5 Years on, Never Forget the South West Politicians Who Took Us to War

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." –Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003

Five years on and the total and utter disaster and complete charnel house that is Iraq is still killing, maiming, breeding terror and eating money like a black hole. So how did we get into this? We must not forget that there are people in our communities who put us there. They must take their share of the guilt and blame for the over a million dead, the millions of refugees, the boost to militant Islam and that they have leached they from the South West - just over £1.2 billion by my calculations.

(I make it £1,232,590,223 - that is the proportional SW cost per person in the UK based around the independent Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz's calculation that the war will cost the UK £20 billion)

There is still, rightly so, so much anger at this clusterfuck, to quote John Harris writing about the failed protest march before the war;

"But the larger tale of what the march and its aftermath say about our estrangement from Westminster still seems bleak. At its heart is a feeling that is still with us: the disorientation that comes from passing through the biggest political rupture in living memory - a matter not just of the disastrous invasion, but the deceit that surrounded it - and beholding a political elite that still wants to keep the public's sustained disquiet at arm's length, and carry on speaking the language of Business As Usual."

Just so we don't forget, this is a list of the South West politicians who voted against the rebel amendment saying there was no moral case for war against Iraq in 2003;

Avon

Ms Jean Corston (Lab, Bristol East)
Ms Dawn Primarolo (Lab, Bristol South)
Dr Liam Fox (Cons, Woodspring)

Devon

Gary Streeter (Cons, Devon South West)
Hugo Swire (Cons, Devon East)
Ben Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter)
David Jamieson (Lab, Plymouth Devonport)
Mrs Linda Gilroy (Lab, Plymouth Sutton)
Mrs Angela Browning (Cons, Tiverton & Honiton)

Dorset

Laurence Robertson (Cons, Tewkesbury)

Somerset

Ian Liddell-Grainger (Cons, Bridgwater)
Adrian Flook (Cons, Taunton)
David Heathcoat-Amory (Cons, Wells)

Wiltshire

Michael Ancram (Cons, Devizes)
Michael Wills (Lab, Swindon North)
Ms Julia Drown (Lab, Swindon South)
James Gray (Cons, Wiltshire North)
Robert Key (Cons, Salisbury)

This list is far from exhaustive; there are other ways you could interpret the various twists and turns in the run-up and persecution of the war. There are also plenty of people within big-business and the media of the South West who, either through subtle or blatant policy and editorial helped to push us into war; for example newspaper magnate Sir Ray Tindle’s decision to stop printing anti-war stories. They must also share the blame.

Iraq is not going to go away. It is good to see people looking at the root causes of war; such as the arms trade and how we can stop it, such as the Smash EDO tour. The elites cannot be trusted to stop the killing or with our future. Take the words of Tom Bradby speaking on the ITN Evening News, April 10, 2003;

"This war has been a major success"

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The News Behind the News

You may have heard about the resignation of the Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer; caught in a wire-tap while ordering a prostitute; dodogy and wrong IMHO and he should go, along with the rest of 'em. Its the kind of thing I imagine lots of powerful politicians get up to. However there is another story here, about the right-wing and their continued assault on any and all democratic processes that do not lead to them. It turns out that for every Republican politician investigated, an average of 5.6 Democratic ones are investigated – not only that it seems that the investigations are linked to election cycles. It would appear that the plan of the right, for a permanent hegemony over society also extends into (obviously) politicizing all the functions of government:

However, there is a second tier of questions that needs to be examined with respect to the Spitzer case. They go to prosecutorial motivation and direction. Note that this prosecution was managed with staffers from the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice. This section is now at the center of a major scandal concerning politically directed prosecutions. During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican. Beyond this, a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles. Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats.

For more on the tactics of the right see here and here.
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Opportunity Cost of Terror

If you have not heard of 'Opportunity Cost' it is a economics term used to look at value that spending your resources in a different place might have brought you. Here is an example from wikipedia;

If a city decides to build a hospital on vacant land it owns, the opportunity cost is the value of the benefits forgone of some other thing which might have been done with the land and construction funds instead. In building the hospital, the city has forgone the opportunity to build a sports center on that land, or a parking lot, or the ability to sell the land to reduce the city's debt, since those uses tend to be mutually exclusive.

So on to the War of Terror. The Neo-Labour regime plans to take money from a landmine scheme and put it into the pockets of the bribery-accused, slush-funding running BAE Systems to service 6 (yes six!) jets used in Iraq.

Money set aside to clear landmines and remove arms from conflict zones is to be raided to pay a private defence contractor to keep Tornado jets flying in Iraq, according to a confidential memo seen by the Guardian. The Ministry of Defence plans to pay BAE Systems from the multimillion-pound Conflict Prevention Fund - which covers projects such as destroying weapons in Bosnia and landmines in Mozambique - to subsidise the £5m-£10m cost of servicing each of the six planes.

