Israel Again

Recent US approval for Israeli attacks upon Gaza, Nablus and Ramallah at the beginning of December – in response to the Hamas suicide bombings – has all but ended speculation that US influence in the Middle East in the wake of September 11th would bring about peace.

Israel’s media spin-doctor Benjamin Netanyahu, no doubt inspired by the gung-ho rhetoric that bolsters President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ could confidently compare Yasser Arafat to Osama bin Laden. A Bush spokesperson was heard to impart to the world’s media: “ Israel has every right to defend itself and the president understands that.” And these statements appeared to be the go ahead for all and sundry to launch verbal attacks upon the people of Palestine, lumping them, no questions asked, in with the Taliban.

The usually moderate EU demanded Ariel Sharon use the iron fist treatment and the ever cautious Tony Blair, who weeks earlier castigated his foreign secretary Jack Straw for linking Islamic terrorism with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, duly expressed his sympathy for Israel.

The prevailing view from the West was that Israel’s retaliation be applauded. The domestic voice of caution was all but muted, with Sharon insisting Israelis learn lessons from the US in the wake of September 11th and refrain from criticisng his policies, and only the boldest of journalists were prepared to set the crisis in a historical context and to point out that if Israel’s attacks upon Yasser Arafat’s compound were a response to the Hamas suicide bombings, themselves a retaliation to Sharon’s state assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Haroud, then militant Palestinians would soon respond in kind.

This said, from within the Israeli government there has arisen the ‘voice of reason’. Sharon’s foreign minister Shimon Perez and his colleagues in the Labour Party boycotted a vote calling upon Arafat’s administration to be labelled ‘an entity supporting terrorism’ and have cautioned Sharon that the fall of Arafat would pave the way for the ascendancy of Palestinian extremists.

For Sharon’s part, we can only despair at his belligerent game plan. He is obsessed with the demonisation of Yasser Asrafat, keen to lay all of Israel’s problems at his feet. In a televised address to Israelis, he declared: “Arafat is responsible for everything that happens here.” And he remains keen to weaken and marginalize the Palestine Authority. However, experts agree that taking the Palestine Authority out of the equation makes it harder for Arafat to subdue the very militants he is charged with rooting out. Moreover, the PLO recognises Israel’s 1967 borders and its ‘right to exist’. Hamas does not, demanding the total destruction of the Jewish state. Neither can Hamas and the PLO be said to be on speaking terms. The former is an organisation of Islamic militants that came to prominence in 1987 as a rival to the PLO, even finding a sponsor in an Israeli state which hoped it would undermine the influence of the PLO, the latter a secular organisation and one that sprung directly from the frustration borne of a failed peace process.

Israel, the US and its allies appear reluctant to acknowledge the causes of the current intifada. The fact is that the Palestinian people are a second class People denied many of the rights of Israelis. Palestine seemingly exists as a number of impoverished ‘third world’ Bantustans inside of an advanced industrial nation whose inhabitants have a high standard of living. The hardship of the Palestinian people is perhaps unparalleled in the Middle East. Palestine’s GNP has fallen by 35% in the past year, unemployment is above 40% and the average income per head of the populations of Gaza and the West Bank is almost one-twelfth of that enjoyed by Israeli people. Palestinians have endured restriction on their movement – guaranteed under previous peace agreements – and arbitrary arrests. The violence witnessed by Palestinian youths on an almost daily basis has induced in many symptoms similar to those suffering Post traumatic stress disorder.

Perhaps Palestinians can be forgiven for having nurtured a hatred of Israel, for this is a hatred that has arisen out of their daily experiences and it stands as an indictment on the Israeli state that so many see no alternative but to resort to horrendous acts of suicide.

Israel of course does not act alone. Its policies are carried out with the full support of the world’s only superpower. It exists as a subsidiary to the US government, surviving as a military outpost of the US, armed to the teeth with weaponry its much larger neighbours can only dream of. Its mission to counter the emergence of any Middle Eastern radicalism that would threaten US control of the region’s oil, which is itself an important source of the control of the world economy.

The future certainly looks bleak for Palestinians. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’, his determination to suspect any Islamic state with September 11th - note his determination to link Somalia, Sudan and Iraq with those attacks on the US – has given new life to the cause of Israeli hawks, led by a president still waiting to find out if he is to be charged with war crimes for orchestrating the 1982 of the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Nonchalantly lobbing missiles at Arafat’s compounds, police stations and security posts, blind to caution, Sharon risks bringing about the demise of Arafat and the Palestine Authority and paving the way for the ascendancy of a more desperate foe in the shape of militant Islam, with whom no peace deal will be struck. With most Arabs finding a common empathy with the Palestinian people, should Sharon take one step to far, invading the West bank and Gaza and, imposing direct rule in response to a militant Islamic blowback, the resultant conflagration would blaze across the Middle East and burn for years.

As socialists, we are prepared for any scenario for we are aware of the lengths the defenders of capitalism will go to secure their interests. If the future of US oil interests in the region meant that Islamic fundamentalism had to be prodded in order to provoke a reaction to justify a massive US response, then Palestinian’s Islamic militants will be prodded. History is littered with the pretexts for war in the name of profit.

George W Bush - Redefining War

As I write, it is having just learned that the Northern Alliance has ‘taken’ Kabul and that the Taliban are now in retreat. The ‘war’, if it could ever have been described as one, is said to be almost over. Already there has been much speculation as to the post-Taliban set-up in Afghanistan.

Speculation is not something socialists like to engage in. For one thing it is a forgone conclusion that any new government will have to be ready to bow with suppliant’s knee before the interests of US corporate elites and in particular the oil hounds, paying back the support their military wing the US air force and US my afforded them. And by all accounts, with the Northern Alliance suggesting they would decline the offer of an international peace-keeping force, Afghanistan is years away from any semblance of peace and order.

What is as important is that the rules of global interaction are changing. This is not least because the US is forging stronger links with repressive regimes in the Middle East and with governments in the Caspian region, but more importantly because of the ongoing delegitimising of international law, the US insistent it will act unilaterally where it wishes, regardless of any views of the UN and the threat of the war on terrorism finally replacing the threat of international communist conspiracy and how this will serve as the new pretext for US military adventurism. We can further anticipate the race for the militarisaton of space – albeit a one horse race and further sophistication of US war-fighting capabilities.

Whilst President George W has strutted and fretted about the US stage, his advisers burying their heads in their hands every time he speaks, Tony Blair globetrotting, drumming up support for the US cause like some keen-to-Republican foreign secretary, there has been every sign that Dubya is attempting to fulfil his father’s prophecy, mouthed during his presidential inaugural address all those years ago, that the 21st Century would be ‘another American century’.

For anyone interested in US domestic politics, aware that George W could never sway an electorate by the power of his words, it perhaps came as no surprise to learn that he could so blatantly repay his corporate backers and grassroots supporters so early into his administration. Within months of coming to office the gun lobbyists, oil companies, and defence contractors had their servitude recognised for the world to see. The 1997 Kyoto protocol on emission reductions is now history. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – the cornerstone of all arms-control negotiations during and since the cold war is now only fit to wipe the presidential arse with, and down the proverbial toilet went the comprehensive test-ban treaty and the UN treaty on the control of small arms. Bush even denounced the recent UN convention on slavery.

Let’s just leave aside Bush’s recent meeting with President Putin of Russia and his suggestion that the US is willing to negotiate cutting it’s nuclear arsenal by one third , to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads, for the simple reason that the US no longer perceives Russia as its prime military and economic threat. Moreover, Putin, in line with his Chinese counterpart, has given his blessing to the US bombing raids on Afghanistan in the hope the US will now support their own wars against ‘terrorists (in Chechnya and China’s Muslim Xingjiang province). So at the moment there is a lot of back slapping camaraderie amongst leaders whose countries are notorious for their state terrorism. This is not, however, a sign of the US seeking a more stable world, but an acknowledgement by the Republican right that National Missile Defence is still very much on the agenda and that the US does not need such a large nuclear stockpile now that it can depend upon other methods of defence. Neither does Bush’s promise to reduce the nuclear arsenal heed recent Russian and Chinese claims that any NMD system would only spur other countries to increase their own arsenals in the hope of overwhelming a nuclear umbrella.

On 25th July, the US scuppered a decade of international negotiations by announcing in Geneva its intention not to back a draft protocol to reinforce the biological weapons and toxin convention, which was initially signed in 1972. It’s reason? Such a move threatened US commercial interests. The protocol would have included verification measures that would have given international inspectors access to laboratories in the signatory countries. Perhaps the US has some stronger reason for denying inspections at thousands of its defence plants and biotechnology sites. What on earth are its commercial interests that it can nonchalantly destroy a treaty signed in the interest of humanity? What the hell is the US developing? And wasn’t it the US that was so damned insistent that an international scientific inspectorate search behind every Iraqi door capable of being locked?

