafsanjani’s. To understand both speeches and Iran’s conflict with the US, Britain and Israel we need to look at their history.

Has Iran’s government said it wants to destroy Israel using nuclear weapons ?
Ahmadinejad’s and Rafsanjani’s Qods Day Speeches

This depends on how some of their speeches are interpreted, whether they really mean what they may seem to say and whether the views of current and former Presidents are shared by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini.

In 1979, after the Iranian revolution which overthrew the western backed dictatorship of the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini made a speech on ‘Qods day’, which in Iran is a religious day dedicated to opposing Israel’s control of Jerusalem (Al Quds or Qods being Arabic for Jerusalem). In this speech he said that he hoped ‘the regime which rules over Jerusalem [i.e Israel] will be removed from the pages of time’.

Israel is reviled by Iran’s rulers for at least five main reasons. First because its government were allies of the Shah’s corrupt dictatorship – and are still allies of the US government, which was also allied to the Shah and remain hostile to Iran’s new regime. Second because fundamentalists among Shia Muslims believe all secular government is illegitimate and against God’s will. Third because Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land and kill Palestinians – and many (though not all) Palestinians are Muslims like the Iranian government (though most are Sunnis while Iran’s government is overwhelmingly Shia. Fourth because by backing the Arab Palestinians the (mostly) non-Arab Iranians get support from and influence over Arabs – like the influence they have over Lebanon by backing the Shia group Hezbollah there. Fifth – but not least – because since 1967 Israel has had a growing array of nuclear missiles which, combined with its large US funded and supplied military, make it feared across the Middle East (in fact Israel’s military remains stronger than that of the rest of the Middle East combined, to say nothing of its ally America’s – whose annual military spending exceeds that of the rest of the world combined).

The US and Britain are equally distrusted and feared for their role in the operation by the CIA and MI6 in 1953 which aided Anglo-Persian Oil (now BP) to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq and replace him with the dictatorship of the Shah (who claimed to be a hereditary monarch but in fact was the grandson of a previous military dictator who had been overthrown by the British after he allied himself to Nazi Germany to try to escape the British Empire’s dominance in Iran.)

They also (along with the Chinese, Soviet and most European governments) armed and funded Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1980 Saddam invaded Iran. Even after his gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 the Bush (senior) administration kept funding Saddam under the guise of ‘agricultural aid’, which only ended in October 1990. This made many Iranians feel that the ‘international community’ which backed Saddam for 8 years while he gassed their troops and his own people, is not to be trusted or relied on. It may also have made some of think that having their own nuclear deterrent to prevent others using WMD on them in the future might be worth considering.

So to be seen as ‘soft’ on Israel, the US or Britain in Iran would lose Iranian politicians support just as much as being seen as ‘soft on terrorism’ or ‘soft on rogue states’ would lose Israeli, British or American politicians support.

This is probably the main reason why Iranian politicians have made a speech including a similar call to Khomeini’s for Israel to be ‘removed from the pages of time’ every year on the same day. Ahmadinejad as President quoted Khomeini on this in his Qods day speech in 200?. This followed a passage in Ahmadinejad’s speech in which he said the Soviet Union and the Apartheid government in South Africa no longer existed – and in an interview on French television he later clarified that he had meant he hoped Israel would cease to exist in the same way the Soviet Union and Apartheid had – through a peaceful referendum of all ‘Palestinians…Christian, Jewish and Muslim’. However the ‘wipe Israel off the map’ translation had already been widely disseminated – and even confirmed by some over-zealous PR men working for the Iranian President.

Supreme Leader Khameini and even some officials of the Iranian foreign ministry (whose ministers are appointed by the President) immediately said that if Ahmadinejad had said Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’ he did not speak for the Iranian government. (another widespread misconception is that Iranian Presidents are powerful – in fact the Presidency is a very weak office in the Iranian system, has no control of the military and certainly would not decide whether Iran developed nuclear weapons, much less have the power to use them – those powers lie with the unelected ‘Supreme Leader’)

Rafsanjani’s speech in 2002 was less reported but actually more worrying. Rafsanjani is a former Iranian president and a political rival of Ahmadinejad’s who has been highly critical of Ahmadinejad’s intransigence on the nuclear issue and has long been seen as a ‘moderate’ advocating compromise and negotiations with ‘the West’. By 2007 he had been elected to the chairmanship of several of Iran’s governing councils which are second only to the ‘Supreme Leader’ in influence and power. (Iran’s system of government has one similarity to America’s – there are many different centres of power in it which each act as checks and balances on the others, the difference being that the strongest, the Supreme Leader (equivalent to the President in the US) is unelected and the holder must be an ‘Ayatollah’).

Rafsanjani said that

‘Because colonialism and imperialism will not easily leave the people of the world alone. Therefore, you can see that they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favours Israel…They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel…They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.

If one day ... Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.’

There are two elements to this speech – one is the conventional and WMD threat from Israel, which is both worrying to Iranians, who have no nuclear deterrent and is useful to Iran’s government in directing Iranians’ attention outwards to external threats as opposed to the actions (and oppression) of their own government.

The other is more ambiguous and potentially very worrying. It could be interpreted as meaning that if an Islamic country (such as Iran) develops nuclear weapons then a Cold war style stalemate would develop – or it could be interpreted as saying that if Iran developed nuclear weapons it could use them on Israel (a relatively small country in size and population, though not in military power) and destroy it without having to worry too much about the retaliation.

Since the US possesses an arsenal of thousands of inter continental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads and would certainly use them on Iran if Iran used nuclear weapons on Israel this speech seems at first glance to bolster the claims of those who say Iran’s regime is suicidal and irrational.

However there is actually nothing unprecedented in Rafsanjani’s statements. During the Cold War Chinese Communist leaders frequently claimed that in the event of nuclear war they could win as they had a larger population and land mass than the US or Russia and could afford to lose tens of millions of people and survive. Yet nuclear war never came. Rafsanjani’s statements may well be a similar attempt at deterrence – we shouldn’t forget that from many Iranians’ point of view the problem is how to deter us from attacking them directly or (as in 1953 and the Iran-Iraq war) by proxies. Even if they aren’t Iran’s government will realize that while “the Islamic world” might survive a US counter-strike, Iran would not.

What are the Options to meet the potential Iranian nuclear threat to Israel and are any of them viable?

The first option is the one followed so far – to use sanctions and diplomacy to try to get the Iranian government to stop enriching Uranium and agree to only use uranium refined for them by other countries (such as Russia) to ensure it isn’t enriched to a level that would allow it to be used to produce nuclear warheads. This is a reasonable option on the face of it but the trouble is that there is no way to verify whether the Iranian government were genuinely complying or not if they did accept the offer – and so far they’ve refused the offer in any case.

