The Logic behind that UN Resolution on Iraq

After weeks of debating, the UN Security Council hammered together a unanimous resolution setting harsh terms for Iraqi disarmament, and cautioning there would be brutal consequences for any further defiance.


Bluntly, cleverly, the UN has crafted a situation where Iraq not only has to prove that it has eradicated all of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it also has to verify that it never possessed certain WMD. This seems something of a Catch 22 - for if Iraq never possessed the alleged WMD in the first place, then how can it prove that it never possessed them? And woe betides Iraq if it can’t prove that it never had something others say it has had. All Globocop has to do is affirm it does not believe Iraq or declare the findings of the weapons inspectors invalid and begin an attack on the grounds that Bush and his fellow hawks were right all along, that the scheming and devious Saddam is just extra clever at hiding the evidence.


For Saddam’s part, he has insisted he will move to defuse the crisis by complying with the resolution and cooperating fully with the UN inspectors. The level of compliance and cooperation he will afford the inspectors will undoubtedly determine future events. As before, this weapons inspectorate will be acting on CIA intelligence and will undoubtedly be seeking to manipulate a situation that will lead to a US response. What is less certain is just what will transpire if Saddam really complies 100% with the terms of the UN resolution and cooperates wholeheartedly with the weapons inspectors. As far as the UN is concerned he will have honoured the UN resolution and can stay in power – no regime change!


But could the US really stomach a situation in which Saddam stays in power, an obstacle once again to Bush’s ambitions to make this century – as his father once prophesised – ‘another American century?; a barrier to the corporate interests of US oil giants? How would such a situation be squared with the ambitions of US capitalism as evidenced increasingly in the belligerent and imperialistic tone of foreign policy documents these past ten years?


We had, cause recently to report on the Bush administration's foreign policy objectives outlined in "National Security Strategy" document, (also known as the "Bush Doctrine" even though it was penned by National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice). It states quite brusquely: "The President has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago." The document goes on to say: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States."


We have also commented how the "Bush Doctrine" resembles a similar document, (which we have also reported on) - a1992 Pentagon paper written by hawks Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz that announced that the United States will aim to "prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defence strategy and requires that we endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power."


Lately, The New York Times ran a story outlining how "the White House is developing a detailed plan ... to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein. ... In the initial phase, Iraq would be governed by… [someone who would]… assume the role that Gen. Douglas MacArthur served in Japan. ... In contemplating an occupation, the administration is scaling back the initial role for Iraqi opposition forces in a post-Hussein government." The article continued: "as long as the coalition partners administered Iraq, they would essentially control the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world." Which is what really concerns the US. Allowing a coalition a say in the distribution of Iraqi oil? Think again, Chirac, Putin and Blair. There’s profits to be had.


Writing in The Guardian, November 5th, George Monbiot reported on the recent findings of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre:


“As available reserves decline, the world's oil-hungry nations are tussling to grab as much as they can for themselves. Almost everywhere on earth, the United States is winning. It is positioning itself to become the gatekeeper to the world's remaining oil and gas. If it succeeds, it will both secure its own future supplies and massively enhance its hegemonic power… In the Middle East, the only nation which could significantly increase its output is Iraq.”


Monbiot further highlights a 2001 a report sponsored by the US Council on Foreign Relations and the Baker Institute for Public Policy which outlines some of the implications of this decline for US national security. The report states: "The world is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity." It also states that the looming crisis is increasing "U.S. and global vulnerability to disruption". During the preceding year, it says, Iraq had "effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest". If world demand for oil continues to rise, world shortages may possibly reduce the prominence of the US to that of "a poor developing country".


The report maintains that this crisis demands "a reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy ... Such a strategy will require difficult trade-offs, in both domestic and foreign policy. But there is no alternative. And there is no time to waste." By assuming "a leadership role in the formation of new rules of the game", the United States will put a stop to the strategic ambitions of its competitors.


When the ‘Bush Doctrine’ is considered with similar US foreign policy reports, it becomes clear that the US is determined to scupper at the outset the plans of any commercial rival, whoever they may be, particularly where oil is concerned. The US is well aware that Baghdad has already awarded $1.1 trillion in oil contracts to Europe, China and Russia and, naturally, all are anxious that their contracts will not be honoured by a US-dominated Iraq should Saddam be ousted. Thus, the recent UN resolution on Iraq can be viewed from a new angle. The long drawn-out diplomatic wrangling over the precise wording of the UN Security Council resolution has less to do with Saddam’s WMD and far more to do with who will have access to the second largest oil reserves on the planet. European ‘doves’ are not so much concerned with the morality of an attack upon Iraq, or with any related humans rights issues. Their bickering over the finer points of the UN resolution is simply a desperate attempt to ensure they do not lose out in the scramble for Iraq’s oil reserves.


In the meantime, be assured that if the oil-crazed Bush administration has its way, Saddam will be found to have breached this new UN Security Council resolution and the perfect pretext will have arisen for the US invasion of Iraq and the next stage in US global domination.

Another War for Oil

This is the text for a leaflet I wrote for an anti-war demo (it incorporates a previous article on the subject)

Once again, in a further attempt to tighten US control over Middle Eastern oil supplies, and no doubt to distract attention from mega-domestic corporate wrongdoings, George W Bush has presented before the world the vision of time- honoured bogey-man Saddam Hussein lobbing weapons of mass destruction around as if they were going out of fashion.

With Osama bin Laden now clearly relegated to second place in the league of global spooks, Saddam has been dusted down and once more presented to us as the greatest existing threat to world peace. The news from Washington is that he still has stockpiles of chemical weapons and is close to building an atomic weapon. That neither George Bush nor Tony Blair has yet been able to authenticate the Iraqi threat with real evidence distracts transatlantic warmongers no more than the fact that Saddam is clearly aware that were he to use any such WMD his country would be instantly obliterated. And that US ally, Israel, is in breach of as many UN resolutions as the errant Iraq, which Bush cites as evidence of Saddam’s contempt for the world, is no more considered than continuous US flouting of UN resolutions.