In effect, President Bush has told the world: ‘Fuck off, it’s US first’. Somewhat echoing his father’s sentiments’ that he would ensure the 21st century was another ‘American century, son George W has announced his intention that the world will be ruled by force and on behalf of US corporate interests.

The evidence has been ever present since September 11th. Colin Powell, when asked to publicly provide evidence of bin Laden’s links to the attack on New York and Washington, avoided the issue by claiming its disclosure would be a breach of national security. When the Taliban wished to negotiate, offering to hand bin laden to a third party, Bush replied: “I said no negotiations and I mean no negotiations.” And while the US is keen to point out it has a ‘coalition’ of support against the Taliban it has bombed Afghanistan single-handedly, except for a few token cruise missiles fired from a British submarine (a doggie- snack for the ever-loyal poodle) on the first day of the attack upon Afghanistan.

It is now not only full steam ahead with the prized National Missile Defence system with a target date for the deployment of the system set for 2005 (See also the Socialist Standard of March this year), but plans are now afoot in the US to develop a space bomber that could destroy targets on the other side of the globe within 30 minutes; the bomber travelling 15 times faster than conventional bombers, able to hit a target from 60 miles up and paving the way for a new era of stratospheric warfare.

NMD, however is clearly a sign that the US is moving towards becoming a more aggressive and threatening military power. Experts now maintain that the issue is not so much whether an anti-missile system is feasible or desirable, but what kind of diplomatic and military policies the world’s only superpower would pursue from beneath the relative safety of a nuclear umbrella. It seems less the case that NMD is about protecting the USA from ‘rogue states’, and more the likelihood that such a sophisticated system of defence will ensure the profits flow in the right direction and that the global schoolyard bully can streamline its protection racket, safe in the knowledge it will meet little resistance.

Back in 1992, Paul Walfowitz (now Deputy Secretary of Defence) and Lew Libby (Bush’s National Security Adviser) formulated ideas which were presented as a confidential Pentagon document by none other than vice-president Dick Cheney:

“The US must hold global power and a monopoly of force. It will then protect the new order while allowing others to pursue their legitimate interests as Washington defines them. The US must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership, or seeking to overturn the established political order, or aspiring to a larger regional or global role…we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing those wrongs which threaten not only our interests but also those of our allies and friends. The US alone will determine what are those wrongs and where they are to be selectively righted.” (quoted in. Year 501 by, Noam Chomsky)

This is an extremely revealing document - a document that is also very worrying. And it’s not a one off. There are others, take for instance the US Space Command’s document “Vision 2020” which, now five years old, well telegraphs US designs for the 21st Century, suggesting that globalisation will lead to greater misery, to a lot more ‘have-nots’ with an axe to grind and who will have to kept in line:

“Although unlikely to be challenged by a global peer competitor, the United States will continue to be challenged regionally. The globalisation of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between the haves and have-nots. Accelerating rates of technological development will be increasingly driven by commercial interests not the military. Increased weapons lethality and precision will lead to new operational doctrines…..only military dominance will protect US interests and investments.”

In 1998, the US government report “The Long-Term Plan” reiterated this notion of there being trouble ahead from the dispossessed:

“The US will remain global power and exert global leadership. Widespread communications will highlight disparities in resources and quality of life, contributing to unrest in developing countries…The gap between the ‘haves and the ‘have–nots’ will widen, creating regional unrest. The US will remain the only nation able to project power globally.”

It is a fair bet that such sentiments have been prominent components of the US weltanschauung for some years – at least since 1945 and definitely since 1989 and the collapse of Soviet-style state capitalism. Moreover, it’s no bold assertion to suggest that China is chief the enemy in waiting – not the allegedly ‘rogue states’ such as Iraq and North Korea, nor the threat of international terrorism which has been a US favourite since the days of Reagan – for the simple reason that the republican right perceive China to be an economic and military power on a collision course with the US over domination of the Pacific. And if the US learns anything from its military history it is to strike first – hence the dire necessity of a fully functioning NMD.

At the beginning of July this year, only days before the New York Times announced Bush’s plans to ditch the comprehensive test ban treaty, his administration enquired of nuclear laboratories just how soon they could begin testing again – clearly intent on breaching agreements made 16 months earlier by 187 countries who had negotiated steps to strengthen the non-proliferation treaty.

On the 14th of July this year, the US launched a missile from the Marshall Islands. Twenty-nine minutes later a second missile, launched from Vanderburg, California, intercepted it at an altitude of 144 miles. The success not only strengthened Republican arguments for a competent star wars system, but was the order for similar multi million dollar tests to be carried out every month and helped justify the mobilisation of contractors into Fort Greeley, Alaska, to begin foundation work on a new missile silo.

Just over two years ago, President elect, George W Bush, gave a speech at Charleston, South Carolina. He spoke of the “contagious spread of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction” and hence the necessity of strengthening the unrivalled military power of the US. He then boldly announced that “the best way to keep peace is to redefine war on our terms.”

Which just about says it all – “to redefine war on our terms.” Economic war? Surely not the more bloodier version? And what is ‘redefining’ war? To provoke your competitors to the point that they begin arming themselves with better weaponry, then making a pre-emptive strike, bombing them back into the stone age on the pretext they threatened world peace, safe in the knowledge, there will be no retaliation and that you can then overtake their markets? We jest not!

Forget all the crap that George W’s father mouthed when he became president. The peace dividend’ that was supposed to replace cold war hostilities and benefit all after the collapse of ‘communism’ was as fictitious as fairies. The agenda now is as it was then and 40 years previous – US global domination in the military and economic fields and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

As socialists we certainly do not need to redefine our war. The war we must fight to end the insanity and horror Bush and Co would hurl us headlong into is the Class War. And this can not be fought with missiles, but something more powerful – our minds, our imagination, our solidarity and preparedness to unite as the majority exploited class and to wrest control of the planet from the madmen before it is to late.

Are you with us? Don’t take too long to think of a reply – the doomsday clock really is ticking.

Unholy War (book Review)

Unholy Wars – Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism
299 pages, John K. Cooley, Pluto Press

This new edition of a book first published in 1999 provides a first rate insight into the US relationship with militant Islam during and since the Cold War and provides much ammunition for those holding to the line that in supporting the likes of Osama bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US was indeed sowing the seeds of a bitter harvest reaped on September 11th 2001.


The USA did not only support those opposing the Soviet forces in the Afghan War, forming a deadly and unholy alliance with militant Islam in the process, it very much instigated the war. When President Carter signed a directive for covert support for the enemies of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in July, 1979, he was informed that do so would lead to Soviet intervention. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, would comment: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we consciously increased the probability that they would do so…This secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.” He later wrote to Carter: “Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam War.” (p. 19)


The US support for the mujahedin and other groups would turn out to be phenomenal. Billions of dollars were pumped into the Afghan cause and thousands of Islamic zealots were given specialist training in the US and Britain. As Cooley observes: “In the United States they experienced tough courses in endurance, weapons use, sabotage, and killing techniques, communications and other skills. They were required to impart these skills to the scores of thousands of fighters who formed the centre and the base of the pyramid of holy war.” (p. 81)


The training of the warriors of jihad not enough, the CIA also promoted drug trafficking in Afghanistan, one result being that the trade found easy access into the Soviet Union and helped destabilise civil society there. Moreover, “Nowhere did the growing addiction to locally-produced drugs, encouraged by those in the CIA…wreak greater havoc than in the Red Army…on an even larger scale than the addiction of American GIs during the Southeast Asian wars.” (p.5)


And of course there was the oil. One reason why the US nurtured the Taliban was that American oil companies wanted to build an oil pipe-line from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, to the Indian Ocean. It was hoped, states Cooley, “…that the Taliban, once in control, would be a security blanket. It would be able they conjectured, to secure the truck highways and eventually routes for oil and natural gas pipe-lines.” (p. 147)


In this updated edition of the 1999 publication, Cooley brings his topic up to date with an insight into the Bin-Laden-linked international terrorist network, as well as providing information on the post 1999 Pakistani coup.


For the socialist there is much in Unholy Wars we can use in the battle of ideas, revealing the lengths the US will go to, and the stinking depths it will plummet to secure its own ends, regardless of the cost of life. Where there is profit to be made, where US interests are challenged, nothing is sacred. People, no, whole nations are there to be manipulated.

Leaders? Not Here

Many workers think we cannot function without leaders. This is a fallacy and one perpetuated by the master class to help them maintain their rule over our lives. Indeed, so prevalent is this philosophy, that from the cradle to the grave we are taught to mistrust out own intelligence and to look up to our ‘betters and superiors’ (schools, church, politicians, parents etc) and to accept without question the plans they draw up for our future.