There’s also a serious question mark over whether any level of access for IAEA inspectors would be accepted by the US and Israeli governments as proving Iran wasn’t trying to develop nuclear weapons. In Iraq in 2002-2003 the Bush administration invaded despite UNMOVIC weapons inspectors saying they were being granted access to all the sites they requested to say and despite them being in the middle of overseeing the destruction of Saddam’s longest ranged missiles (those with a range of just over 150 kilometres) when war was declared. (In fact the original withdrawal of the previous inspection teams in 1998 was not – as often wrongly stated – due to Saddam’s regime expelling them from the country but actually due to impending Anglo-American air strikes. After these Saddam refused to allow inspectors back into the country as he suspected the inspection teams had been infiltrated by CIA agents who were identifying sites for bombing in the 1998 ‘Operation Desert Fox’ – and in fact some members of the UNSCOM teams admitted this had been the case).

Sanctions and diplomacy to secure inspections or persuade Iran’s government to agree to enrichment by a third country are not a bad thing in themselves, but they will provide no guarantee that the US or Israel won’t attack Iran even if the Iranians are complying with their demands, partly because elements in both governments have ulterior motives (regional dominance in the case of Israel and control of the second largest proven oil reserves in the world plus global hegemony in the case of the US) and partly because it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to be certain whether the Iranians would secretly continue enrichment for nuclear weapons.

This is especially the case because currently the logic, following that in Iraq, is that if sanctions and diplomacy ‘fail’, all options are potentially on the table as Bush and Rice have put it. That means war in one form or another – and as we’ll see these military options are unlikely to be effective in securing an end to Iran’s nuclear programme and would have many other serious negative consequences (not least large numbers of civilian deaths and a boost in support for hardliners and extremists at the expense of moderates in Iran and across the Islamic world, possibly including more Iranian style Islamic revolutions.)

The Four Military Options
– Why none of them would work and all of them would make things worse

The second option, if sanctions and diplomacy fail, or the US and Israeli governments claim they have failed, would be the first military one - limited airstrikes and missile strikes on suspected or known nuclear sites in Iran. Military experts have pointed out that this would be unlikely to do more than delay Iran developing nuclear weapons for 5 to 7 years at most if it continued to want them. Morally this option is likely to result in civilian casualties. This would also be certain to give a boost to hardline Islamic fundamentalists and nationalists in Iran and weaken the position of democrats and those wanting to negotiate with the west – just as the September 11th attacks increased Christian fundamentalism and nationalism in America, made even liberals rally behind the Bush administration and allowed them to paint the opposition as ‘unpatriotic’ or even ‘traitors’. As a result it would make Iran more likely to develop nuclear weapons and strengthen support for extremists who might actually consider using them. This is obvious from the election of Ahmadinejad, whose campaign gained a boost from the US invasion of Iraq and US and Israeli threats to attack Iran next.

It would also be likely to increase support for anti-American and Islamic fundamentalist groups worldwide – especially those in Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapons and even many Islamic fundamentalists in its military and military intelligence.

It would result in Iranian counter-attacks – probably the closure of the straits of Hormuz, pushing up oil prices further and possibly even missile attacks on our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran would definitely step up arms supplies to insurgents in both those countries – and Hezbollah and Israel would probably end up at war again as they were in 2006, causing many casualties, mostly civilians, in both Lebanon and Israel again.

The third option would be an air campaign combined with a ground invasion of ‘regime change’ as in Iraq. We’ve already seen the disastrous effects of this – and despite upbeat talk by General Petraeus and others it continues to result in the deaths of many Iraqi civilians killed in fighting between pro and anti government and occupation forces, is still increasing membership of extremist groups and sectarian and criminal violence and additionally causing deaths due to There had been systematic torture by coalition forces as well as by Iraqi government police and military – who use the same methods employed under Saddam. In addition many Iraqis are suffering hunger and malnutrition on a scale unseen even under sanctions and Saddam and from dysentery caused by lack of clean drinking water (an epidemic of a disease unknown in Iraq even under Saddam). So we can safely say that, as in Iraq, an invasion, regime change and occupation would make things worse rather than better – even taking into account the brutality of the Iranian government which includes the torture and murder of critics of the government and even in one case the killing of a woman by religious police for the “crime” of holding her fiancée’s hand in public.

The fourth option would be to use a massive campaign of bombing and missile strikes from air and sea to destroy Iran’s economy in order to weaken it to the point that it couldn’t afford to produce nuclear weapons. This would be morally highly questionable and the other negative effects would be the same as those for the second option, but on an even larger scale, with Islamist revolutions likely across the Muslim world – including in nuclear armed Pakistan. It might not even prevent the Iranian government putting all its remaining resources into developing nuclear arms.

The fifth option would be to destroy Iran and its people entirely with massive nuclear strikes on the grounds that it's them or the Israelis. This would certainly end Iran's nuclear programme, but only by committing a crime as terrible as the one it would be designed to prevent (the possible future nuclear annihilation of Israel by Iran) with additional negative effects as for the third option above. Luckily the sixth option makes it totally un-necessary.

The Best Option? – Deterrence and negotiations

The sixth option is simply to deter Iran by making it clear (as has been done many times already) that if Iran was to develop nuclear weapons and use them on Israel then France, the UK, the US (and possibly even Russia) would respond by massive nuclear strikes on Iran which would ensure it would not survive either – and that the same would result from any nuclear attack on Israel by Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah.

This could be combined with peace negotiations between Iran, Israel and the US along with separate but simultaneous Israeli-Palestinian-Arab negotiations on solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the enduring hostility between Israel and some Arab states.

Some will immediately object that Iran cannot be deterred.

Can Iran be Deterred by the nuclear arsenals of Israel’s allies?

Iran’s government is supposedly uniquely irrational because it has a religious ideology which will make it commit national suicide, something which, the argument goes, no secular regime would do. This argument is full of holes though. During the Cuban missile crisis several high ranking generals and advisers to President Kennedy pushed for him to order a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union by the US as the only way America could ‘win’ the ‘inevitable’ nuclear war. Kennedy, luckily for all of us, refused – but it showed that secular nationalists can be every bit as extreme and irrational as the most extreme religious fanatics. It also showed that while there were some elements in the US and Soviet government and military who were irrational enough to push for collective suicide the majority reined these extremists in and vetoed this insanity.

The history of the Iranian government since 1979 suggests exactly the same is true of ‘the Ayatollahs’. When, in 1988, an American ship misidentified an Iranian passenger plane as a military one and shot it down the Iranians believed this had been a deliberate act signaling that US forces were about to join in the Iran-Iraq war on the Iraqi side. They were wrong – but the decision that followed from their mistake was entirely rational. Almost the entire Iranian military, religious and political establishment lobbied Khomeini to negotiate peace before the Islamic Republic’s government was defeated and overthrown. Khomeini agreed. Those who persuaded him included Ali Khameini – now the Supreme Leader, who is Commander in Chief of Iran’s military and would have his finger on the nuclear trigger if Iran ever developed nuclear weapons ; Rafsanjani (now one of the most influential politicians in Iran, elected to chair several Governing councils),– and the officers of the Revolutionary Guards (of which President Ahmadinejad is a former member).

