Bombing won’t halt Isis terrorism

Stop the Tories’ war on Syria

RAF Tornado bomber, photo by Ministry of Defence (Creative Commons)

RAF Tornado bomber, photo by Ministry of Defence (Creative Commons)   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Janet Gibson, Hull Socialist Party

The Tory government is beating ever louder its war drums, while the mass media churns out pro-war propaganda and presses Labour to follow suit.

David Cameron is determined to join in with the US, France and Russia in bombing Syria. This won’t stop Isis, it won’t stop the flood of refugees. Instead, it’s intended to boost the UK government’s prestige abroad!

Who started the bloody wars, occupations, carnage and destruction in the Middle East anyway? And where the hell is that Chilcot report into the 2003 Iraq War?

The West’s ‘blood for oil’ policy, via the illegal Iraq War, toppled Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but only for the country to be ripped apart with sectarian strife and the emergence of Isis.

Reactionary

Isis and its Islamist rivals in Syria have been funded and armed by the pro-West oil-rich reactionary Gulf states. The anti-democratic House of Saud routinely beheads and stones to death its own people. So why did Tory MP Anna Soubry, defend Saudi Arabia on BBC Question Time? Oil and trade deals maybe?

Bombs don’t just kill; they destroy infrastructure, homes and basic utilities that support life. Imagine your home, public transport, roads, water and electricity suddenly gone. And when you flee to preserve family life imagine hearing Cameron declare your family to be just part of ‘the swarm’?

In the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks what did Cameron do? He awarded himself £10 million to kit out an RAF jet to protect himself from Isis first!

Amid swingeing austerity cuts Cameron announced £178 billion worth of military and security expenditure over the next decade. He will not be left behind in the ‘blood for oil and prestige’ battle. He wants drones, rapid response units and Typhoon jets.

Cameron says “the [capitalist] world is a more dangerous place than five years ago!” He isn’t wrong. It’s a more dangerous world precisely because Western and Russian governments pursue ‘regime change’ policies in the Middle East and beyond – to install ‘puppet regimes’.

In the meantime arms dealers and super-rich investors amass private profits from the wars and conflicts around the world.

We need a very loud united global movement of socialists, trade unionists, workers, youth, and pensioners to oust all the corrupt rotten governments who chase profits through war and austerity.

“No to war and austerity” should be a worldwide rallying call to fight for publicly owned economies run and controlled by workers and the public, instead of leaving state power in the hands of a war-mongering elite.


Protest

Don’t bomb Syria!

Saturday 28 November

12-2pm Downing Street,

London SW1

and across the UK