It is assumed leaders run the world. Well, we think it is we, the workers who run the world. Politicians might make government policy, which becomes law, but it is we who build and man the hospitals and schools. It is we who build the bridges, roads and railways, ports and airports, all the products that humans need to survive. It is we who produce everything from a pin to an oil-rig and provide humanity with all the services it needs – we the working class. We don’t depend on leaders for these skills or for their guidance. They have no monopoly on our knowledge and intelligence and the inventions we dream up, but benefit from them the most. If all the worlds leaders died tomorrow, few would really miss them and society would function as before. If all the bosses decided not to turn up at their factories, their business would still function because it is we who see to it that they function. Do you need a boss standing over you all day in the office or workplace, showing you how to work? Are you constantly in search of the guidance of a more superior individual to tell you how to run your life?

The concept of leadership has emerged as a result of class society and will end when we abolish class society, when abolish the capitalist mode of production and all that goes with it. The master class have been allowed to lead because of their control over the means of living, because of their control of the education system and their monopoly of the media and other and information processes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The greatest weapons we posses are our class unity, our intelligence, and our ability to question the status quo and to imagine a world fashioned in our own interests. The master class perceives all of this to be a threat and so will do anything to keep us in a state of oblivion, dejection and dependency. Our apathy is the victory they celebrate each day. Our unwillingness to unite as a globally exploited majority and to confront them on the battlefield of ideas is the subject of their champagne toasts.

Only sheep need leaders, and if workers want to be sheep then they can expect to get fleeced. The truth is, we have been led for so long by idiots that we have forgotten our own collective strength and lost sight of just what we, as a species, working together, are capable of.

The WSM has no leaders and has existed for 97 years without one. If someone can lead you into socialism, there will always be someone who can lead you out again. Socialism must be the free and conscious decision of the majority, otherwise it will never work. Our position is now as it was in 1904 at our inception – there is nothing that we can do for the working class that it is not already capable of doing for itself. For Socialism to be a success, it must be established without leaders and followers. It must be established by ordinary people al over the world uniting and working together to establish a new system peacefully and democratically – a world in which the exploited at last regain control of their own destiny.

Terrorists and Terrorists

Writing in The Guardian recently, George Monbiot observed that if Osama bin Laden did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. This is no brazen assertion, for the same has been said about many a US enemy over the years, the most memorable being Saddam Hussein. The reasoning behind such an outlook is simple. The US needs the threat of a bogeyman to scare us into falling into line as well as to justify large scale military actions on behalf of its own corporate elite and, of course, to provide the US with the pretext to play globocop on behalf of all god-fearing, peace-loving citizens everywhere.

Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organisation have been blamed for the September 11th attacks on the USA. Bin Laden’s photograph has been splashed across every newspaper front page in the world. Already there is a $10 million price on his head. The highly articulate George

W Bush is urgently reminded of the old Wild West wanted posters and has spoken of how bin Laden’s name is now on one. But who is bin Laden and how did he come to prominence? Osama bin Laden is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This is no big secret. The US, in fact, were arming groups like the notorious mujahedin a full six months before the Soviet invasion of December 1979 and it is estimated that at the Soviet withdrawal, US aid to the Afghan cause totalled $5 billion (this monetary support for some seven fundamentalist and extremist groups beginning after 1980 when Reagan quadrupled the CIA budget to £36 billion). Even after the Soviet withdrawal, the US still supported the Mujahedin, though more covertly now and through Pakistan’s version of the CIA, the ISI, their game plan now to play on the differences between the varying groups and their leaders in an attempt to undermine the power of the factions for Washington’s ends. The game plan analogy is perhaps best revealed in the words of Jimmy Carter’s adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski, who described Afghanistan at the time as ‘the greatest chessboard’. (see also Unholy Wars book review).

Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be linked to bin-Ladens’s al-Qaeda organisation and amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them. Moreover, US surveillance was well aware of bin Laden’s absence prior to the attack and it seems they purposely chose not to target him because a dead bin Laden would have dangerously enhanced his legendary charisma amongst the Islamic fundamentalists he inspires, his death inciting his followers to more crazed acts of vengeance.

It now seems that the US is reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam and is now paying the price. The globalisation process, which the US has pursued obsessively, has only served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

The Islamic zealots the US are prepared to annihilate, and indeed form an alliance with, in Afghanistan were, however, afforded most favoured status during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the Carter administration and beginning in 1980, they were trained in their thousands (sources quote 20,000) at the CIA’s Camp Peary and at the ex-army base at Harvey Point in Carolina; by the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and indeed by the SAS in Scotland. They would go on to be trained at Fort A.P. Hill, just off the Washington-Richmond interstate highway, and at Camp Picket in Virginia by Green Berets and US Navy SEALS. This was not simply ‘basic’ training. They were trained in over 60 deadly skills, including the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives, remote control devices for land mines, incendiary devices and the use of automatic weapons with armour piercing shells. Thus the US went about supporting a ten-year long jihad in the hope Soviet state capitalism would not encroach upon its central Asian markets and that the military cost of the operation would cripple the Soviet economy.

Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting and supporting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years. For instance, the US and the UK supported Suharto’s military coup in Indonesia in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 members of the PKI, and more recently they have supported an Indonesian regime that massacred thousands who voted for independence in East Timor. And it was the US who helped topple the democratically elected Allende government in Chile which resulted in thousands of deaths and countless disappearances. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and massacred 17,500, this was a terrorist act fully supported by the US. It continues to support one of the most notorious state terrorist organisations around in Colombia, Colombia now being the worst violator of human rights in the hemisphere and at the same time the leading recipient of US Military aid – the previous being Turkey. And how can we forget Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Korea?

Since 1945 the US has toppled some 40 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Noriega, Pinochet, Mobuto, Amin, Trujillo, Marcos, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.

In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan the Iraqi airspace its own air force is excluded from. During the 40 day Gulf War, US planes dropped 177 million pounds of explosives on Iraq – the greatest aerial bombardment in history. It has imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps 2 million people and bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey has used to bomb 3000 Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Gulf War, the US mercilessly attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and quite literally fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped, ill-trained soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. Only days previous to the September 11th attack on the US, the US and Great Britain again joined hands in a bombing raid on Iraq. No western newspaper reported it.

There was of course a time when the US couldn’t help Iraq enough. During the Iran-Iraq war, the US gave its full blessing to Iraqi atrocities, turning a blind eye to the chemical weapon attack on the small town of Halabjah in 1988 with the loss of 5,000 innocent lives. Indeed, in 1987 when Iraq attacked the USS Stark, killing 37 servicemen, there was no US response as the White House was keen at the time that Iraq got the upper hand in its war with Iraq and that the US got its oil at the price it demanded.

The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada, propped up right wing tendencies in Panama, Chile, Brazil, Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia. In Africa it supported the right-wing Savimbi as he tried to make Angola more hellish for its impoverished millions, adopted a policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa’s apartheid machine and was all to willing to shoulder up with South Africa in its war with the frontline states. In the Middle East it has allied itself with anti-democratic currents in Iran and Iraq and more recently with Jordan, Egypt and Saudi- Arabia, whilst at the same time ensuring there is no Middle Eastern solution, that the Palestinian people are kept in a state of subjection and that numerous UN Resolutions pertaining to the occupied territories are ignored. This year alone Israel is receiving $6 billion in free US aid, in direct contravention of Congress rulings. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 70 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed tens of thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked the proposed UN inquiry). The US catalogue of shame is indeed a deep one and we can only begin to scratch at its surface.

Whilst the September 11th attack resulted in an appalling loss of innocent life which no sane person could condone, it remains a wonder that the US has escaped the attention of terrorists for so long. For the poignant truth is that there are millions who have been murdered defeated, demoralised, impoverished and crushed by the US and its allies and who could well have turned to the pathos of terrorism as a means of evening up the score. Who knows the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world, prepared to destroy the life of their master? This is not to suggest the US ‘deserves’ to be bombed, but hints at the number of enemies the US has created in pursuit of global domination, forever trying to carve out larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.

If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, then the loss of life in New York and Washington, whilst horrendous, is not incomparable. For instance we can’t realistically comprehend the horror of the dying days of World War 2 when, in one night alone, up to 100,000 died in a 1000 bomber raid on Dresden or when Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost 150,000 in unnecessary nuclear attacks. But it is to the present we make comparison. Is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Is it not a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of an Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25 page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars? Where is the 3 minutes silence for the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died of hunger and disease as a result of US sanctions in the past 10 years – a figure which presidential spokeswoman Madeleine Albright described recently as “a price worth paying”? Can we not also label the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation terrorist organisations, judging them on the premeditated carnage their policies have unleashed on the underdeveloped world?