This is another opportunity cost - the government could either spend the money clearing landmines or bombing people...hmmmmm...hard choice. You could ask this question in regard the billions spent so far (and to be spent) on what is the best way to stop terrorism. And when you find out that the government has just spent £30 million buying 3 (yes just three!) robot aircraft (or UAVs) for Afghanistan at a cost of £10 million each but the whole contract runs to a billion.

Here is the real cost of this war;

The United Nations has delivered a grim assessment of the conflict in Afghanistan, reporting that violence increased sharply last year and resulted in the deaths of more than 8,000 people, at least 1,500 of them civilians.

And here is why they are willing to spend, spend, spend our money in pursuit of their aims;

The strategy behind these operations is what the Neoconservative advisers to President Bush have called “the Long War.” A leading member of the Neoconservatives, James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, said he hopes it will not last more than 40 years. The cost of such a generational conflict has been estimated at more than $17 trillion dollars.....But we should be aware that what Woosley and others have discussed is not just rhetoric or speculation – it is given substance by operational plans, dedicated military personnel, operating from 737 – I repeat seven hundred and thirty seven -- existing bases worldwide, with already constructed and positioned weapons, and sustained by an already allocated budget.

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Medals as Propaganda

I read recently about medals being given out for the wars of terror. While I can appreciate that they are supposed to celebrate individual acts of valor, they also help the military PR machine pass out some news that has a positive spin. This is particularity important for countering the reality of a very bloody and unpopular (not to say expensive and seemingly unending) wars. In the face of falling recruitment and some public friction to the military it is little wonder the military is dreaming up PR stunts like 'Prince Harry fighting Terry Taliban' and possibly medals being bigged-up to the media? After all the military are happy to lie for propaganda at home... Over in the US there is the noted phenomena of 'medal inflation' where it seems more medals and ribbons are being handed out willy-nilly. Take these examples;

Here is General George C. Marshall, a five-star general of WWI and veteran of WWI. He has an impressive row of three ribbons;



And click here to see an image of Lynndie England who also has three rows of ribbons and was one of the soliders court-marshaled for torture in Abu Ghraib...

A quote;

Consider what a retired Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Astore, has to say on the subject: "Those medals and militaria that our commanders wear are a kind of evidence. Our military, they indicate, is so busy patting itself on the back that its medal-bestowing has come to resemble those Little League tournaments where every kid gets a trophy, win or lose. We're so busy celebrating how great we are that we're failing to face reality. Not all problems can be solved by applying more elbow grease and shouting 'Hooah.'"

The War of Terror Goes Nuts: The Liberty City 7 Trial

I don't know if you are heard of the 'Liberty City 7 Trial' I had not, but it has echoes of the terror-scare stories past in Britain, the US and in Europe where a so-called threat is postulated by a government and the media jump on-board to whip the whole thing up into a civil-liberties-beating frenzy. The politicians can then take away our rights and justify more resources going into the military-industrial complex. Simple really. This one, the Liberty City 7 Trial, takes the biscuit though. The FBI set up a sting operation, pay thousands of dollars to seven homeless and semi-homeless guys then mount a huge paramilitary raid on them and claim they were, "prepared to wage a full ground war against the US."

Do you know what weapons the raid turned up? One single handgun. A full ground war? It's a fucking joke, except it's not:

It was a classic case of entrapment. The government recorded over 1500 hours of conversations, primarily between their guy Assad and Batiste [two of the defendants] - but the most they got was Batiste implying that to disrupt things in the US one would have to attack targets like the Sears Tower, yet never saying that he himself was planning to blow it up.

Batiste admitted during his trial that he was working a con and that he realized that these two Arabs [FBI agents] had money and he was trying to get some of it. "I was behind a couple of months on the rent, the children had no clothes," explained the father of four. "There was no food for a couple of days. There was a lot of pressure on me at the that time." Most of the others were homeless and were sleeping in their little warehouse.

And upon their arrest the U$ government claimed they were, "prepared to wage a full ground war against the US."

This is part of the same administration that tried to force a coup against Hamas in Gaza (even though the were democratically elected and 'we' are supposed to be fighting for 'democracy') that backfired and put Hamas firmly in power;

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs...President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

It's a fucking joke, except it's not.

PS. Neo-Labour, caught once more being the bunch of hypocrites they are.
PPS. Big-up to campaigners in Gloucester who scored a victory over airport expansion.
PPPS. Next GoatLab - April 18th: Syntheme's Bristol Debut!
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