In 2003, after the US defeated the Iraqi military in a matter of weeks, the Iranian government (with the approval of Khamenei as ‘Supreme Leader’) made offers of negotiations to both the Israeli and US governments on a comprehensive peace settlement covering signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, giving full IAEA access to nuclear sites, putting a freeze on the nuclear programme, recognizing Israel, ending Iranian supplies of arms and training to Hamas and Hezbollah

Once again they were willing to compromise to preserve their own power or security. Many in all three governments were for going ahead with negotiations. Yet Sharon and the neo-conservatives among the Bush administration refused any negotiations, arguing that they could extract all the Iranian government had offered and more by force without making any concessions.

Saddam, who was also supposedly too mentally unstable to be allowed WMDs, did not use them when he did have them – because deterrence worked on his regime too. In 1991 he had chemical warheads for his scud missiles – but he didn’t use any of them on in his missile attacks on Israel or coalition forces – because the Bush senior administration had made it clear that if he did the response from the US would be massive and nuclear.

Deluded or brave individuals may be persuaded into committing suicide for the good or their religion or nation (depending on your viewpoint and the exact form of the suicidal mission) but there has never been an entire nation or an entire government and military which will permit some of its members to bring national suicide on all of them. Japanese troops were often willing to die ‘for the Emperor’ on the ground or as kamikaze pilots – but when Japan’s fleet and air force were defeated and its main islands empty of troops the Emperor began suing for peace – even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So deterrence can work between Iran and Israel and its’ allies just as it worked between the Soviets and NATO in the Cold War.

The current President of North Korea and his predecessor have been notoriously irrational and ideologically extreme – and North Korea, unlike Iran, actually has nuclear weapons and middle to long range missiles capable of delivering them at least to Japan and possibly to the US and has carried out tests of them firing over Japan. Yet the Bush administration has accepted that the North Korean government can be deterred from using these weapons and possibly persuaded to renounce them through concessions offered in negotiations. So why the refusal to take the same position on Iran?

Deterrence is the only option which can give a pretty solid guarantee of safety for Israel and the world. All of the others fail to provide any guarantee of safety while actually increasing the threat – and resulting in the deaths of many more civilians and soldiers than would otherwise be the case.

The Other Benefits of using Deterrence rather than
‘pre-emptive’ Military Strikes or the threat of them

Focusing on our ability to deter any possible future nuclear strike on Israel by Iran (or vice-versa) would also allow us to stop threatening pointless ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘last ditch’ military attacks on Iran to prevent it developing nuclear weapons – which, as we’ve seen, couldn’t achieve that aim anyway and would make things rapidly worse.

These threats of military action have a similar effect on Iranian public opinion to the one that perceived external threats – such as Al Qaeda – have on western public opinion. They strengthen the position of the current Iranian government and boost hardliners and extremists against those who favour greater democracy and negotiations with Israel, the US and the West – who can be painted as ‘unpatriotic’ or even ‘traitors’ and ‘foreign agents’ by the current regime – much as the Bush administration and its supporters (including American nationalists and Christian fundamentalists) have done with critics labelled ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’ in the US.

copyright©Duncan McFarlane2008

Blair's Recycled Propaganda

Tony Blair has now claimed in a speech to his old ally Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg (the mayor of New York) that people are wrong to think that Islamic terrorist attacks have been “provoked” by our governments (1).

(You can see a video of the speech on this link)

It’s not that Blair’s and Bush’s government’s have “provoked” Islamic terrorist groups. It’s that they’ve created more recruits for them who want revenge for the many thousands of Muslim civilians killed as collateral damage, in war crimes and by systematic torture by NATO and coalition forces. Mr. Blair is fond of claiming that it’s not “our troops” that are killing and torturing civilians it’s the people they’re fighting. In January 2007 he claimed “It's not British and American soldiers that are killing innocent people, we're trying to protect innocent people.” (2)

Yet in Afghanistan this year
NATO air-strikes have killed more civilians than the Taliban (3). It was British troops who beat Iraqi waiter and father of three Baha Mousa to death and tortured the civilians taken prisoner with him on suspicion of being insurgents (4), (5), (6). Neither that nor Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents as Amnesty International , Human Rights Watch , Iraqis and dozens of British and American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan report (7), (8), (9), (10), (11). The officer who oversaw Mousa’s torture has been promoted and is training new recruits (12). In the November 2004 coalition assault on Fallujah Iraqis and western journalists and aid workers – said American snipers shot civilians and ambulances (14), (15), (16), (17). Civilians were killed the same way in Samarra, with half the dead women and children (18). More recently 15 civilians including 9 children were killed in a US air strike in Iraq (19). These are just a few examples out of many. US Government Accountability Office statistics show that in the majority of cases neither coalition troops nor insurgents are targeting civilians (20). The fact remains both kill them in large numbers, usually as collateral damage due, sometimes – as in some suicide bombings and the massacre by US troops in Haditha, deliberately (21).

Yet instead of asking forgiveness for their involvement in supporting war crimes and systematic torture Blair and Murdoch pat one another on the back and call for another war on another country. US-led wars are not only killing as many civilians as Islamic terrorists they are also giving these terrorist groups more recruits.

They increase support for Al Qa’ida the same way September 11th gave more support to extreme nationalists like Cheney and Christian fundamentalists in the US. Bombing Iran would also kill civilians and have a similar effect on Iranian public opinion – boosting support for Islamic fundamentalists and extreme nationalists.

As Condoleeza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 nuclear deterrence does work against “rogue states” like Iraq under Saddam and Iran now (22). Saddam did not use chemical warheads for his scuds in 1991 when he did have them because he was deterred by the nuclear arsenals of the US and Israel (23). Iran’s government would never use nuclear weapons on a nuclear armed Israel with a nuclear armed US ally for the same reason, even if it developed them. The “threat” posed by Iran’s nuclear programme is as mythical as that of Saddam’s WMDs.

It would also be nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with controlling Iran’s oil – just like the 1953 coup backed by the CIA and MI6 which overthrew the elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq for attempting to nationalise Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP) in Iran (24), (25), (26) ; but then Blair doesn’t even know who Mossadeq , the most famous Iranian politician in Iran's entire history, was.

It's not the 20s or 30s we're in Mr. Blair (unless you mean the growing fascist culture on the right of American politics with Iraq as Czechoslovakia and Iran as Poland) - it's much more similar to 1953.