All of this may sound churlish, but is in no way intended to diminish the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble in New York are our fellow workers - make no mistake about it - members of the working class, murdered whilst they were being exploited. Whilst we are revolted, as socialists we certainly do not crave the comfort of revenge. We take a more considered view.

Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. But what is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where 3 individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the world’s 48 poorest nations? How can we condemn attacks on our ‘civilisation’ when we destroy food to keep prices high and employ scientists on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease? What questions we can ask of those who destroy the lives of millions, then run for the moral high ground when disaster hits their own backyard!

Since the attacks on New York and Washington, The US and British media has become a history exclusion zone, feeding only the spreading contagion of patriotism, whilst flag waving and the repetitious singing of anthems trigger, in pavlovian fashion, national epidemics of jingoism, the only cure of which is reprisals. The dominant view is that extremists the world over are intent on destroying democracy and western civilisation – a myopic perspective which washes well with a news-hungry audience whose knowledge of US foreign policy and basic international affairs makes it impossible for them to separate reality from distortion.

Bush may well speak of the terrorism the US faces from Islamic fundamentalism, but a truer picture is one in which the real global terror is US fundamentalism. Since coming to power, Bush has helped scupper the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on emissions and all but wiped his presidential backside on the 1972 ABM Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the UN treaty on the control of small arms. His attitude to treaties and conventions suggests he has already declared war on the planet and that US foreign policy will continue as before and with one aim – to ensure the 21st Century is another ‘American Century’, as George senior poignantly prophesised all those years ago.

And so, the proverbial line has been drawn in the sand. President George W Bush has told the world “either you’re with us or you’re against us.” It’s a catch all sentiment that is taking hold. Indeed, one writer asked me through the letters page of the Shields Gazette: “A simple message to John ********. Which side are you on, ours or the terrorists?” “It’s that simple”, I’ve been told on the streets! This is presumptuous arrogance and not an option for the class conscious to dwell on. It’s a form of blackmail coming from both sides of the pond which has had some effect. Some campaigners feel that for the time being we should hold back with our anti-war campaign. Oxfam, for instance, cancelled a petition against US policy on pharmaceutical corps on the grounds it was ‘inappropriate to pursue criticism of the US’

The mainstream view is that the forces of barbarism have declared war on the bastion of democracy. George Bush boldly declared: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another.” Yet wonders not why, if this were so, the Statue of Liberty, the White House or the Lincoln memorial was not attacked on September 11th. Why the Pentagon and the WTC - one a symbol of America’s global military reach, the other a symbol of US economic prowess?

Of course there is much missing from Bush’s assertion that Islamic terrorists are just simply jealous as hell of the democratic freedoms ‘enjoyed’ in the US. The simple truth is that throughout the Middle East, indeed the world, the US has, despite its alleged support for movements towards democracy and greater freedoms for all, generally hampered provisional steps in the direction of democratisation. The general line is that if a foreign election is not going the way Washington would like it to go, if the outcome could prove detrimental to US corporate profits, then it must be tampered with. Since 1945, the US has subverted elections in the following countries: Italy (1948-1970s), Philippines (1950s) Lebanon (1950) Indonesia (1955), Vietnam (1955), British Guyana (1953-64), Japan (1958-1970s), Nepal (1959), Laos (1960), Dominican Republic (1962), Guatemala (1963), Bolivia (1966), Portugal (1974-5), Australia 1974-5, Jamaica (1976), Panama (1984, 1989), Nicaragua (1984, 1990), Haiti (1987-1988), Russia 1996), Mongolia (1996), Bosnia (1998).


In the Middle East, whilst it has increased its support for despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco, it has invariably lowered its economic, military and diplomatic support for any Arab country embarking on major political liberalisation.

Israel, for instance, gets 40 per cent of all US overseas aid. Meanwhile Israel is in breach of 6 UN resolutions and continues oppressing Palestinians, the great majority living as second class citizens with almost no rights. During Jordan’s despotic and repressive rule in the 1970s and 80s, US aid for the Amman regime was enormous. Then when Jordan decided to oil the cogs of its political machine in the 1990s, that aid was vastly reduced and for a while suspended. Similarly, aid to Yemen was cut off within months of that unified country’s first ‘democratic’ election. In recent weeks, when it was discovered that Qatar’s satellite channel Al-Jazeera was beginning to sound a little ‘pro-democracy’, upsetting regional dictators, broadcasting images of the US bombings and airing bin Laden’s now famous video, it was Colin Powell who demanded the channel be closed down, insisting it fostered ‘anti-Americanism’.

When it comes to Middle Eastern peace, the US has ensured the region is as unstable as ever, cocking a snook at UN Resolution 687 which calls for region-wide disarmament - which would also mean an end to Israel’s nuclear capability – whilst at the same time selling $60 billion worth of arms to Middle Eastern countries in 10 years (80% of all world arms exports to the Middle East). Israel, by the way, receives $3 billion in US military aid on the pretext it is defending itself from its Arab neighbours – those same neighbours the US has armed to the teeth!

This side of the Atlantic, In his finest Orwellian double-speak, Tony Blair could announce: “The values we believe in should shine through in Afghanistan”. Could this be the same Blair whose government armed the Indonesian military machine during its recent rampage through East Timor, whose government signed 91 military export licences for Israel in the first eight months of the current Intifada? Such instances fly in the face of the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) claim that ‘we will not issue export licences where there is clearly identifiable risk that the equipment might be used for internal repression or adversely effect regional stability.’ Are these the same ‘values’ which, on the same day as the attacks on the US, allowed the DSEi arms fair to go ahead in London and to continue for another 3 days? And are these same ‘values’ informing a Labour government who, without any mandate from the UN, has helped notch up 15,000 RAF/USAF bombing raids on Iraq since the second Gulf War?


These same ‘values’ are now behind the decision that Britain and the US should support a proxy army, the Northern Alliance, an outfit with an impressive record of widespread rape, pillage and murder in Kabul, in its confrontation with the Taliban. One of the key figures in the Northern Alliance is Abdul Rashid Dostom, and ally of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov, who has made huge profits exporting drugs via Uzbekistan, and who allegedly was all to keen to secure Russian weapons and military supplies in exchange for keeping the gas flowing north.

Just as Blair’s values can enable him to curry favour with Israel’s Ariel Sharon, architect of the slaughter in Qibya in 1953 and the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, so can these same ideals prompt him into friendly dialogue with President Karimov, whose airfields are suddenly strategically important now the destruction of Afghanistan has commenced. Karimov, incidentally, holds 7,000 political prisoners, allows no free press and no political opposition. And Karimov, of course, has other reasons for supporting the anti-Taliban alliance. His corrupt police state is facing bankruptcy and to prop it up he is intent on running an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port

But back to the US. It’s fair to say that the Bush administration is in the throes of foreign policy denial – there has been almost blanket rejection of any notion hinting that previous US policy has any bearing on the present. Yet few worthwhile commentators have not mentioned the Middle East linkage, the US support for Israel in its continual oppression of Palestinians and of Washington’s continuing victimisation of Iraq. In a video-recorded message to the world, bin Laden asked: ‘You American people, can you ask yourselves why all this hate against America and Israel? The answer is clear and simple, that America has committed so many crimes against the nations of Muslims.’ Bin Laden then proceeded to list the aforementioned grievances. The latter said, it could perhaps be that bin Laden is an opportunist - indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians – but who is a wise judge of issues that incense people across the Middle East.

Here in Britain, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was castigated by his Labour bosses for making such a link between Palestine and the recent terrorist attacks in the US when he said that Middle eastern terrorism was bred “by the anger many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.” Tony Blair was to spend 15 minutes on the phone to Ariel Sharon, trying to calm him down and get him to agree to meet Straw

Neither will Washington acknowledge its complicity in other areas which have a direct bearing on the present. Whilst Bush is mouthing off about the importance of curbing the funding of terrorist groups and keen to see the Taliban’s overseas assets frozen, it was his own administration, May gone, that scuttled international efforts to clamp down on tax havens, withdrawing support for an OECD initiative that called for more transparency in tax and banking procedures.

Moreover, it was again in May of this year, that the Bush administration was giving the Taliban $43 million as an incentive to reduce the cultivation of poppies, knowing full well the Taliban were notorious abusers of human rights and that they harboured terrorists from all over the Islamic world, including number one bogey-man Mr bin Laden . And there was no criticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who for years gave the Taliban military and financial aid.

For quite some time now, US, German and Russian intelligence services have been alerting Washington to the fact that Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire weapon’s grade nuclear material, indeed as early as 1993 from Russian outlets with poor controls. What was the response of the Bush administration to this? They proposed cutting funds for a programme aimed at preserving nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.

