BUSH SAYS “inaction is not an option”. Even with war continuing in Afghanistan, he is preparing for military action against Iraq – with Blair trotting loyally behind.
Christine Thomas
But Blair doesn’t have support for attacking Iraq. 51% of people in Britain are opposed to military action. Even his own MPs are rebelling.
After 11 September, Bush and Blair argued that war against Afghanistan was necessary to defeat terrorism. Some people believed them and went along with the war, even though it was really about restoring the US’s prestige and power internationally.
However, this time the mood is different. 3,000 to 8,000 ordinary Afghans have been slaughtered in Afghanistan but it has not brought peace. More soldiers are being sent because of the violence and ongoing fighting and no-one knows how long they will be there.
War is raging in Israel/Palestine and India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, came to the brink of war over Kashmir.
Military action against the Iraqi people would be like throwing petrol on to the flames of injustice already burning among so many Arab and Muslim people internationally.
It would clearly be seen as a war to assert and reinforce US imperialism’s economic and military dominance around the world and in the oil-rich Middle East in particular.
Bush talks about weapons of mass destruction, while sitting on the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal with plans to deploy them even against countries without a nuclear capability.
Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator, but one that was armed and backed by the western powers when it suited them. After the 1991 Gulf War, they sat back while Saddam brutally crushed an uprising by Kurds and Shi’a Muslims.
They were afraid that if Saddam was overthrown, the instability that would follow would threaten their interests in the region.
A ‘regime change’ orchestrated by US military action, would result in the deaths of thousands of ordinary Iraqis, in addition to the hundreds of thousands who have already died because of bombings and sanctions.
It would do nothing to solve the problems of the Iraqi workers and poor. It is for them to overthrow Saddam as part of an international struggle to change society.
We need to build a broad, mass movement in opposition to the warmongering aims of Bush and Blair. Join us to help build that movement. But don’t leave it there. Join us to fight for socialism as the only lasting solution to the poverty, exploitation and war which this system creates.