The risks of bombing Iran (not least to Iranian civilians) are vast. The risks posed by Iran developing a nuclear deterrent are non-existent. Iranians are under far more threat of attack by the US and Israeli governments than Israelis are from Iran’s government.

As for Blair’s accusations that Iran is “prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace”, what about the Bush administration’s co-operation with the torturing dictators of Saudi Arabia to fund and arm Sunni terrorist groups like Jundullah in Pakistan in its terrorist attacks inside Iran or for Sunni terrorist groups who target Shia and Christians in Lebanon as reported by ABC News and by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker? (27), (28) For that matter what about US and British forces’ killing and torture of civilians on the orders of their superiors and governments in war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

We should remember the thousands of innocent people killed on September 11th. We should also remember the tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed since, as many by US and British air-strikes, torture and snipers in Afghanistan and Iraq as by the Taliban or suicide bombers. We should also remember the thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli bombs and shells supplied by the US via British airbases as much as the Israeli civilians killed by Iranian supplied rockets fired by Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist groups.

Listening to another word Tony Blair has to say on fighting terrorism and threats to lives and democracy would be as pointless as listening to Bin Laden. These people and their simple minded irresponsible warmongering are the problem not the solution.

If you really want to end the terrorism Iran backs which has been carried out by Hamas and Palestinian groups against Israeli civilians Tony then start opposing the occupation of Palestinian territory by Israeli forces, the killing of Palestinian civilians by them and the starvation of the entire population of Gaza through sanctions which you have supported.

As for Rudy Giuliani trying to link Iran to Al Qaeda that’s about as convincing as the same nonsense about Saddam. Al Qa’ida are Sunni extremists who consider Shia to be apostates who should be killed. The Iranian government are Shia. In the popular American phrase “do the math” Rudy – Iran aren’t aiding Al Qa’ida.



(1) = Guardian Unlimited 19 Oct 2007, 11.30 am update, ‘Blair accuses Iran of fuelling 'deadly ideology' of militant Islam’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2195043,00.html

(2) = BBC News 16 Jan 2007, ‘UN marks soaring Iraq death toll’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6266393.stm (see under heading ‘Sectarian Clashes’)

(3) = USA Today 24 Jun 2007, ‘Afghan civilians reportedly killed more by U.S., NATO than insurgents’, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-06-24-karzai_N.htm

(4) = Amnesty International 15 March 2007 , ‘United Kingdom Court Martial acquittals: many questions remain unanswered and further action required to ensure justice’, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engEUR450052007?open&of=eng-GBR (see set of bullet points half way down page)

(5) = Scotsman 19 May 2004 - ‘Soldiers 'took turns to beat Iraqi captives'' - http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=404&id=199022004 (quotes a soldier testifying in court that he saw soldiers take turns to kick and bunch captives and that their screams kept soldiers in neighbouring barracks awake )

(6) = Guardian 21 Feb 2004 ‘They were kicking us, laughing. It was a great pleasure for them’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1153011,00.html
(quotes surviving Iraqis tortured along with Mousa)

(7) = Amnesty International 1 Nov 2005 ‘TORTURE AND ILL-TREATMENT IN THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’’, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engact400142005

(8) = Amnesty International 6 Mar 2006 - ‘Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq' - http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde140012006

(9) = Human Rights Watch World Report 2006 - ‘Torture and Inhumane Treatment: A Deliberate U.S. Policy’ - http://hrw.org/wr2k6/introduction/2.htm#_Toc121910421

(10) = The Independent 27 Feb 2007 - ‘UK troops 'beat relatives of Camp Breadbasket captives'' - http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article13069.ece

(11) = Washington Post Wednesday, September 28, 2005; A21,‘ A Matter of Honor’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527_pf.html

(12) = Panorama programme transcript BBC One 13 Mar 2007 - ‘A Good Kicking ' - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6455113.stm

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

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

(15) = Guardian 17 Apr 2004, ‘Getting aid past US snipers is impossible’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1193717,00.html

(16) = Guardian 19 Apr 2004, ‘Children hit by 'random shooting'’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1194878,00.html

(17) = BBC News Online 11 November 2004 , ‘Eyewitness: Smoke and corpses’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4004873.stm

(18) = The Independent 04 October 2004 , ‘Civilians bear brunt as Samarra 'pacified'’,
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article39655.ece ( Part of 5th paragraph reads ‘Of 70 bodies brought into Samarra General Hospital, 23 were children and 18 women, said Abdul-Nasser Hamed Yassin, a hospital administrator. There were also 23 women among the 160 wounded….. from 6th paragraph ‘Another resident, Mohammed Ali Amin, said: "There were American snipers on rooftops who were shooting people trying to get to their homes. Even at the hospital the Americans arrested injured boys of 15 saying they were insurgents.’)

(19) Guardian 12 Oct 2007, ‘UN calls for US to publish facts on Iraqi deaths’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2189559,00.html

(20) = United States Government Accountability Office 23 Apr 2007, GAO-07-525T , ‘STABILIZING AND REBUILDING IRAQ’, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07525t.pdf - see table on page 7 'ENEMY-INITIATED ATTACKS AGAINST THE COALITION AND ITS PARTNERS'.

(21) = Guardian 22 Dec 2006, ‘Four US marines charged with Iraq murders’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329669554-103681,00.html

(22) = Rice, Condoleeza (2000) in Foreign Affairs January/February 2000‘ - 'Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest' http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20000101faessay5-p50/condoleezza-rice/campaign-2000-promoting-the-national-interest.html

(23) = Nye , Joseph S. & Smith , Robert K. (1992), ‘After the Storm' , Madison Books , London , 1992 , - pages 211-216 (Nye is a former CIA officer)

(24) = Pollack, Kenneth M.(2004), ‘The Persian Puzzle', Random House, New York, 2005 paperback edition - pages 27-140
(25) = Curtis, Mark (1995), ‘The Ambiguities of Power : British Foreign Policy since 1945', Zed Books, London & New York, 1995 paperback edition - pages 87-96

(26) = Takeyh, Ray (2006), ‘Hidden Iran', Times Books , New York, 2006 - pages 83-96

(27) = ABC News 03 Apr 2007, ‘ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran’,
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/04/abc_news_exclus.html

(28) = New Yorker magazine ‘The Re-direction’ by Seymour Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

Murky Waters - The Dispute over the British sailors held by Iran is not as clear cut as Blair has suggested

Craig Murray, (who was head of the Maritime Unit of the British Foreign Office from 1989 to 1992), has pointed out that while in theory the Conventions on the Laws of the Sea fix international maritime boundaries at 12 miles from a country's coast , or else half-way between two countries' coasts (whichever is less) in practice this isn't so simple.