At every turn we find evidence that the US is not only the creator of the monster that now seeks to destroy it, but of also unlocking the door wherein the creator lives.

Of course all the cant and clever rhetoric and soldier speak of the last few weeks have helped mask what are now becoming the true intentions of the US. The attacks on the US on September 11th are now being used to serve US foreign and domestic policy.

The oil reserves of Central Asia are large enough to attract any oil baron (200 billion barrels by some estimates) and as Afghanistan is geographically located between the Caspian basin and the markets of Japan, China and the Indian sub-continent, we can well see the country’s strategic importance to foreign policy planners wishing to dictate the way in which the region’s oil and gas reserves are utilised to the benefit of the US dollar.

The ‘war on terrorism’ is clearly being used to induce fear and mistrust in the US, and through this fear a justification will be found to curb all manner of civil liberties, increase police powers and military spending.

Furthermore, the current crisis serves to extend US power around the globe and perhaps sets a definite agenda for the coming century, the ‘war on terrorism’ serving as a replacement for the Cold War, now that the US has had its anti-communist passport stamped null and void and is desperate to maintain a pretext to assert its hegemonic credentials. (With regards US intentions in the 21st century, please see the article ‘Redefining War’ in issue 5 of Socialist View).

To be sure, this is not the first war of the 21st Century as Bush has claimed, but just one battle in a larger war that began in 1945 with the US determined to control the world’s resources, and there is more than ample evidence to prove this. More importantly, though, The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed too late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit.

As socialists, as observers of international affairs and commentators on the way they impinge upon the lives of our fellow workers, we are well attuned to the machinations of the elites of powerful countries as they seek to promote the interests of their corporate backers. Though it is no easy task for the uninitiated, we urge our fellow workers to be as vigilant as ever. To believe the arguments of the likes of Bush and Blair is to disarm yourself intellectually - for it is at times like the present, when the media is dancing to the tunes of governments, when the trumpets of jingoism, patriotism and reaction are sounding, that we need to be fighting the war of ideas with a little more gusto.

The solution to the ongoing insanity, we insist, remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism

The Great Denial - Terror Attacks on USA

I sent this to the Shields Gazette. Needles to say it was never published, even in part. I later lengthened it into another post on thsi blog "Terrorists and Terrorists (I am unsure of the actual date I wrote this - just workiong here from a date in the article's properties)

The proverbial line has been drawn in the sand and President George W Bush has told the world “either you’re with us or you’re against us.” It’s a catch all sentiment that is taking hold. Indeed, one local letter writer asked me through the letters page of the Shields Gazette: “A simple message to John B******. Which side are you on, ours or the terrorists?” “It’s that simple”, I’ve been told on the streets!


The mainstream view is that the forces of barbarism have declared war on the bastion of democracy - or so the explanation to a bewildered nation reads. George Bush boldly declared: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another.” Yet wonders not why, if this were so, the Statue of Liberty, the White House or the Lincoln memorial was not attacked. Why the Pentagon and the WTC - one a symbol of America’s global military reach, the other a symbol of US economic prowess?


Of course there is much missing from Bush’s assertion that Islamic terrorists are just simply jealous as hell of the democratic freedoms ‘enjoyed’ in the US. The simple truth is that throughout the Middle East, indeed the world, the US has, despite its alleged support for movements towards democracy and greater freedoms for all, generally hampered provisional steps in the direction of democratisation. Whilst it has increased its support for despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco, it has invariably lowered its economic, military and diplomatic support for any Arab country embarking on major political liberalisation.


Israel, for instance, gets 40 per cent of all US overseas aid. Meanwhile Israel is in breach of 6 UN resolutions and its continuing repression of Palestinians. During Jordan’s despotic and repressive rule in the 1970s and 80s, US aid for the Amman regime was enormous. Then when Jordan decided to oil the cogs of its political machine in the 1990s, that aid was vastly reduced and for a while suspended. Similarly, aid to Yemen was cut off within months of that unified country’s first ‘democratic’ election. In recent weeks, when it was discovered that Qatar’s satellite channel Al-Jazeera was beginning to sound pro-democracy, upsetting regional dictators, broadcasting images of the US bombings and airing bin Laden’s now famous video, it was Colin Powell who demanded the channel be closed down, insisting it fostered ‘anti-Americanism’


When it comes to Middle Eastern peace, the US has ensured the region is as unstable as ever, cocking a snook at UN Resolution 687 which calls for region-wide disarmament - which would also mean an end to Israel’s nuclear capability – and at the same time selling $60 billion worth of arms to Middle Eastern country in 10 years (80% of all world arms exports to the Middle East). Israel, by the way, receives $3 billion in US military aid on the pretext it is defending itself from its Arab neighbours!


Writing in the Guardian (29/9/01), Artundhati Roy goes a little further. “Could it be’ she asks, ‘ that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support of exactly the opposite things, to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorships, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocides?’ (for more on this see the October issue of Socialist Standard).


This side of the Atlantic, In his finest Orwellian double-speak, Tony Blair could announce: “The values we believe in should shine through in Afghanistan”. Could this be the same Blair whose government armed the Indonesian military machine during its recent rampage through East Timor, whose government has signed 91 military export licences for Israel since the current Intifada? Such instances fly in the face of the FCO claim that ‘we will not issue export licences where there is clearly identifiable risk that the equipment might be used for internal repression or adversely effect regional stability.’ Are these the same ‘values’ which, on the same day as the attacks on the US, allowed the DSEi arms fair to go ahead in London and to continue for another 2 days? And are these same ‘values’ informing a Labour government who, without any mandate from the UN, has helped notch up 15,000 RAF/USAF bombing raids on Iraq since the second Gulf War?


These same values are now behind the decision that Britain and the US should support a proxy army, the Northern Alliance, an outfit with an impressive record of widespread rape, pillage and murder in Kabul, in its confrontation with the Taliban. One of the key figures in the Northern Alliance is Abdul Rashid Dostom, and ally of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov, who has made huge profits from exporting drugs via Uzbekistan, and who allegedly was all to keen to secure Russian weapons and military supplies in exchange for keeping the gas flowing north.


Just as Blair’s values can enable him to curry favour with Israel’s Ariel Sharon, architect of the slaughter in Qibya in 1953 and the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, so can these same ideals prompt him into friendly dialogue with President Islam Karimov, whose airfields are suddenly strategically important now the destruction of Afghanistan has commenced. Karimov, incidentally, holds 7,000 political prisoners, allows no free press and no political opposition. Karimov of course has other reasons for supporting the anti-Taliban alliance. His corrupt police state is facing bankruptcy and he is intent on running an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port


But back to the US. It’s fair to say that the Bush administration is in the throes of foreign policy denial – there is almost blanket rejection of any notion hinting that previous US policy has any bearing on the present. Yet few worthwhile commentators have not mentioned the Middle East linkage, the US support for Israel in its continual oppression of Palestinians and of Washington’s continuing war with Iraq. In a video-recorded message to the world, bin Laden asked: ‘You American people, can you ask yourselves why all this hate against America and Israel? The answer is clear and simple, that America has committed so many crimes against the nations of Muslims.’ Bin Laden proceeded to list the aforementioned grievances.


Here in Britain, Foreigh Secretary Jack Straw was castigated by his Labour bosses for making such a link between Palestine and the recent terrorist attacks in the US when he said that Middle eastern terrorism was bred “by the anger many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.” Tony Blair was to spend 15 minutes on the phone to Ariel Sharon, trying to calm him down and get him to agree to meet Straw


Neither will Washington acknowledge its complicity in other areas which have a direct bearing on the present. Whilst Bush is mouthing off about the importance of curbing the funding of terrorist groups and keen to see the Taliban’s overseas assets frozen, it was his own administration that scuppered international efforts to clamp down on tax havens, withdrawing support for an OECD initiative that called for more transparency in tax and banking procedures.


Moreover, it was only in May of this year that the Bush administration was giving the Taliban $43 million as an incentive to reduce the cultivation of poppies, knowing full well the Taliban were notorious abusers of human rights and that they harboured terrorists from all over the Islamic world. And there was no criticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who for years gave the Taliban military and financial aid.


For quites some time now, US, German and Russian intelligence services have been alerteing Washington to the fact that Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire weapon’s grade nuclear material, indeed as early as 1993 from Russian outlets with poor controls. What was the response of the Bush administration to this? They proposed cutting funds for a programme aimed at preserving nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.


Such hypocrisy is further reflected in the personnel at the forefront of Bush’s anti-terrorism ‘crusade’ - Colin Powell, US Sec of State and John Negroponte, the current US ambassador to the UN. The former came to prominence when given the job of covering up the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, next seen trying to whitewash to the Iran-Contra scandal, whilst the latter, as US ambassador for Honduras, was up to his neck covering the tracks of US backed right-wing death squads and their state terrorist activities. Yet these same mendicants are charged with routing out the threat to freedom and democracy!