Hypocrisy and Double Standards


Not so long ago, the US opposed, with one other country, a UN resolution condemning international terrorism and remains the only country to veto a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law - clearly a response to the censure it received from the International Court of Justice for "unlawful use of force" during its terrorist war against Nicaragua, and to which it was also ordered to pay substantial reparations. Dismissing that particular ruling, the US went on to intensify that assault.

When it comes to international treaties, you could be forgiven for thinking George W loathes humanity. His administration has refused to accept the Kyoto agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which threaten environmental disaster. It has torn up the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty - a move that threatens a new arms race with the US gearing up for "Star Wars" or the properly named National Missile Defence system. It has, as already stated, de-recognised a treaty setting up an International Criminal Court, maintaining that its politicians and troops should never be held to account for crimes they commit (see quote from the 2002 National security Strategy below).

On July 25th 2001, 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. The reason for this decision was that it threatened US commercial interests. The protocol would have incorporated verification measures which would have given an international inspectorate admittance to laboratories in the signatory countries. We may well wonder just what the US is afraid the inspectorate would uncover at its thousands of biotech sites and defence plants. Just what are its commercial interests and secrets that it could even consider scuttling a treaty drawn up in the interests of humanity? Yet this same administration has been so vociferous in calling for a UN inspectorate to rummage about in Iraq.

Aware that world opinion was against him, Bush looked set to pursue his campaign via the UN, clearly hoping that Iraq’s failure to comply with requests from UN weapons inspectors would be the green light he needed to justify an attack upon Iraq. When Iraq offered to allow inspectors in to search for the weapons the US claimed Saddam had stockpiled, Bush declined the offer.

We may well wonder why the US pretends to be oblivious as to the chemical facilities Iraq might have. Certainly Saddam has the technological know-how. It came courtesy of the US when they sponsored Saddam in his war with Iran. Back in 1994, the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. It concluded:

"The United States provided the Government of Iraq with ‘dual use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including: chemical warfare agent precursors; chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings…chemical warhead filling equipment; biological warfare related materials; missile fabrication equipment; and, missile-system guidance equipment

We can further observe that the country with the biggest nuclear arsenal on earth and the biggest stockpile of chemical weapons, and which has a proven track record of having used them, is the United States.

The United States has in fact 9,000 nuclear warheads, as does Russia. Britain, France and China have another 950 between them. On the other hand, Saddam doesn't even have one, as is widely acknowledged. Instead, they charge him with hoarding chemical and biological weapons, but then so do the countries just mentioned.


Furthermore, Dr Kathleen Sullivan of the Nuclear Weapons Education Project in New York observes: "The Bush administration is not only funding the further modernisation of nuclear weapons, but it is also proposing two new facilities in the US dedicated to the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons." She asserts that "the current doctrine on nuclear weapons use" in the US leaves little doubt that Bush is prepared to use them first.

Washington is certainly planning on some serious battles in the near future. Next year, the Bush administration will spend $396 billion on a war machine costing 26 times the combined military spending of the seven countries it recently announced it would not hesitate to hit with nuclear weapons - Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Cuba – and a figure almost 300 times that of errant Iraq. Bush now intends to develop thr US war wagon, with a plan to raise this figure to an annual $451 billion by 2007.

We can wonder whether Israel’s nuclear arsenal is ever inspected – after all, it is an aggressive and unpredictable Middle Eastern country, just like Iraq, and with little regard for human rights, its neighbours or UN resolutions. The answer is no. And why? Because, like India and Pakistan, which are widely believed to have a couple of dozen nuclear warheads a piece, Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It’s nuclear arsenal, therefore, exists outside international law and beyond the reach of international weapons inspectors. As Iraq has signed the treaty, it is therefore required to submit to such inspections.

And let’s not forget the key U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991 – aimed at prohibiting Iraq from developing WMDs; its preamble proclaims that all states must do everything possible to "establish a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region of the Middle East." Though well cited by transatlantic warmongers, seeking justification for an attack on Iraq, it is not solely concerned with Iraq, as it calls for eradicating weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems right across the Middle East, including Israel, and the working towards a global ban on chemical weapons.

But to go back, for the moment, to Washington’s alleged concern for Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons, recent evidence reveals the US is guilty of playing a heinous game of double standards. Edward Hammond, in an article that appeared on the Counterpunch website (www.counterpunch.org/) on 25th September and entitled US Violates International Law - The Pentagon's Secret Chemical Weapons Program, highlights a report published a day earlier by the Sunshine Project (the text can be found at www.sunshine-project.org/) accusing the US military of conducting a chemical weapons research and development program in contravention of international arms control law. The charges follow an 18 month investigation of the Department of Defence’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD).

The enquiry made wide-ranging use of the US Freedom of Information Act to obtain Pentagon records that form the prime basis of the allegations. An arrangement of documents, many of which are to be found on the Sunshine Project website, make obvious that JNLWD is operating an illegal and classified chemical weapons program. In particular, the Sunshine project accuses the JNLWD of:

1. Conducting a research and development program on toxic chemical agents for use as weapons, including anaesthetics and psychoactive substances, in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention;

2. Developing long-range military delivery devices for these chemicals, including an 81mm chemical mortar round, that violate the Chemical Weapons Convention.

3. Pursuing a chemical weapons program while fully cognizant that it violates the Chemical Weapons Convention and US Department of Defence regulations;

4. Attempting to cover up the illicit program by classifying as secret even its own legal interpretations of the Chemical Weapons Convention and attempting to block access to documents requested under US information freedom law.

Reports and Dossiers

On September 17th the Bush administration presented to the world it’s National Security Strategy of the United States. Though heavily influenced by the events of September 11th, the report is informed with the same belligerent, imperialist jargon that has fused many similar reports. In highlighting areas where the US feels its interests face the biggest challenge, it becomes simplistically clear that this is but a blue print for US domination of the globe. Control of Iraq’s oil reserves can perhaps best be seen as but the first stage of the battle for US global supremacy.

Section 8 states: “We are attentive to the possible renewal of old patterns of great power competition… Russia, India, and China…In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path that, in the end, will hamper its own pursuit of national greatness.”

Section 9 informs us: “the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. forces.” It continues: “We must prepare …by developing assets such as advanced remote sensing, long-range precision strike capabilities, and transformed manoeuvre and expeditionary forces. This broad portfolio of military capabilities must also include the ability to defend the homeland, conduct information operations, ensure U.S. access to distant theatres, and protect critical U.S. infrastructure and assets in outer space.”