Due to disputed sandbanks and islands and the irregular shape of coastlines( which create disputes over what triangulation points to measure from on each coast) the only way to decide where the maritime boundaries between Iran and Iraq are would be through negotiating fixed boundaries – which have not been negotiated in the disputed waters our sailors were taken captive in.

The Royal Navy commander of the operation in which our sailors and marines were taken captive told the BBC in an interview

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters. Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in their territorial waters. The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated.” ( BBC video here )

Murray also points out that an article in the US military's Stars and Stripes Magazine in October last year quoted a US naval task force commander in the Persian Gulf saying “No maritime border has been agreed upon by the two countries”.

The same article says “Bumping into” the Iranians can’t be helped in the northern Persian Gulf, where the lines between Iraqi and Iranian territorial water are blurred, officials said.”

This means all the maps and GPS co-ordinates provided by both the British and the Iranians prove nothing - because any boundary lines they mark are completely arbitrary and could easily be disputed in the absence of a carefully negotiated maritime boundary which does not exist in those waters

Ahmadenijad or the Revolutionary Guards may have planned to swap our sailors for the Iranians held by the US. The US government has ruled this out.

However Ahmadenijad may be looking to gain prestige among Iranians by being seen to stand up to Britain as the former colonial power since he’s under pressure from striking bus drivers and teachers (whose union leaders he has disgracefully jailed after sending police to beat demonstrating teachers) and from political rivals such as Rafsanjani – who has said he and the Guardian Council may take over Iran’s economic policy - which Rafsanjani says Ahamadenijad has failed on.

There is , as Murray says, no excuse for the Iranians holding our sailors as long as they have – but if our government would admit that the waters they were in were disputed and issue an apology of sorts (whether we are morally obliged to or not) we would have a better chance of getting our people back. Prestige may be enough for Ahmadenijad here.

Those who suggest sanctions or military action risk making Ahmadenijad even more popular as many Iranians still distrust the US and UK due to our governments’ role in supporting the Shah’s coup which overthrew the popular elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953. The British and American governments also supported the Shah's dictatorship till its overthrow in 1979. The current Iranian government has a bad human rights record - but the Shah was even worse. There are at least some limited elements of democracy in modern Iran - and dissidents, even among the Ayatollahs, who reject the position of the 'Supreme Leader' as un-Islamic and demand more democracy. War or military strikes on Iran would weaken them and strengthen the theocratic elements. It couldn't prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons sooner or later either.

What’s more Israel, with US equipment and training and with considerable armour, artillery and air forces Hezbollah lacked , failed to defeat the Iranian backed Hezbollah and the IDF took heavy casualties in a war over Israeli soldiers taken captive by Hezbollah last year. There is no guarantee the US and UK would do better against Iran which has an air force – particularly with Shia militias and Sunni insurgents in Baghdad and across Southern Iraq behind our forces.

An SAS operation to free the hostages has been one of the wilder suggestions by the British government's critics - though not even the Conservative opposition support it. The way US special forces ended up failing in a similar attempt under President Carter should give pause for though - as should the fact that we still have staff in our embassy in Iran and lots more sailors and marines in the Gulf.

We should do a deal or apologise if necessary (whether we're in the right or the wrong is less important than our sailors' lives are) then get all our troops out of Iraq before the Bush administration or Ahmadinejad can use them as pawns again.

Budget response March 2007 – Stealing from the majority to give to the wealthiest

The minimum wage and the 10% tax rate for low earners were the only progressive things Brown ever introduced as Chancellor.

Now he's scrapped the 10% tax rate - doubling taxation on low earners - in order to give a 2 % tax cut to big companies and a small tax cut to everyone on above average incomes . If that’s fairness I’m the Dalai Lama’s attractive cousin.

Of course Brown will tell you about tax credits for low income families – but the amount of time and trouble involved in filling out the ridiculously complex forms to claim these means that many people on low incomes don’t have the time or energy left after work to complete them – so many ‘tax credits’ never get claimed or paid out

Of course Brown will tell you about tax credits for low income families – but the amount of time and trouble involved in filling out the ridiculously complex forms to claim these means that many people on low incomes don’t have the time or energy left after work to complete them – so many ‘tax credits’ never get claimed or paid out (between 7% and 20% even on the treasury's (biased) estimates).

Parliament's Public Accounts Committee say the tax credits system is complicated and frustratingly arcane . Many low income earners don't claim as a result. Every year billions in tax credits goes unclaimed. It's estimated that
£2.3 billion will go unclaimed this year. If people on low incomes are single and without children they won't qualify for enough credits to cancel the doubling of their tax rates anyway.

The governmenthas even been so confused by the complexity its own system that it paid out too much to some low income families - then demanded it all back , by which time it caused serious financial hardship for people who had budgeted with money the government now told them they didnt have. The over-complicated system also facilitates fraud. The government writes off around £1bn in over-payments and fraudulent tax credit claims each year.

The obvious solution is to cut or abolish income tax for people on low incomes. That would mean they actually got their tax reduced in reality rather than just in treasury theories. It would also eliminate much of the fraud facilitated by a system so complex treasury officials don't even know who is entitled to what.

Brown has made it crystal clear that like Blair and Cameron his only real commitment is to his own ambition by discarding people struggling to make ends meet while he laughs and jokes.

He did nothing to oppose the Iraq war in which so many of our soldiers and so many Iraqis have died for nothing and agreed to provide "whatever it took" in spending to continue that disaster. If that's fiscal prudence then I'm the King of Siam.

The £14bn extra for the NHS would be good if it wasn't going to go straight into the pockets of PFI /PPPP investors and executives and as a result increase annual costs on the NHS so that new hospitals with less beds and staff than the old ones they replace will mean taxes increasing and services being cut again to provide more income for the already over-paid at the expense of everyone else. That is not fiscal prudence. That's subsidising the very very wealthy tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority again. If that’s fiscal prudence or fairness I’m a four-armed six-legged re-incarnation of the Emperor Haile Sellassie of Ethiopia reborn in cyborg form with built in anti-aircraft weaponry.

Brown's shown again and again that when the choice is between his ambition and other people's lives or suffering its his ambition he cares about.

Most other current and potential candidates for Labour leader have the same policies - so do Cameron and the Tories. No wonder Brown's 15 points behind even the con man Cameron in the polls.

The most popular candidate for Labour leader who would scrap all these disastrous policies is John McDonnell MP. You can read his response to the budget on the New Statesman website here.

Starving Afghanistan into the hands of the Taliban:

Why pushing the Afghan government into a poppy eradication policy won’t end the heroin trade - and the legal alternative that could

The disastrous policy of pressuring the Afghan government to destroy poppy crops without providing any alternative source of income for Afghans – many of whom are still starving to death as I type this – shows no signs of changing unless we all put pressure on our governments to change it.