9/11 - Terrorist Attack in the USA

The attacks on the US leave many questions unresolved. What will the final death toll be? Who carried out the attack and what will be the US response? Why was the attack carried out? Any answers at the moment are purely speculative.


Osama bin Laden is widely believed to be behind the terror attacks. He is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them.


US surveillance was well aware of bin Laden’s absence prior to the attack and it seems they purposely chose not to target him because a dead bin Laden would dangerously enhance his legendary charisma amongst the Islamic fundamentalists he inspires, his death inciting his followers to more crazed acts of vengeance - the logic that has informed the US decision not to assassinate Saddam Hussein (one described as the world’s no. 1 mad man).


The US is now reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam and is now paying the price.


Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years (ie their support for Suharto’s military coup in 1966 which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 members of the PKI and their more recent support for an Indonesian regime that massacred thousands who voted for independence in East Timor). In this same period the US has toppled some 30 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Mobuto, Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.


In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan the Iraqi airspace its own air force is excluded from, imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps 2 million people, bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey uses to bomb Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Iraqi Gulf War defeat, the US attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada and supported right wing tendencies in Panama, Haiti, El Salvador and Colombia whilst at the same time ensuring there is no Middle Eastern solution, that the Palestinian people are kept in a state of subjection and that UN Resolutions pertaining to the occupied territories are ignored. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 20 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed tens of thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked an inquiry). The list is indeed a long one.


The question should perhaps not be who bombed the US, but why was such an attack so late in coming. This question does not suggest we condone the attack, but hints at the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world prepared to destroy the life of their master. It hints at the number of enemies the US has created in pursuit of global domination, all with a score to settle – and they are legion, and it hints at the misery and deprivation inflicted on hundreds of millions of workers as the US carves out ever larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.


If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, then the loss of life in New York and Washington is not that alarming. Is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Do we consider it a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of an Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25 page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars?


The attacks on the US will perhaps serve to show republican hawks the futility of a national missile defence system. These hijacked planes could well have flown into nuclear power stations or bases containing US stockpiles of biological weapons (the US is the world’s biggest stockpile of such weapons). The most sophisticated missile defence system imaginable simply cannot be programmed to read the mind of a religious fanatic incensed with the notion that his death (and those of 10,000 infidels with him) is a passport to heaven.


Whilst we gasp in disbelief at the deaths of perhaps 25,000 workers in the biggest terrorist attack in history, it is worth pausing and remembering that the US, Britain, France, China and the Soviet Union have between them thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet a hundred times over. Any one of these war-heads is indeed capable of creating death and destruction on a scale that would make the attack in question look like a playground firecracker.


All of this may sound churlish, but is in no way intended to diminish the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble are our fellow workers, members of the working class. Whilst we are revolted, we do not seek the comfort of revenge, for the eye for an eye philosophy can only make the whole world blind, as Ghandi observed.


Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. When Ghandi was asked what he thought of western civilisation he replied, “it sounds like a good idea.” What is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where 3 individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the word’s 48 poorest nations? How can we condemn attacks on our ‘civilisation’ when we destroy food to keep prices high and employ scientists on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease? What questions we can ask of those who destroy the lives of millions, then run for the moral high ground when disaster hits their own backyard


The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed to late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit. The globalisation process, which the US pursued obsessively, only served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

The solution remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has fee access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed

Son of Star Wars

Rarely have Americans elected to office a president as impetuous, callous and as indifferent to the well being of others as George W Bush, who even as a presidential candidate, signing more death warrants than any Governor in history, made no secret of his hawkish ambitions, determined to forge ahead with the ‘Son of Star Wars’ National Missile Defence system and to propel the world into another arms race and all the old cold war hostilities that accompany it and, indeed, perhaps signing the future death warrants of hundreds of millions.


The recent Pentagon report Proliferation: Threat and Response came as a god-send for the Bush camp, anxious to rationalise a planned $60 billion increase in defence spending, inclusive of investment in the NMD programme which would deploy thousands of air defence missiles to intercept intercontinental ballistic weapons fired by the proverbial ‘rogue states’.


The report would have it that the threat to mainland America is as great now as during the Cold War era and that apocalypse is just over the horizon, discerning a credible threat from North Korea within 10 years, Iran within 15 years and Iraq within 20 years. The report is critical of China for its continuing use of arms sales to ‘advance its strategic and economic interests’, but is silent on the US domination of the global arms market and its related hegemonic aspirations. Likewise, the amnesiacs who compiled the report lambaste Iraq for its ‘pursuit of regional hegemony’, Syria for its excessive $1 billion defence budget (the US defence budget is currently $300 billion) and North Korea for its stockpiling of chemical weapons (when the US has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons on the planet). At every turn, it seems, there’s a rogue state just itching to lob a nuclear or biological weapon at the defender of global peace and democracy, and it is this warped logic that informs the hawkish stance in Washington. No mention is made of the fact that even without NMD, any state stupid enough to throw anything bigger than a grenade at the US would be bombed back into the Stone Age.


Nevertheless, it is talk that is demanding a $60 billion increase in US defence spending (which is actually China’s total military budget), and rhetoric that the cold warriors Bush has given cabinet posts to are more than familiar with. Once a critic of NMD, Colin Powell, of Gulf War fame (a man who came to prominence covering up the My Lai massacre and later up to his neck in the arms for hostages scandal and the illegal supplying of arms to the Contras) is now Secretary of State and the Pentagon’s top NMD salesperson. Other cabinet posts have gone to other Reaganite hawks such as Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Candaleezza Rice. Bush’s choice for key cabinet posts alone should warn us there is some serious ass kicking to be done.


Whereas Bush sees NMD as a ‘constitutional and moral requisite’ (he incidentally also believes humans and fish can coexist peacefully) US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld agrees that ‘it is in many respects a moral issue’, that NMD is essential to counter ‘the raw and random violence of the outlaw regime or the rogue state armed with missiles of mass destruction’, that NMD would make the US ‘less isolationist’, less vulnerable and more prepared to help its allies.’


At a defence conference in Munich in early February, at which the implications of NMD were discussed, concern was raised that NMD would undoubtedly spark an arms race. Rumsfeld declared that NMD would not destroy arms control agreements including the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but later suggested the 1972 treaty was ‘ancient history’.


Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian National Security Council told the conference that ‘the destruction of the 1972 ABM Treaty will result in annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race.’ As much, and more was hinted at back in late 1999 when Republican hawks celebrated a Senate vote not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and announced their intention to scupper the 1972 ABM Treaty which outlawed Star Wars’ missiles systems capable of intercepting incoming missiles. For it was them that Russian Defence Minister Nikolai Mikolov, acknowledging Russia could not match US technology, declared Russia would simply deploy more warheads capable of overwhelming the US nuclear umbrella system.


In November of 2000 the Kremlin announced plans to cut its number of men under arms by 360,000 and to shift the emphasis from nuclear weapons to conventional arms. This decision has since been shelved and will be reconsidered in March at the earliest. Meanwhile, in direct response to Washington’s announcement that the US intends to go through with the Son of Star Wars anti-missile programme, whatever shape this may be (air-based, sea-based, space-based) and regardless of any objections, Russia has announced it will seek an anti-US diplomatic alliance with China, North Korea and Iran.


As well as Russia, both India and China have expressed concern about the NMD, fearing it will very much provoke an arms race and force them to expand their own nuclear weapons programmes. Whist France and Germany are wholly opposed to NMD, the British government is currently playing its cards close to its chest. Though the MoD and the foreign Office claim they are ‘not convinced of the merits’ of NMD, Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon, asked if the US would be allowed to upgrade their early warning system at Flyingdales in Yorkshire replied: ‘We share of course US concerns about emerging threats. The US is our closest ally.’ For Tony Blair’s part, whilst it is felt he is bending towards the idea, keen to placate his US cronies, his government is under no pressure to make a decision for several months, which suits New Labour down to the ground. It should also be remembered that Blair is facing a General Election this year so has no intentions of losing votes as a result of arguments with anti-nuclear protestors. It is, however, a safe bet that Blair will indeed see an election victory as his mandate to commit Britain to Bush’s wider game plan for global US domination.


It is a fair guess that there is more behind NMD than Washington lets on. For instance, the moment you begin installing a sophisticated missile defence shield is the moment your adversaries begin seeking ways around it. Whilst NMD may well take out the incoming missile, what of the biological or nuclear bomb in the suitcase or the suicide bomber?