That same section tells us that US “forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States…We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.”

Although now five years old, the US Space Command document ‘Vision 2020’ had similarly telegraphed US designs for the 21st Century and set in context the logic behind NMD: “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. “

Indeed such ideas were then hadly new. They were formulated by Paul Walfowitz (now Deputy Secretary of Defence) and Lew Libby (a National Security Adviser) and presented as a confidential Pentagon document in 1992 by none other than vice-president Dick Cheney. It argued that the US should take the necessary steps to stop any “…hostile power from dominating regions” whose resources would allow it to attain superpower stature; that it should discourage attempts by other advanced industrialised states to challenge US hegemony or upset the extant political and economic global set up and act to halt the ambitions of any prospective global competitor.

It is in the above context that we can perhaps set Tony Blair’s 50 page dossier Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction – the assessment of the British Government, which was coincidentally presented to the British public within days of the publication of the National Security Strategy of the United States.

Blair’s dossier – an attempt to whip up British support for the US venture against Iraq - was largely penned in Washington by the same discredited intelligence agencies that offered no forewarning of the attacks of September 11th. The Foreign Office here neglected even to edit the dossier’s American jargon. Its 50 pages begin with pure distortion, claiming that a report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies suggested Iraq could assemble nuclear weapons within months. In actual fact, the Institute's report concluded that Iraq was years from even developing, let alone perfecting and making, nuclear weapons – a fact that is eventually admitted to towards the end.

Writing for the Znet website (www,Zmag.org/) on 25th September, Robert Fisk observes of the dossier: “Reading it can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof – if the contents are true – that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct…it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us – for nothing.”

Of course there is little testimony in Blair’s dossier that was not already widely available. What there is plenty of in the dossier is conjecture . Instead of the cast-iron definites you would assume would lend the report credence, we come across terms like “there is no definite intelligence”, “it appears”, “is almost certainly”, “difficult to judge”, “secret intelligence sources”, “I believe” and a fair few “ifs”.

With this chunky bit of evidence presented to the British people, Blair expected a popular mandate to go to war. Not that this would be a last resort to stop Saddam developing WMD, as Iraq had in fact agreed to submit to the weapons inspections initially suggested by Washington and London. Bush however was having none of it – as far as he was concerned Saddam could not be trusted. He demands war and Saddam is not going to get out of one that easy. Indeed, US Secretary of State Colin Powell openly announced that America might block the return of United Nations’ weapons inspectors to Iraq. The US is understandably afraid that Iraq's unrestricted offer to the inspectors will "damage the coalition," that he will take from under their noses their excuse for a full scale attack and the theft of Iraqi oil.


The Coming War for Iraqi Oil


There can be no other reason for the US obsession with Iraq than the promise of securing future oils supplies and the profits they bring. What remains imprecise is the US game plan in the region: to use Iraq as a springboard to capture Iran and thus secure a shorter and cheaper route to Gulf ports for Caspian oil, or maybe to get a tighter grip on Saudi oil less there be Islamic fundamentalist blowback resulting from the ‘war on terror’? Or maybe, with China estimated to equal US demands for oil within 20 years, a China the US sess as a real threat to its commercial interests, the foray into Iraq is part of a larger a plan to head off future problems now. NO? Would there be so much US concern if Iraq exported dates only.

Clearly seeing through the current charade, Mo Mowlam, once a member of Blair’s cabinet, wrote in The Guardian (5th September): "This whole affair has nothing to do with a threat from Iraq - there isn't one. It has nothing to do with the war against terrorism or with morality. Saddam Hussein is obviously an evil man, but when we were selling arms to him to keep the Iranians in check he was the same evil man he is today. He was a pawn then and he is a pawn now. In the same way he served Western interests then, he is now the distraction for the sleight of hand to protect the West's supply of oil.”

As the Bush administration continues to beat the war drums, mustering support for its attack upon Iraq, there are those who still steadfastly maintain that the US-UK position on Iraq has nothing at all do with oil and that Bush and Blair are quite sincerely concerned about peace and democracy and ridding the world of a regime that threatens global harmony with its weapons of mass destruction. The evidence, however, suggests that Western concerns with Iraq are far less to do with its alleged threat to world peace and everything to do with control of the region’s oil supplies.

In a leading article in the Washington Post on 15th September, staff writers Dan Morgan and David Ottaway, wrote extensively about Western oil interests in Iraq, observing that whilst senior Bush administration officials say they have not begun to focus on the issues involving oil and Iraq, “American and foreign oil companies have already begun manoeuvring for a stake in the country's huge proven reserves of 112 billion barrels of crude oil, the largest in the world outside Saudi Arabia.”

An Observer investigation, published on 6th October, began: “Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq…The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq’s massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia’s”

However revealing this may appear, more damning evidence of US intentions in the Middle East actually emerged some time ago. In April 2001, some five months before ‘September 11th’, a little heard of report was submitted to vice-president Dick Cheney, originally commissioned by James Baker who had been the US Secretary of State under George Bush Senior. It is entitled Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century and describes how the US is confronting the biggest energy crisis in its history. The report specifically targets Saddam as an obstacle to US interests because of his control of Iraqi oilfields and suggests the use of 'military intervention' as a way to access and control Iraqi oilfields and help the US out of its energy crisis.

One passage reads: 'Iraq remains a destabilising influence to...the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets…. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader ... and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”

According to the report’s compilers, the main cause of any coming crisis will be 'Middle East tension', which means the 'chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption'. It admits that the US will never be 'energy independent' and is becoming too dependent on foreign powers supplying it with oil and gas. The answer is to put oil at the centre of the administration - 'a reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy'.