This policy has inevitably pushed many farmers in Southern Afghanistan into the arms of the Taliban or hiring gunmen to protect their crops. After all if the choice is starving to death – and watching your children starve to death - to obey a government that provides you with nothing and seeks to destroy your only source of income – or else disobeying and even defending your crops by force which would you choose?

That’s one of the reasons that British troops are also being killed in Afghanistan – because our government wasn’t prepared to consider alternative strategies such as the obvious one suggested by the excellent Senlis Council report on Afghanistan. That alternative is to buy the poppy crop and use it to produce opiate based painkillers - which are in short supply. Of course the Bush administration haven’t been too keen on this. They're great abstract moralists (and the Republican party gets campaign donations from the big pharmaceutical companies who profit from high prices of painkillers due to restricted supplies of opium

If our government , former Defence Minister John Reid and current defence minister Des Browne were really supporting our troops surely they’d be questioning this policy though? In fact they haven’t. ‘Outspoken’, ‘straight talking’ John Reid never uttered a word , never changed the policy.

It seems when it comes to clashing with the Prime Minister or the Bush administration over strategies which are bound to fail and so lead to out troops dying for nothing he just isn’t willing to speak out or talk straight – and isn’t a safe pair of hands at all.

Des Browne – the current defence minister – has emphasised that British troops aren’t carrying out the eradication of poppy crops. That’s quite true. They’re not. The people mainly involved in actually destroying poppy crops are Afghan government forces. The Afghan government’s motives are first that the American and British governments have put pressure on them to end the heroin trade and second that the Taliban and other warlords take a significant share of the profits in the form of protection money used to buy arms and pay fighters.

Yet we’re told that criticising this policy – which was bound to fail from the first (if you destroy the only source of income a country has without providing an alternative they’re not going to all accept it gratefully) is in Des Browne’s phrase ‘undermining the troops’. So continuing to support a self-defeating strategy that’s increasing the number of Afghans who are fighting our troops is ‘supporting’ them – while saying that we should either switch to a strategy of licensing of poppy crops for sale as painkillers and negotiate a peace that stops our troops being killed for nothing is ‘undermining’ them?

If we offered a better price for poppy crops to produce opiate painkillers than the black market offers for heroin almost none of it would become heroin at all – and half the fighters hired by farmers to protect their crops from us wouldn’t be fighting our troops. We could even fund the construction of pharmaceutical factories in Afghanistan to give Afghans legal export earnings and jobs in a highly profitable and legal industry.

It’s not as though we’re reducing heroin production – in fact it increased in Afghanistan by over 1000% between the invasion of October 2001 and the start of 2003. Past efforts at drug crop eradication in other countries have failed utterly – as in Colombia – or simply led to the relocation of production to other countries (e.g from Turkey to Afghanistan in the 1970s).

Of course the heroin trade would not be entirely eliminated by supporting a transfer to painkiller production – but it would be reduced greatly without massive loss of life. The current failed strategy has seen increased heroin exports from Afghanistan at a high cost in lives. NATO’s commander in Afghanistan has even said Afghans could turn to the Taliban soon if we don’t start improving their lives rather than making them worse.

Everyone in Britain, France , Canada or the US who can could write to or email their MP or representative and ask them to support a change in this disastrous policy which costing the lives of our troops and Afghans in a war neither side can win – and pointlessly when a legal and beneficial alternative to this pseudo-moralistic ‘war on drugs’ is readily available with the only people likely to lose out from increased painkiller production being pharmaceutical firms who can afford reduced profits a lot more easily than Afghans can afford to starve or be shot or our troops can afford to be killed because of a self-defeating strategy based on tabloid headlines rather than reality.

Prejudice Against All Immigrants is No Better than Racism

The not guilty verdict in the trial of Mark Collett - the BNP ( British Nationalist Party )’s head of publicity – , like the debate over Councillor Bland’s poem vilifying immigrants, shows the confusion between racism and prejudice against immigrants.

While racism is condemned by everyone prejudice against immigrants is wrongly seen by some people as somehow respectable.

Collett had called asylum seekers ‘cockroaches’ – the same insult used by Hutu extremists to whip up the hatred against Tutsis which led to the 1994 genocide – and gone on to say that we should ‘show the ethnics the door’.

The latter was part of the attack on ‘multi-culturalism’. The critics of multiculturalism effectively demand that we all conform, all become identical and all have only one identity – national – and one single loyalty – to the state. This is a recipe for the end of any meaningful democracy. There can’t be democracy if there’s no debate allowed and no civil society, no membership of overlapping groups with different beliefs beyond the state.

Multiculturalism is part of a free society. Prejudice against immigrants is often a cover for racism and even when it’s not it’s no better than racism.

Yes Muslim demonstrator Abdul Rahman was wrong and inciting violence when he called for those who insulted Islam to be beheaded. He however, unlike Collett or BNP leader Nick Griffin, Rahman was jailed for doing so and said he regretted and apologised for his actions. Collett and Griffin walked free and far from apologising for or regretting their actions went on to add the BBC to their list of people to be seen as no more than ‘cockroaches’.

Perhaps amending the law to include inciting hatred against immigrants as an offence would prevent the same happening in future?

Hizbollah , Jesus and Tommy Sheridan

During his recent visit to Lebanon former Scottish Socialist Party leader (and now Solidarity leader) Tommy Sheridan referred to Hezbollah as ""is now the movement the oppressed across the globe will take inspiration from".

According to Sheridan in one village he visited in southern Lebanon a local dignitary Sheikh Qaouk said "if [Jesus] was here he would raise the rubble off the Lebanon children and throw the rocks at Israel".

Now I'm neither a Christian nor a Muslim, nor am I taking sides in the SSP civil war (and if I did i'd take Tommy's side because his policies are more sensible) - and yes I believe the News of the World and possibly MI5 too are out to destroy Sheridan. I admire Tommy Sheridan for sticking to his principles and I agree with him on a lot of things.

Nor was it Tommy who came up with the line about Jesus.

However from what little of the Neew Testament I've read Jesus wasn't continually urging people on to random acts of violent revenge, nor did i get the impression his miracles involved raining rocks down on anyone's heads. Non-violence and forgiveness seemed to figure fairly strongly.

I sympathise with the Lebanese and what they've suffered over the decades - and i understand that Hezbollah also see themselves as defenders and allies of the Palestinians. Their organisation of welfare and public services is excellent - and they had every right to resist Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

However I really hope that the oppressed of the world don't take the Hezbollah path. Attacking members of an enemy military is one thing but both Israeli forces AND Hezbollah targeted civilians in the 2006 war just as in most of the previous conflicts between them.