A more likely explanation lies in the fears of the Republican right that the only discernible threat to US hegemony in the 21st Century will come from China as it develops into the economic giant many think it capable of - a serious challenger for US profits. What better way to curtail China’s economic ambitions than to compel it to channel more money into defence and away from other social programmes, economically hamstringing it? A similar tactic had been employed against the former Soviet Union during the Reagan administration in the late eighties, forcing state capitalism into an early grave as it found itself unable to meet the costly demands of an escalating arms race weighted heavily in the favour of the US.


It is poignantly ironic that George W Bush is preparing to raise the global security stakes when just over ten years ago his father George Bush, as president, announced to the world the benefits of the coming ‘peace dividend’ in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘collapse of communism’; a world in which there would no longer be the need for countries to invest heavily in military hardware now the bogeyman had been exorcised – that money was now to be used for health, education and other social programmes. But there again, George senior did announce at his inauguration that the 20th Century had been the ‘American Century’ and that he’d be doing his damnedest to ensure the 21st was also an ‘American Century’. So maybe George junior is simply following out his father’s promises. Ensuring the 21st century will also be ruled by force and woe betides any one silly enough to mess with US interests.


One thing is sure. The US is deadly serious about possible threats to its strategic and economic interests in the 21st Century and has already toyed with a future confrontation with a possible rising superpower. In January, the US air force, along with 250 military and civilian ‘experts’, completed its first major war games in space at the Space Warfare Centre in Colorado, rehearsing a conflict set in 2017 between China and the US. It is no great leap of the imagination to envisage the projected winner.


As we have announced several times in the past year, if we are to prevent the 21st Century becoming a more violent re-run of the 20th, that witnessed Two world wars, the first use of nuclear weapons and many hundreds of smaller conflicts – all in the name of profit – it is essential we, the victims, the cannon fodder, the class that has the biggest price to pay to satisfy the whims of the mighty, begin to organise now; not tomorrow when NMD is in place, nor in years to come when the sirens are screaming. We as a class have suffered too much and have too much to lose to leave decisions regarding the future of our planet in the hands of group of arrogant, conceited and profit crazed individuals. Let’s really organise to take their power away, before it is too late.

Macedonia

Late June and early July saw much tension in Macedonia, threatening once more to ignite nationalist hatreds that have ripped the Balkans apart now for almost a decade.

It was uncannily ironic that as Yugoslavia was sending former president Slobodan Milosevic to stand trial in The Hague on war crimes, a mob of 5,000 Macedonian protestors, including police, soldiers and reservists, stormed their parliament and forced president Boris Trajkovski flee in fear of his life. His crime? He had agreed to a western brokered cease-fire with ethnic Albanian rebels and also allowed NATO to ferry rebel fighters to safety from a village they had captured six miles away from the capital Skopje . Not only was the mob furious that their government had signed a ceasefire with a movement that Nato’s own command had labelled ‘terrorists’ and ‘murderers’, but here was the west once again coming to the aid of insurgents.

Ostensibly, the Albanian rebels claim to be only interested in winning equal civil rights for ethnic Albanians and constitutional changes, but this however is no civil rights movement. If so, then why the armed insurgents and why do they call themselves the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA)? The answer is simple, they are nationalists bent on creating a greater Albania. They are after territorial gain and control of the porous borders which show a fair profit in drugs and arms smuggling and the lucrative trade in ‘illegal’ immigrants. Violence and guerrilla warfare as practised by the NLA is not normally the stuff of ‘civil-rights’ movements, which generally pursue a non-violent agenda. It is the remit of liberation forces intent on wresting territory from its present owners. What has prompted the NLA to pass themselves off as a ‘civil-rights’ movement is NATO’s refusal to redraw the borders of the Balkans.

Moreover, why do they launch attacks on government forces? Simple – they hope to incur a heavy handed response from Macedonian forces which would win them support from Macedonia’s Albanian population, who perhaps need little egging on bearing in mind their social and economic gripes, and from Kosovo Albanians and Albania itself. They have further counted on benefiting from a similar situation when their parent organisation, the KLA, incurred such a harsh and brutal response from Serb forces that NATO was forced to intervene on behalf of the Albanians in 1998.

The risk of all out war is serious enough. It is feared that the mob fury could now be focused on isolated pockets of Albanians in Macedonia (they make up one third of the population) now that Trajkovski has agreed to the temporary EU brokered ceasefire. At present the rebels have captured areas of territory in the west of the country and have cut off water and electricity supplies, further inciting Macedonian hardliners in Skopje to demand armed intervention – a situation made all the worse with the rebels threatening to descend on Skopje to protect Albanians living there.

Chief protagonists of the Macedonian Slav majority, including prime minister Ljubco Georevski still hanker after a ham-fisted solution to the problem and perhaps the fact that the government has recently taking delivery of eight new attack aircraft – doubling the size of its air force – and that Georgevbski’s VMRO-DPMNE political party have recently handed out automatic weapons to 2000 reservists suggests they are not putting much faith in a peaceful solution to the crisis. If Macedonian Slavs, tired at the slow pace of a settlement in their favour, frustrated with the unchecked gains of the rebels, decide to even the score and attack ethnic Albanian areas, this will most certainly witness the beginning of a new wave of civil war.

A political settlement however is still on the cards as I write, with negotiators from the EU and NATO having set an unofficial mid July deadline for a peaceful solution, which would then pave the way for British, French, Italian and Greek soldiers to take part in a mission to disarm ethnic Albanian rebels. The ceasefire, signed by the heads of the Macedonian army and police force as well as the NLA, consists of two linked agreements - one between the NLA and NATO and the other between the Macedonian forces and NATO, with the NLA agreeing to disarm if a political settlement can be reached.

Critics, meanwhile, warn that by acknowledging the NLA as a legitimate protagonists in debates about Macedonia’s future, the west has effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia along ethnic lines - and this is cold comfort for Macedonian nationalists and the paramilitary groups now springing up and arguing for the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Macedonia’s mixed communities. Many Macedonians still remain distrustful of the US, who they see as pro-Albanian- following the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and are contemptuous of any western-designed solution.

Little surprise, then, that Balkan analysts see only a deteriorating situation and one that can’t be solved by further western solutions that sparked the storming of the Macedonian parliament.

To date the present conflict has not been as bloody as previous Balkan disagreements, but it has nevertheless resulted in 100,000 refugees who represent perhaps 5 per cent of the population. It is perhaps too early to predict events in the coming weeks in Macedonia. Whilst nationalism, like the disease it is, can be diagnosed, there remains no immediate prognosis. For it feeds on fear and insecurity, alienation and ignorance which themselves can lead to irrational passions and attempts at quick-fix and spontaneous violent attempts at remedy which always prove counterproductive and detrimental to all concerned.

Nationalist conflict has raged for 10 long years in the Balkans. What, in all honesty, have any of the victors gained? What is the ‘independence’ they yearn after, if it means being trapped within borders – artificial constructs, no, prisons – inside of the bigger prison of capitalism?

THE COMING BALKAN CONFLICT?

Two years after Nato and the UN moved into the former Yugoslavia to police a region beset by conflict since the Balkan break-up of the early 90s, a new conflagration threatens. Macedonian troops have clashed with Albanian rebels on the Kosovo border and, on the Serbian border, Albanian nationalists have launched attacks against Serb police positions.


Along the Kosovo/Macedonia and Kosovo/Serbia border, former members of the KLA have formed into guerrilla units intent on creating a ‘Greater Kosovo.’ In the south of Kosovo the small and nascent Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) aims to annex north and eastern Macedonia, whilst on Kosovo’s eastern border, a sister organisation, the UCBMP (Liberation Army of Prosevo Medvedja and Bujanovo) – all towns in the southern part of Serbia with an Albanian ethnic majority - is demanding border changes so that 70,000 ethnic Albanians living in Serbia are included in Kosovo.


Whilst the nationalist insurgents would have it that a ‘greater Kosovo’ is at stake, that includes the ethnic Albanian populations of Serbia and Macedonia, others envisage a ‘greater’ Albania, an Albania merged with Kosovo which would become the largest state in the Balkans, if not the most impoverished. Control of the borders is also allegedly a reason for the recent wave of unrest, for whoever controls these also controls the lucrative and illicit trade in drugs and arms and ‘illegal migration’


The UCBMP have caused such much mayhem in the Presevo Valley that Nato has handed back part of the border buffer zone to Yugolsav military control, to special units of the 7th battalion of the Yugolsav army created by former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In other words, the west has sided with forces that battled for a greater Serbia and only two years after Nato went to war with Serbia on behalf of Kosovo Albanians.