The report initially contemplates an arms-control programme in Iraq and suggests this may lead to a relaxation of oil sanctions which might make for better trading on world oil markets. However, it then acknowledges that such an arms-control policy would prove over-costly as it would “encourage Saddam Hussein to boast of his 'victory' against the United States, fuel his ambition and potentially strengthen his regime”. It continues: “Once so encouraged, and if his access to oil revenues was to be increased by adjustments in oil sanctions, Saddam Hussein could be a greater security threat to US allies in the region…”

With US oil reserves estimated to last no more than 20 years and the with the US the biggest consumer and the biggest net importer of oil (11 million barrels a day, which is a seventh of global production), there is a growing reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Twenty years ago the US imported just over 30% of its oil from the Middle East. That figure now stands at 52%. And in a world where the US has economic rivals, with their own growing demand for oil (i.e. China’s demands are increasing by 3.5% per year), a war to secure control of the ‘greatest prize’ makes sound sense to the Bush administration.

Additionally, in the post 9/11 world, where anti-American feeling runs high in traditional militant Islamic societies, the US also realises it can no longer remain dependent on Saudi oil supplies. As the US needs an oil supply totalling 20 million barrels of crude oil a day, it now seeks a supplier that can perhaps meet half of these needs – Iraq! With the present high global prices of oil sucking the US into a recession it is important also that the US breaks the Saudi stranglehold on the oil cartel Opec.

And what of the Bush administration and its own personal oil interests? Well make no mistake about it, the president, the vice-president, the defence secretary and the deputy defence secretary, the chairman of the NSC and the head of the CIA all have oil connections. The most hawkish US regime ever assembled has its own private reason for a ‘war’ with Iraq.

Four years ago, Halliburton, the US oil equipment company of which Dick Cheney was chief executive, sold parts to Iraq to help with the rebuilding of an infrastructure that had been devastated during the 1991 Gulf war. Halliburton did £15 million of business with Saddam - a man Cheney now compares to Adolf Hitler. Moreover, Halliburton is one of the US companies thought by experts to be queuing up for the profits resulting from any clean-up operation in the wake of another US-led attack on Iraq.

In the past few years, and increasingly since Bush came to power and most evidently since 9/11, the US has spread its military tentacles - establishing bases in twelve new countries in the past year alone. US forces now surround over 80% of the world’s oil reserves. They have encompassed the Caspian region which has an estimated 70-200 billion barrels of oil and 11 trillion cubic feet of known gas deposits. And still with gas, Iran, neighbouring Iraq, and part of Bush’s dreaded ‘Axis of Evil’ controls 80% of the world’s gas reserves. And with gas estimated to account for 30% of world energy production by 2020, the US game plan becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss as nonsense.

Moreover, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - have international oil companies with major stakes in a ‘regime change’ in Baghdad. And since the Gulf War of 1991, companies from more than a dozen nations, inclusive of France, Russia, China, India, Italy, Vietnam and Algeria, have either negotiated contracts or sought to reach agreements in principle to develop Iraqi oil fields, to revamp extant facilities there or explore undeveloped fields. Most of the deals, however, are in abeyance until the lifting of U.N. sanctions.

Sources in Russia have expressed serious concerns about a US attack on Iraq and any ‘regime change’ this may result in, fearing that a post-Saddam, pro-US, government might just not honour the extraction contracts that Baghdad has already signed with Moscow and that all such contracts would be declared null and void. Many in Russia now fear that the US has already brokered deals with the Iraq opposition and despite recent dialogue between Moscow and Washington remain unconvinced of Washington’s claim that Russian contracts would be legitimate.

One Russian UN Official reportedly told The Observer (6th October: “The concern of my government is that concessions agreed between Baghdad and numerous enterprises will be reneged upon, and that US companies will enter to take the greatest share of those existing contracts.”

Such fears are perhaps not unfounded. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (an umbrella organisation of Iraqi opposition groups backed by the US), recently announced that he preferred the creation of a US-led consortium to develop Iraq's oil fields, which have deteriorated in the ten years of UN sanctions, saying "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil." (Washington Post)

Back in 1997, Russia’s biggest oil company, Lukoil, signed a $20 bn contract to tap into the West Qurna oilfield. In October of last year, the Russian oil services company Slavneft purportedly signed a $52 million service contract to drill at the Tuba field, also in southern Iraq. A proposed $40bn Iraqi-Russian economic agreement also reportedly includes opportunities for Russian companies to explore for oil in Iraq's western desert.

French company Total Fina Elf had negotiated for rights to develop the huge Majnoon field, near the Iranian border, which could contain up to 30 billion barrels of oil. But in July 2001, Iraq announced it would cease giving French firms preference in the award of such contracts because of its decision to abide by UN sanctions, and then gave a $90 bn contract to Russian oil company Zarubezhneft to drill the bin Umar oilfield.

During the first two days of October, at the first US-Russia Commercial Energy Summit in Houston, Texas, emphasis was placed on Russia increasing its oil exports to the US, which is desperate to reduce its reliance on the Middle East. Off stage, talks were in progress about a series of contracts held by Russian oil companies. According to Vaget Alekperov, Lukoil chairman, in an interview with the Financial Times on October 3rd, the Russian government secured an agreement that if, or when, the Baghdad regime is toppled, "the [Iraqi] law is the law, the state is still there.”

Mikhail Margelov, of the international affairs committee of the Russian federation council (the upper house of parliament), afterwards told Reuters that Moscow expected "equal, fruitful, cooperation" with the US "especially in the privatisation of the Iraqi oil sector".

Following the Houston summit, Russian energy minister Igor Yusufov and economy minister German Greg travelled with US commerce secretary Donald Evans and energy secretary Spenser Abraham for talks with Bush's vice-president Dick Cheney and national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, undoubtedly in order for the latter to reassure the former that a Russia supportive of an attack upon Iraq would indeed get its share of the spoils once Saddam is ousted.

Apparently, plans to safeguard Russia's interests in Iraq have been under discussion for months in Washington. Prior to the Bush-Putin summit in May, Ariel Cohen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation suggested an offer to "support the Russian companies' contractual rights", arguing that Lukoil could sway Russian foreign policy, and that a deal could be brokered to Washington's and Moscow's mutual advantage.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chief of Russia’s second biggest oil company, Yukos, later said in a Washington Post interview that "if there were sufficient political will", one possibility was to create a Russian-American oil consortia to exploit Iraqi

Clearly, like the capitalists state it has always been, Russia wants to make sure that, whatsoever deals the US agrees upon with anti-Saddam Iraqi politicians or Kurdish nationalists, their existing contracts remain valid. And this, more than the repayment of Iraq's $7bn Soviet-era debt, is the decisive factor in deciding how Russia casts its vote on the UN Security Council.