I don't accept that being the weaker side makes targeting civilians right or war crimes acceptable. Both sides were guilty of war crimes and both should be condemned for them.

Why Dannatt is right that our troops should be brought home from Iraq

General Dannatt, the head of the British army, was absolutely right in his statements that the presence of coalition forces in Iraq is exacerbating, not solving, security problems and that a date should be set for them to be brought home. Our forces’ presence in Iraq is part of the problem and isn’t preventing civil war. They should be brought home now from the impossible situation they have been put in by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Disbanding the Iraqi army is universally acknowledged to have contributed to mass unemployment and insurgency. What isn’t as widely acknowledged is that every one of our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan means Afghans or Iraqis ending up unemployed because money that could be given to their government to employ them instead goes to our military operations.

Murders and torture by Iraqi and Afghan government forces are an issue. Let’s be honest this is a problem in our own militaries too and a tacit policy of the Bush administration. Abu Ghraib, as many American soldiers have testified to Human Rights Watch – was only the tip of the iceberg and torture has continued since . Amnesty International says the same.

According to Amnesty International torture is also carried out by the forces of the new Iraqi government which is also meant to be preventing it. The Times newspaper has also reported that the Iraqi government is also behind or infiltrated by some of the death squads and militias creating civil war in Iraq. So how can staying to prop up a government that's helping cause civil war possibly prevent it?

There's also the question of why British and American taxpayers are paying billions for ‘reconstruction’ projects handed out in contracts to British and American firms which are failing to reconstruct anything and employ almost no Iraqis? If that money went to the Iraqi government - or future Iraqi governments - to employ Iraqis as foreign aid or war reparations we would at a stroke become seen as generous rather than greedy by Iraqis, as allies rather than exploiters.

True there are corruption problems – but these couldn’t be worse than the level of blatant over-charging by companies like Halliburton given fixed contracts with no competition just because their former CEO is deputy vice president of the US.

Finally the presence of foreign troops in Iraq , the accidental killing of civilians by some and the deliberate killing or torture of civilians by others is strengthening not only Al Qaeda globally but also extreme nationalist and extreme religious groups in Iraq. This does not strengthen democracy in Iraq but weakens it. Democracy is a culture and a system of belief. It can't survive as a set of institutions if no-one in Iraq believes in it. Only when foreign forces have left Iraq and Iraqis are free to decide for themselves what future they want without being open to the charge of being allied with foreign invaders if they support democracy will democracy have any possibility of developing in Iraq.

The fact that Al Qaeda are fanatics or that many of the 'insurgents' or 'resistance' are murderers and torturers cannot change this fact or justify such abuses when carried out by some on our side. Nor can it make such abuses any less inevitable as long as thousands of troops are left in the position of occupiers in a country most of whose people would rather they left.

Unfriendly Fire –
The Killing of ITN journalist Terry Lloyd was not an isolated incident


The public inquiry into the death of ITN journalist Terry Lloyd in Iraq in March 2003 has concluded that fire by US forces unlawfully killed him after a firefight between US and Iraqi forces had ended.

From reports of the inquiry by the UKs Channel 4 there were at least four different groups of witnesses – Iraqi combatants ; western journalists, cameramen and Iraqi interpreters ; a British special forces member ; and the American unit involved.

The western journalists and the Iraqis say there was fire exchanged between an Iraqi pick up truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on it and an American tank. The pick up truck was destroyed. Then the Iraqis commandeered a journalist's van to use as a makeshift ambulance and put the Iraqi casualties and Terry Lloyd who was badly wounded by US fire , into it.

The US tank continued firing on this vehicle and killed Lloyd.

The British special forces member who says he witnessed it too and the US unit claim they didn’t keep firing after the heavy machine gun truck was taken out.

I tend to believe the journalists given that all the other witnesses were combatants on one side or the other and so bound to be biased.

The British and US military story is also undermined by BBC reports that expert analysis of a video of the incident provided by the US unit showed 15 minutes had been cut from the film.

Lloyd’s killing was not an isolated incident but one of many incidents of coalition forces firing on reporters who weren't embedded in a unit according to the International Federation of Journalists.

This may well be another tacit Bush administration policy like the continuing torture policy revealed by the testimony of many US soldiers recorded by Human Rights Watch.Torture continues in Iraq long after the Abu Ghraib scandal supposedly ‘ended’ it

This tacit policy seems to be to fire on non-embedded reporters to scare the others into being embedded and make sure the majority of media coverage is what our militaries and governments want it to be . Though in Lloyd’s case there may have been confusion over which vehicles contained Iraqi fighters and which contained media – particularly as the vehicle he was in was commandeered by fleeing Iraqi fighters as a makeshift ambulance – it is also clear that firing on enemies who were not attacking but fleeing with their wounded might well constitute a war crime in itself. For anyone who would defend such action consider whether you would think Iraqi forces would be justified on firing on fleeing British or American troops who weren’t firing on them any more and were trying to get their wounded and wounded journalists to hospital.

The ambulance was not marked as an ambulance – it was just a commandeered media van - but its fairly clear the second burst of fire from the tank wasn't part of a fire fight but at the least an attempt to kill off any survivors and wounded after the Iraqis were beaten and trying to get away. That on its own would be arguably a war crime. If they knew some of the wounded were media it would definitely be a war crime - whether they knew or not i don’t know - but they do seem to have cut 15 minutes from the tape and the coalition accounts don't fit with the western journalists’ and camera-mens’ accounts and those are the only independent eye-witness accounts and so the most reliable.

Of course it may have been a war crime for Iraqi fighters to take their vehicle into a civilian column and of course insurgents and Al Qaeda in Iraq have also targeted and murdered journalists but if this in some way makes it right for coalition forces to target them or make little attempt to avoid killing them if they aren't embedded with coalition units i can't see how. Freedom and democracy if they mean anything have to include a free press - not one limited in where it can go , what it can see and what it can report by militaries and governments any more than by terrorist organisations, militias or 'insurgent' or 'resistance' groups.

John Reid for Labour Leader? What has he actually ever done as a Minister? And how about John McDonnell instead?

I don’t like personalising politics. Politics should be about debating what the right and wrong aims are, what the best or least bad option open to us is and how to achieve them – with everyone getting a chance to put their point of view forward and contribute any expertise or knowledge they have that could help.

Instead most of the media have decided that ‘politics is about personalities’ and this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy too much of the time. So to oppose certain policies it becomes necessary to point out what policies the people the media selects as favourites have actually done or which policies they support – and what the results of those policies are.

John Reid is one example. He’s come across well recently in press conferences and speeches. A couple of his jokes were pretty good as well. I don’t know if someone wrote them up in advance for him if he came up with them himself but either way he delivered them well. His comic timing is excellent.