Once thing is certain – the west has clearly underestimated the threat of Albanian nationalism and indeed dissipated the once popular belief in Kosovo and Albania that Nato was an ally of Kosovo Albanians. There is also a lack of any consensus between Nato and the UN about the shape of any final Kosovo settlement, and US policy is still out of step with the other Nato allies. Neither is it in Nato’s remit to cross the border and control the Kosovo side of the border, in spite of the fact that Kosovo, though technically part of Serbia, is a Nato protectorate.


Whilst UN officials see in KLA violence a game plan intended to provoke a swift retaliation from Macedonia (home to 600,000 ethnic Albanians) which will in turn incite Kosovos, Stratfor (the US Security consultants) sees the ‘primary motive for the [UCPMB] campaign in the Presevo valley [to be the desire] to provoke a harsh response and thus damage relations between the new Yugoslav government and K-For.” The UCPMB plan – if indeed it was a plan – has turned sour. The demilitarised Zone is now being policed by Serbian troops under the watchful eye of Nato and the US wishes to settle the Kosovo problem peacefully and to integrate Yugoslavia into a plan for long-term regional stability.


All the signs are that Nato’s Frankenstein is up and walking, fed on the same raw nationalism that has brought so much bloodshed to the Balkans this past decade, bent on carving out a greater Albania from Albania, Kosovo and the ethnic Albanian regions of Macedonia and Serbia. But they face repeated obstacles: not least is the desire by Western powers to cement relations between new President of Serbia Vojislav Kostunicas


K-For (the western peace keeping force set up to police the region) failed to disarm the KLA, which went on the initiate a criminal network safe in the knowledge they had the backing of US Intelligence. And as The Observer reported on 11th March, that the CIA encouraged KLA fighters to mount a rebellion in southern Serbia to undermine support from President Milosevic. As one K-For battalion commander pointed out:

“
The CIA have been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he’s gone, the US State Dept. seems incapable of reigning in its bastard army.”


One Foreign Office analyst observes:


“We are not looking at a repeat of the circumstances when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 1990s. The people we are now dealing with are the fanatics who became wealthy out of national politics, crime and war. They feel that their power is being eroded and they will fight to survive.” (Guardian, 3/3/01).


Elsewhere, to the west of Kosovo, nationalists in Montenegro, lulled by the US into believing it would be permitted to split from Serbia once Milosevic was ousted, have been told to put aside these aspirations and re-forge ties with Serbia – news that is already inciting the nationalists of Montenegro. Meanwhile, Croat nationalists allied to Bosnian Croat leader Ante Jelavic are denouncing the government of the Muslim-Croat Federation, threatening to unravel the 1995 Dayton agreement which partitioned Bosnia along ethnic lines. Suddenly, Spring-time in the Balkans looks set to see war once again blossom.


For almost a century, this journal has been consistent in its opposition to nationalism, in the belief that nationalism is a killer epidemic, creating conflict from which those with the least to gain have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.


We maintain that, regardless of the ‘century-old hatreds’ that still lie unchecked in the Balkans, their cultural, historical and religious differences, there is more that unites Muslims and Christians, Albanians and Serbs, than can ever divide them. Their real needs – needs people the world over identify with – can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers. We can only hope it is not too long before the long suffering people of the Balkans come to realise this.

Depleted Uranium? Depleted Minds!

The recent and indeed ongoing debate about the effects of depleted uranium adds a whole new dimension to the time-honoured quote that truth is the first casualty of war. Recent evidence would suggest that dishonesty is not only a midwife to war, but very much its bastard offspring.


Depleted uranium (or U238) is what is left of natural or pure uranium after the isotope U235 has been removed for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and in nuclear power plants. It further contains up to 60 per cent of the radioactivity found in its pure form and, because it is more concentrated, it is potentially more lethal.


A heavy and dense silvery metal, U238 is also highly pyrophoric which makes it an ideal core material in anti-tank projectiles and bunker-busting Tomahawk missiles (each one of these contains 3kg of DU).


Upon impact, the core of the DU projectile ignites and oxidises at such high temperatures it becomes glass or ceramic micro and nano particles, containing lethal alpha, beta and gamma rays. The ensuing conflagration other than burning to a cinder the inhabitants, smothers the target tank or bunker with a fine radioactive dust, contaminating a surrounding area for up to 50 metres of the impact sight with lesser contamination detectable many kilometres away. The extent to which British, European and American servicemen’s health has been effected as a result of such contamination forms the basis of the debate.


The British and US governments, Nato and the medical experts they have hired to fight their corner insist there are no medical side effects to the inhalation of DU dust particles. Just as John Speller the armed forces minister, could claim in December of last year that ‘we are unaware of anything that shows depleted uranium has caused any ill health or death of people who served in Kosovo or Bosnia,’ so too could Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson, in a 10th January damage limitation press conference nonchalantly argue there was ‘no link of any kind’ between depleted uranium and leukaemia, that there was ‘nothing to fear from this particular type of munitions’, and that ‘we act with the interests of our troops and civilians in mind.’ (Independent, 11/1/01).


So convinced was Nato of the rightness of its cause and its preparedness to continue using DU munitions, their staff distributed dossiers of scientific evidence stifling claims that DU was harmful and even called upon the services of two Pentagon medical experts to refute the claim that DU was harmful.


The broadsheet press, however, wasted no time in revealing an army report entitled The Use and Hazards of DU Munitions, dated 8th March 1997 which stated that ‘All personnel…should be aware that uranium dust inhalation carries a long term risk to health.’ This same MOD report warned that exposure to depleted uranium, as used in British and US tank shells, increased eight-fold the risk of lung, lymph and brain cancers.


It was at the same time revealed that the government’s own nuclear safety advisers at the Atomic Energy Agency warned 10 years ago that depleted uranium shells fired during the Gulf War would pose a health risk. The 1991 AEA report says:


‘Handling heavy metal munitions does pose some potential hazards as does the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination as a result of firing in battle…and can become a long-term problem…and pose a risk to both the military and civilian population.’ (Times, 15/1/01).


All of which cuts no ice with Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon who still maintained days after the revelation of the MoD report that ‘there is no scientific evidence to support that the use of radioactive material caused illness, including leukaemia…there are no risks associated with depleted uranium and certainly no proven link between its use and illness.’ (Times, ibid). If this was the case then why the Mo D warning? What scientific evidence were they working from?


One wonders whether those defending the government and manufacturers of DU munitions are aware of the related facts. That of the 53,000 servicemen/women who were stationed in the Gulf, 5,000 are recorded as suffering illnesses including leukaemia and that there have since been 521 deaths.


Are they aware that British and US tank ammunition alone during the Gulf War contained 55,000 lbs of depleted uranium? That 300,000 rounds of depleted uranium rounds were fired during the Gulf War, or that levels of irradiated particles in the air above Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are 20 times higher than over Baghdad?


Researcher Dr Chris Busby found that urine samples taken from Gulf War vets showed that mass spectrometry tests revealed soldiers inhaling dust received doses of up to 778 millisieverts, not the 20-30 claimed by the MoD and suggested as being ‘of no cause for concern’.


Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland revealed that DU particles stayed in the lungs for 10-20 years and that 10,500 of Britain’s Gulf War personnel could develop fatal cancers. He further warned that thousands of people living near the firing ranges in Britain and the factories producing the DU munitions were likewise at risk of contamination.

The present government position is that there is no case for an inquiry because they refuse to acknowledge any evidence of a significant risk to personnel. The Health and Safety Executive are supposedly monitoring ranges in Britain, but as their findings are of ringing no alarm bells their level of monitoring can be seriously questioned.


The most the 19 Nato ambassadors will agree to is a ‘working party’ to coordinate information on DU shells. Reluctant to conduct their own inquiry, they have passed the task over to the UN who they believe are ‘better equipped’ to deal with the matter, not least because the UN is largely controlled by the US. However, to their credit, they have since demanded that 11 of the 112 sites Nato have pointed them at be cordoned off.


The underlying factor of course is costs. A clean up operation in Bosnia and the Gulf would, it is estimated, run into $trillions, not to mention the cost in compensation to the military and civilian population involved.


Moreover, the DU shells are a relatively cheap and highly effective method of murder, bearing in mind the core material is a waste product, and indeed manufactured by an industry that governments do not wish to take contracts from- they exist as powerful lobbies. And which government would ever come clean and admit to error? That so much of the evidence emerging pertains to the Gulf War, when the Conservative Party were in power, helps explain why they, the Tories, have not sought to make political capital out of the issue, and hasn’t Tony Blair an election on the horizon?


So we can expect the issue to be no nearer a propitious outcome in the coming months
than we can expect the causes of war itself to be abolished. The lies and disinformation will counter every new revelation proving the detrimental effects of DU. For the defenders of capitalism, there is too much at stake for them to concede just one inch that maybe, just maybe, their critics are right. When it comes to counting the casualties of war, we must still be prepared to list truth right up there with them.