R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and a leading protagonist in the US anti-Iraq campaign, is one of many all too aware of Russian and French qualms regarding the whole affair. Cognizant of the need to secure French and Russian support he commented: "It's pretty straightforward, France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them." In other words, ‘scratch our backs and we’ll scratch yours.’

France is listening and, like Russia, is wondering whether once Saddam is ousted, its companies will lose out to US oil interests. Not only is it now thought to be negotiating a slice of the coming action – a bigger role than the US afforded it in the 1991 Gulf War – but the state-owned Total Fina Elf oil company has also been in talks in the US about the distribution of the spoils of war.

As Washington’s crusade against Iraq offers huge opportunities for international oil corporations, it also exposes serious risks and worries for the global oil market should there indeed be ‘regime change’ in Iraq. As the Washington Post reported: “Access to Iraqi oil and profits will depend on the nature and intentions of a new government. Whether Iraq remains a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, for example, or seeks an independent role, free of the OPEC cartel's quotas, will have an impact on oil prices and the flow of investments to competitors such as Russia, Venezuela and Angola.” (15th September).

Consider the case of Russia. Oil companies such as Lukoil have an important financial concern in developing Iraqi fields; however, a general lowering of oil prices that may result from a flood of Iraqi oil into world markets could jeopardise Russian government attempts to attract foreign investment in its untapped domestic fields, because a drop in world oil prices could make costly ventures to unlock Siberian oil reserves far less attractive.

Conversely, the knife cuts both ways. In the short term, Russia is poised to make a tidy profit if a US invasion of Iraq sparks an immediate hike in oil prices, with its oil companies already negotiating to sell the US oil at two-thirds of the existing market price.

Though having initially urged caution on the Iraq affair, it now looks likely that both Russia and France will give their blessing for a US-led assault on Iraq. And who could blame them? Their governments are little more than the executives of their respective master classes and in the cut- throat world of capitalist competition they must be seen to be promoting their profit-oriented interests, and to hell with the cost of life. In Moscow, Paris, and in state capitals the world over, governments will always maintain that oil takes priority over blood.

Months ago, defending the belligerent stance of the US in its ‘war on terror’ Bush said that ‘inaction is not an option.’ Blair now reiterates this platitude, mantra-fashion. We agree. For the class conscious, inaction is definitely ‘not an option’. As we see it, it is the inaction and complacency of the working class that has enabled the horrors we associate with capitalism, including war, to continue. For almost a century we have warned of the dangers of political apathy, of trusting in leaders, of accepting all that governments say without question and of striving to reform a system that can endure no end of reforms. It is our silence, our inaction, more than anything, that Bush and Blair will depend on in coming months when they seek to legitimise an attack upon Iraq - that same silence the master class toasts each day. Our inaction remains as an important element in our continuing exploitation, for the master class see in it our consent for their excesses.

If you’re into demonstrating against war, then take our advice and invest in a sturdy anti-war banner, for if you are prepared to oppose war without opposing the very system that gives rise to it, then you’ll be demonstrating for quite some time to come. Alternatively you can join the movement which believes that to end wars you must first put an end capitalism. An uphill struggle? No more so than the campaign to end war against the backdrop of the profit system.

The US and the Threat of Bio-Terrorism

On 22nd January 1999, the New York Times reported President Bill Clinton as having said that what kept him awake at night was a fear of biological warfare. In light of the recent deaths from anthrax in the US and the consequent panic this has created from coast to coast, it is fair to say that many millions now share this fear. Postal workers now go about their everyday work wearing masks and gloves and there is widespread caution about opening even the most harmless–looking envelopes and packages. Meanwhile the US security services are working around the clock in an attempt to find out who is behind this new wave of bio-terrorism. Whilst many Republican hawks have already pointed the finger of blame at Iraq, the more cautious are suggesting this could be the work of home-grown right-wing fanatics. Military analysts and all manner of White House advisers have hurriedly placed the issue of the threat of bio-terrorism at the top of their agendas, others have drawn up nightmare scenarios, invoking images of mass outbreaks of plague and other deadly diseases.

What is forgotten amongst all of the current hysteria is a related concern which we reported a few months ago. Namely, how on July 25th of this year, 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. The reason for this decision was that it threatened US commercial interests. The protocol would have incorporated verification measures which would have given an international inspectorate admittance to laboratories in the signatory countries. We wonder just what the US is afraid the inspectorate would uncover at its thousands of biotech sites and defence plants. Just what are its commercial interests and secrets that it could even consider scuttling a treaty drawn up in the interests of humanity? And was it not the US who was so vociferous in calling for a UN inspectorate to rummage about in Iraq for months?

What few Americans realise, or care not to know, is their own government’s complicity in the use of chemical and biological agents – not just against ‘enemies’ but on its own people. For instance, in 1952, the US dropped an average 70,000 gallons of napalm per day on Korea. In 1980, it was revealed between 1967-9, the US sprayed Agent Orange over 23,607 acres of the southern boundary of the demilitarised zone in North Korea. For almost ten years the US sprayed tens of thousands of tonnes of poisons over 3 million acres of South Vietnam, inclusive of 500 lbs of dioxin (3 ounces of this in the water supply is estimated to be able to wipe out New York City) and US forces in September 1970, acting under ‘Operation Tailwind’ used aerosolised sarin gas to prepare their attack upon a Laotian village. Moreover, the Los Angeles Times reported on June 18th 1990: “US military institutions have polluted the drinking water of the Pacific island of Guam, pored tonnes of toxic chemicals into Subic Bay in the Philippines, leaked carcinogens into the water source of a German spa, spewed tonnes of sulphurous coal smoke into the skies of central Europe and pumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the oceans.”

At the end of World War 2, the judges at Nuremberg, who had scrutinized reports on the nazi medical trials, formulated a set of principles which became known as The Nuremberg Code. Its first tenet stipulates: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” It would seem that this is a tenet the US has since forgotten. For 20 years the CIA and the Defence Department conducted tests that exposed millions of Americans to all manner of bacteria and chemical particles, without once informing the potentially affected.