He’s intelligent and quick witted with a good sense of humour. In every one of the ministerial posts he’s occupied he’s delivered good public relations for the government and the party. The media have decided on this basis that he’s a ‘safe pair of hands’.

His presentational abilities are unquestionable.

Yet what exactly has John Reid ever achieved as a Minister? If you look at the actual results left in his wake the fact is John Reid doesn’t seem to have changed policies at all – and in many cases has left disaster in his wake.

As defence minister John Reid was responsible for British policy in Afghanistan.
As a cabinet member for the last 7 years he could have pushed for a change of policy at any time – or publicly resigned if he felt unable to support its policy.

Instead he allowed the continuation of the disastrous policy of pressuring the Afghan government to destroy poppy crops without providing any alternative source of income for Afghans – many of whom are still starving to death as I type this.

This inevitably pushed many farmers in Southern Afghanistan into the arms of the Taliban or hiring gunmen to protect their crops. After all if the choice is starving to death – and watching your children starve to death - to obey a government that provides you with nothing and seeks to destroy your only source of income – or else disobeying and even defending your crops by force which would you choose?

That’s one of the reasons that British troops are also being killed daily in Afghanistan – because our government wasn’t prepared to consider alternative strategies such as the obvious one - suggested by the excellent Senlis Council report on Afghanistan since the Taliban - of buying the poppy crop and using it to produce painkillers which are in short supply instead. Of course the Bush administration, great abstract moralists (and the Republican party which gets campaign donations from the big pharmaceutical companies who profit from high prices of painkillers due to restricted supplies of opium) haven’t been too keen on this.

If our government , former Defence Minister John Reid and current defence minister Des Browne were really supporting our troops surely they’d be questioning this policy though? In fact they haven’t. ‘Outspoken’, ‘straight talking’ John Reid never uttered a word , never changed the policy.

It seems when it comes to clashing with the Prime Minister or the Bush administration over strategies which are bound to fail and so lead to out troops dying for nothing he just isn’t willing to speak out or talk straight – and isn’t a safe pair of hands at all.

Des Browne – the current defence minister – has emphasised that British troops aren’t carrying out the eradication of poppy crops. That’s quite true. They’re not. The people mainly involved in actually destroying poppy crops are Afghan government forces. The Afghan government’s motives are first that the American and British governments have put pressure on them to end the heroin trade and second that the Taliban and other warlords take a significant share of the profits in the form of protection money used to buy arms and pay fighters.

Yet we’re told that criticising this policy – which was bound to fail from the first (if you destroy the only source of income a country has without providing an alternative they’re not going to all accept it gratefully) is in Des Browne’s phrase ‘undermining the troops’. So continuing to support a self-defeating strategy that’s increasing the number of Afghans who are fighting our troops is ‘supporting’ them – while saying that we should either switch to a strategy of licensing of poppy crops for sale as painkillers and negotiate a peace that stops our troops being killed for nothing is ‘undermining’ them ?

If we offered a better price for poppy crops to produce opiate painkillers than the black market offers for heroin almost none of it would become heroin at all – and half the fighters hired by farmers to protect their crops from us wouldn’t be fighting our troops.

It’s not as though we’re reducing heroin production – in fact it’s increased in Afghanistan by over 1000% since 2001. Past efforts at drug crop eradication in other countries have failed utterly – as in Colombia – or simply led to the relocation of production to other countries (e.g from Turkey to Afghanistan in the 1970s).

Then there was Mr Reid’s job as Health Minister. When Monklands hospital in Mr Reid’s own constituency faced closure he joined the sadly failed campaign to keep it open. However he hasn’t once criticised or opposed the over-priced public private finance initiatives (the new euphemism for PFIs) which were a major cause of its closure – and if Monklands hadn’t closed another hospital would have closed because of the exhorbitant costs of the same PFIs.

As Home Secretary his latest speech referred to the need to put the rights of British citizens above those of terrorists who sought to kill them. The problem with this is that any British citizen could be a suspect. The ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid was born in Britain and grew up here. Equally the police frequently arrest the wrong people – whether citizens or not. Mistakes are inevitable. That’s why we have (or had) a criminal justice system in which people are innocent until proven guilty – so we’ll only send people who are guilty and actually are a threat to the rest of us to jail. If we lose the right not to be jailed without a fair trial – if the government can jail anyone simply by claiming it has secret intelligence proving them to be a terrorist threat – then we’re risking losing democratic rights that took centuries of struggle to get. I’m not saying this government would jail opposition leaders , human rights activists or whistle blowers – but if we bring in these kind of laws what’s to prevent a future government from doing so.

As an orator or a public relations man John Reid excels. If you look at what he’s actually achieved as a government minister or the reality behind his sound bites there’s not really much to say though. Nor does he live up to his reputation for standing up and speaking his mind when he needs to – not when it comes to defending our troops or our NHS patients and staff. He moves from one ministry to another delivering positive tabloid headlines and that’s about it. Disastrous policies like Iraq, PFIs or poppy eradication in Afghanistan aren’t changed but John Reid, like Tony Blair, manages to make speeches which avoid taking any responsibility for the decisions they made to begin and continue those policies.

The only candidate for Labour leader so far who’s been willing to oppose these policies so far is John McDonnell MP. Some of the media seem to have decided he doesn’t have a chance. If they get off with ignoring his campaign that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anyone who actually wants a change of policy could do worse than support JohnMcDonnell for Labour leader – and make it clear that any party that won’t scrap PFIs, bring our troops home from Iraq and oppose the self-defeating strategy developed by the Bush administration in Afghanistan won’t be getting their vote.

Making personal attacks? It’s a safe bet you’ve no policies worth a damn then


Conservative party leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne have taken to making personal attacks on Gordon Brown – the man seen currently as the most likely future leader of the Labour party calling him ‘weak’ and ‘tragic’.

No surprise then that Cameron and Osborne have no actual policies on anything then so have resorted to cheap insults. They’ve made lots of vague policy statements on such hopeful sounding things as only using nuclear power as ‘a last resort’ and distancing Britain more from the US – but when questioned on whether this means they’d rule out new nuclear power stations or bring British troops home from Iraq they refuse to answer.

When someone resorts to personal attacks and insults in politics you can take it for granted that they either have no policies they’re willing to reveal to the electorate (or want to distract the electorate from policies they’ve already carried out if they’re in office) or have no real policy differences with the person they’re attacking and are motivated merely by ambition or competition for power and leadership positions.

That’s one reason why the infighting between ‘Brownites’ and ‘Blairites’ has been so personal and petty – the two men have made it clear they both favour more Private Finance Initiatives or ‘Public Private Partnership Programmes’ (the same thing – but they sound nicer) , they’ll both stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with any American President and send our troops into their wars – no matter whether the war is necessary or not, no matter whether the US administration has any viable strategy to win that war or not.