The US Army has since admitted that in the 30 years following the close of the Nuremberg trials 239 populated areas across the USA were blanketed with various organisms during tests to gauge dissemination patterns, weather effects and dosages.

In one week in September 1950, in six simulated biological attacks, the US Army sailed a ship down the San Francisco Bay spraying Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcescens inland, at one point these chemicals forming a two-mile long cloud. Within days, San Francisco’s Stanford University Hospital reported its first cases of Serratia marcescens, the first ever instances at the hospital.

In 1953, there were 61 releases of Zinc cadmium sulphide in four sections of the city of Minneapolis, in spite of the known effects of this chemical: lung damage, kidney inflammation, liver degeneration. That same year, the were 35 releases of Zinc cadmium sulphide in St Louis and throughout the Washington DC area. In 1955, the CIA carried out open air whooping cough experiments around the Tampa Bay area of Florida, and in 4 days in February 1956, this same unaccountable organisation sprayed New York streets and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.

In the 60’s the US army released bacteria at Washington’s National Airport to study the effects of a smallpox attack, a similar test being carried out at Washington’s Greyhound bus terminal, and open-air Zinc cadmium sulphide tests were again carried out – 115 of them – in Cambridge, Maryland in 1969.

The true scale and extent of similar experiments on the US public will perhaps never be fully known. Neither has fresh evidence come to light about more recent tests. Interestingly, though, in 1999 the government planned to release a strain of bacteria into the atmosphere from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to test experimental bio-warfare detectors. The public outcry when this was revealed was such that the plan was immediately dropped.

On numerous occasions the US has voted alone against proposed negotiations on chemical and bacteriological weapons at the UN. It has moved to nullify the 1972 biological weapons and toxins convention and has never hesitated to use chemical and bacteriological agents on humans, friend or foe. Whilst we appreciate the anxiety of workers throughout the USA as they face who knows what future threats from bio-terrorists, we remain scornful of the US government and its corporate backers who, all to ready to scramble for the moral high ground in times of national security, are ever keen their own citizens suffer massive bouts of amnesia at such times and forget, and indeed disbelieve, that their protectors would just as soon poison them if they thought that in doing so a profit could be made.

The Coming War for Iraq's Oil

As the Bush administration continues to beat the war drums, mustering support for its attack upon Iraq, there are those who still maintain that the US-UK position on Iraq has nothing at all do with oil and that Bush and Blair are quite sincerely concerned about peace and democracy and ridding the world of a regime that threatens global harmony with its weapons of mass destruction. The evidence, however, suggests that Western concerns with Iraq are far less to do with its alleged threat to world peace and everything to do with control of the region’s oil supplies.


In a leading article in the Washington Post on 15th September, staff writers Dan Morgan and David Ottaway, wrote extensively about Western oil interests in Iraq, observing that whilst senior Bush administration officials say they have not begun to focus on the issues involving oil and Iraq, “American and foreign oil companies have already begun manoeuvring for a stake in the country's huge proven reserves of 112 billion barrels of crude oil, the largest in the world outside Saudi Arabia.”


An Observer investigation, published on 6th October, began: “Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq…The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq’s massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia’s”


However revealing this may appear, more damning evidence of US intentions in the Middle East actually emerged some time ago. In April 2001, some five months before ‘September 11th’, a little heard of report was submitted to vice-president Dick Cheney, originally commissioned by James Baker who had been the US Secretary of State under George Bush Senior. It is entitled Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century and describes how the US is confronting the biggest energy crisis in its history. The report specifically targets Saddam as an obstacle to US interests because of his control of Iraqi oilfields and suggests the use of 'military intervention' as a way to access and control Iraqi oilfields and help the US out of its energy crisis.


One passage reads: 'Iraq remains a destabilising influence to...the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets…. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader ... and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”


According to the report’s compilers, the main cause of any coming crisis will be 'Middle East tension', which means the 'chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption'. It admits that the US will never be 'energy independent' and is becoming too dependent on foreign powers supplying it with oil and gas. The answer is to put oil at the centre of the administration - 'a reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy'.


The report initially contemplates an arms-control programme in Iraq and suggests this may lead to a relaxation of oil sanctions which might make for better trading on world oil markets. However, it then acknowledges that such an arms-control policy would prove over-costly as it would “encourage Saddam Hussein to boast of his 'victory' against the United States, fuel his ambition and potentially strengthen his regime”. It continues: “Once so encouraged, and if his access to oil revenues was to be increased by adjustments in oil sanctions, Saddam Hussein could be a greater security threat to US allies in the region…”


With US oil reserves estimated to last no more than 20 years and the with the US the biggest consumer and the biggest net importer of oil (11 million barrels a day, which is a seventh of global production), there is a growing reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Twenty years ago the US imported just over 30% of its oil from the Middle East. That figure now stands at 52%. And in a world where the US has economic rivals, with their own growing demand for oil (i.e. China’s demands are increasing by 3.5% per year), a war to secure control of the ‘greatest prize’ makes sound sense to the Bush administration.


Additionally, in the post 9/11 world, where anti-American feeling runs high in traditional militant Islamic societies, the US also realises it can no longer remain dependent on Saudi oil supplies. As the US needs an oil supply totalling 20 million barrels of crude oil a day, it now seeks a supplier that can perhaps meet half of these needs – Iraq! With the present high global prices of oil sucking the US into a recession it is important also that the US breaks the Saudi stranglehold on the oil cartel Opec.


And what of the Bush administration and its own personal oil interests? Well make no mistake about it, the president, the vice-president, the defence secretary and the deputy defence secretary, the chairman of the NSC and the head of the CIA all have oil connections. The most hawkish US regime ever assembled has its own private reason for a ‘war’ with Iraq.


Four years ago, Halliburton, the US oil equipment company of which Dick Cheney was chief executive, sold parts to Iraq to help with the rebuilding of an infrastructure that had been devastated during the 1991 Gulf war. Halliburton did £15 million of business with Saddam - a man Cheney now compares to Adolf Hitler. Moreover, Halliburton is one of the US companies thought by experts to be queuing up for the profits resulting from any clean-up operation in the wake of another US-led attack on Iraq.


In the past few years, and increasingly since Bush came to power and most evidently since 9/11, the US has spread its military tentacles - establishing bases in twelve new countries in the past year alone. US forces now surround over 80% of the world’s oil reserves. They have encompassed the Caspian region which has an estimated 70-200 billion barrels of oil and 11 trillion cubic feet of known gas deposits. And still with gas, Iran, neighbouring Iraq, and part of Bush’s dreaded ‘Axis of Evil’ controls 80% of the world’s gas reserves. And with gas estimated to account for 30% of world energy production by 2020, the US game plan becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss as nonsense.


Moreover, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - have international oil companies with major stakes in a ‘regime change’ in Baghdad. And since the Gulf War of 1991, companies from more than a dozen nations, inclusive of France, Russia, China, India, Italy, Vietnam and Algeria, have either negotiated contracts or sought to reach agreements in principle to develop Iraqi oil fields, to revamp extant facilities there or explore undeveloped fields. Most of the deals, however, are in abeyance until the lifting of U.N. sanctions.


Sources in Russia have expressed serious concerns about a US attack on Iraq and any ‘regime change’ this may result in, fearing that a post-Saddam, pro-US, government might just not honour the extraction contracts that Baghdad has already signed with Moscow and that all such contracts would be declared null and void. Many in Russia now fear that the US has already brokered deals with the Iraq opposition and despite recent dialogue between Moscow and Washington remain unconvinced of Washington’s claim that Russian contracts would be legitimate.


One Russian UN Official reportedly told The Observer (6th October: “The concern of my government is that concessions agreed between Baghdad and numerous enterprises will be reneged upon, and that US companies will enter to take the greatest share of those existing contracts.”


Such fears are perhaps not unfounded. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (an umbrella organisation of Iraqi opposition groups backed by the US), recently announced that he preferred the creation of a US-led consortium to develop Iraq's oil fields, which have deteriorated in the ten years of UN sanctions, saying "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil." (Washington Post)


Back in 1997, Russia’s biggest oil company, Lukoil, signed a $20 bn contract to tap into the West Qurna oilfield. In October of last year, the Russian oil services company Slavneft purportedly signed a $52 million service contract to drill at the Tuba field, also in southern Iraq. A proposed $40bn Iraqi-Russian economic agreement also reportedly includes opportunities for Russian companies to explore for oil in Iraq's western desert.


French company Total Fina Elf had negotiated for rights to develop the huge Majnoon field, near the Iranian border, which could contain up to 30 billion barrels of oil. But in July 2001, Iraq announced it would cease giving French firms preference in the award of such contracts because of its decision to abide by UN sanctions, and then gave a $90 bn contract to Russian oil company Zarubezhneft to drill the bin Umar oilfield.


During the first two days of October, at the first US-Russia Commercial Energy Summit in Houston, Texas, emphasis was placed on Russia increasing its oil exports to the US, which is desperate to reduce its reliance on the Middle East. Off stage, talks were in progress about a series of contracts held by Russian oil companies. According to Vaget Alekperov, Lukoil chairman, in an interview with the Financial Times on October 3rd, the Russian government secured an agreement that if, or when, the Baghdad regime is toppled, "the [Iraqi] law is the law, the state is still there.”


Mikhail Margelov, of the international affairs committee of the Russian federation council (the upper house of parliament), afterwards told Reuters that Moscow expected "equal, fruitful, cooperation" with the US "especially in the privatisation of the Iraqi oil sector".


Following the Houston summit, Russian energy minister Igor Yusufov and economy minister German Greg travelled with US commerce secretary Donald Evans and energy secretary Spenser Abraham for talks with Bush's vice-president Dick Cheney and national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, undoubtedly in order for the latter to reassure the former that a Russia supportive of an attack upon Iraq would indeed get its share of the spoils once Saddam is ousted.


Apparently, plans to safeguard Russia's interests in Iraq have been under discussion for months in Washington. Prior to the Bush-Putin summit in May, Ariel Cohen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation suggested an offer to "support the Russian companies' contractual rights", arguing that Lukoil could sway Russian foreign policy, and that a deal could be brokered to Washington's and Moscow's mutual advantage.


Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chief of Russia’s second biggest oil company, Yukos, later said in a Washington Post interview that "if there were sufficient political will", one possibility was to create a Russian-American oil consortia to exploit Iraqi


Clearly, like the capitalists state it has always been, Russia wants to make sure that, whatsoever deals the US agrees upon with anti-Saddam Iraqi politicians or Kurdish nationalists, their existing contracts remain valid. And this, more than the repayment of Iraq's $7bn Soviet-era debt, is the decisive factor in deciding how Russia casts its vote on the UN Security Council.


R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and a leading protagonist in the US anti-Iraq campaign, is one of many all too aware of Russian and French qualms regarding the whole affair. Cognizant of the need to secure French and Russian support he commented: "It's pretty straightforward, France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them." In other words, ‘scratch our backs and we’ll scratch yours.’


France is listening and, like Russia, is wondering whether once Saddam is ousted, its companies will lose out to US oil interests. Not only is it now thought to be negotiating a slice of the coming action – a bigger role than the US afforded it in the 1991 Gulf War – but the state-owned Total Fina Elf oil company has also been in talks in the US about the distribution of the spoils of war.


As Washington’s crusade against Iraq offers huge opportunities for international oil corporations, it also exposes serious risks and worries for the global oil market should there indeed be ‘regime change’ in Iraq. As the Washington Post reported: “Access to Iraqi oil and profits will depend on the nature and intentions of a new government. Whether Iraq remains a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, for example, or seeks an independent role, free of the OPEC cartel's quotas, will have an impact on oil prices and the flow of investments to competitors such as Russia, Venezuela and Angola.” (15th September).


Consider the case of Russia. Oil companies such as Lukoil have an important financial concern in developing Iraqi fields; however, a general lowering of oil prices that may result from a flood of Iraqi oil into world markets could jeopardise Russian government attempts to attract foreign investment in its untapped domestic fields, because a drop in world oil prices could make costly ventures to unlock Siberian oil reserves far less attractive.


Conversely, the knife cuts both ways. In the short term, Russia is poised to make a tidy profit if a US invasion of Iraq sparks an immediate hike in oil prices, with its oil companies already negotiating to sell the US oil at two-thirds of the existing market price.


Though having initially urged caution on the Iraq affair, it now looks likely that both Russia and France will give their blessing for a US-led assault on Iraq. And who could blame them? Their governments are little more than the executives of their respective master classes and in the cut- throat world of capitalist competition they must be seen to be promoting their profit-oriented interests, and to hell with the cost of life. In Moscow, Paris, and in state capitals the world over, governments will always maintain that oil takes priority over blood.

New Labour

Can't remember when I wrote this piece, or even if it is a completed article or the notes for one - just found it on my pc, so stuck a 2002 date on it:

To begin with, the great swing to New Labour at the May 1997 General Election was hardly a mass endorsement of Blair’s policies by the electorate. A quick look at the statistics shows the turn-out at the 1997 election to be the lowest turn-out on record – if anything the abstentionists won the election. Rather, it was more a case of voters simply desiring a change of government, believing Blair could offer some digression from 18 years of Tory rule. In reality, the voters were simply electing to office Thatcherism with a smile on its face.

Blair in fact had much praise for Mrs Thatcher. Prior to the election he declared she was someone “Britain needed at the time’” and she was amongst the very first invites to 10 Downing Street in May 19997 when Blair took office. And though critical of Tory policies whilst in opposition, it was Blair himself who told voters that new Labour would be adhering to Tory pending plans for 2 years – so we feel we have every right in “lumping the Labour party in with the Tories.”

Throughout their term in office, and just like their predecessors, the Labour party have proved themselves to be the party of capitalism, a party f reactionaries, more than ready to suck up to their cronies in big business and to clout the poorest at every opportunity

Prior to the election, Blair so enthralled a CBI conference that they gave him a 14 minute standing ovation. He even travelled to Australia to meet with right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

In 1996, Blair accepted a ride in the private helicopter of Sir Anthony Bamford (of JCB), later announcing they shared “common purposes”. At conference that year he declared “we are on the same side. We are on the same team.” Within 3 years, JCB were fined £24 million by the EU for restrictive practices. In February of 1996 Blair had even told another audience of businessmen: “I want to see Britain become an audience of millionaires.”

Seeing profits at every turn, Blair would go on to tell the Green Alliance/CBI Conference (sponsored by BP) and at which such matters as alternative energy sources were discussed: “We should see protecting the environment as a business opportunity.” A shame BP was not listening, for they have just announced record profits of £24 million per day. And of this how much is invested in sustainable energy (an alternative to oil)? – 0.05 per cent of it!

Sidekick Peter Mandelson could be found on the other side of the pond in January 1999, telling an audience of business people how Labour “is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich

Earth Summit 2002

The findings of a survey carried out by YouGov in the wake of the recent Earth Summit and published in the Observer (8/9/02) revealed that “Seven out of ten people think that the Johannesburg Earth Summit has made almost no difference to the future of the planet. And only one in 500 believes that the controversial £40 million meeting attended by leaders from more than 100 countries, with 60,000 participants, will make the world ‘a lot better’.” This, of course, came as no surprise. In the run up to the Summit, activists the world over had expressed little or no confidence that the Summit would be noted for achieving anything tangible. And if developments since the 1992 Rio Summit were anything to go by, few were holding out for anything worth celebrating.


As the Summit closed, The UN, the British government and many worldwide delegations articulated their surprise that non-governmental groups had come away from the Summit feeling angered and cheated. Oxfam, for instance, had commented that the Summit had been “a triumph for greed and a tragedy for people.” Friends of the Earth remarked: “Do not believe government spin doctors who claim success for this Summit. It is by any objective test a failure.” And Christian Aid said: “The overall winner of this Summit has been big business. It has triumphed in its bid to avoid any legally-binding regulation on its behaviour.”


The final text of the Programme of Implementation agreed upon at Johannesburg after 9 days of deliberations contained but two new and explicit targets. The summit agreed to halve the number of people without sanitation (about 1.2 billion) by 2015 and agreed to plans to provide clean water for half of those without it (Para. 7). And Paragraph. 31(c) considers over-fishing, and thus the depletion of a main protein source for many living in coastal areas. In this regards the Summit agreed to restore, where possible, the world’s fish stocks by 2015 and to urge attention on marine pollution and the establishment of protected areas by 2010.


With growing concern now about the destruction wrought on of the earth’s life support system, the bumbling negotiations were supposed to map out a plan for reducing poverty and protecting bio-diversity. All they could agree on was an aim to reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010 and to increase funding and technical resources to developing countries as well as to strengthen forest law and to reduce illegal logging The Summit acknowledged that poverty and environmental degradation are linked and further adopted the aim of halving the 1.2 billion who exist on less that $1 per day.


Back in 1992 at the Rio Summit, the world’s wealthier countries pledged to greatly increase their development aid to poorer countries to 0.7% of GNP. This was never achieved. Indeed, prior to the Summit, across the industrialised world it stood at 0.22%. What did the Johannesburg Summit promise? We need only turn to Paragraph 5(a) to find the Summit promising “to urge the developed countries…to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7% of GNP as official development assistance.” This would appear a step back. - a ‘promise’ is suddenly demoted to a ‘promise to urge’ – and is perhaps an admission by the promise makers, and the ‘urgers’, that promises are there to be broken.


Arising out of negotiations on sustainable consumption - the “Holy Grail” of the summit - there only was agreement to develop an action programme within 10 years, to publish indicators that evaluate progress and to give shoppers instructive eco labels.


The Summit Failed in its mission to set definite targets and a timetable for increasing the use of renewable energies. Paragraph 19(e) betrays the Kyoto Protocol to combat climatic change by promoting “clean” fossil fuels. This said, the Kyoto Protocol was given a little more legitimacy with Russia and Canada promising to ratify it.


There was littler or nothing to applaud at this Summit. The world’s Leaders, and there were many on show, simply recommitted themselves to agreements they have already and elsewhere committed themselves. If anything, this was an affirmation by the global executive of capitalism that the Programme of Implementation should have carried the subtitle: “Sorry, but there’s profits to be had.”


In the past ten years, the real change has been in giving a more prominent role in negotiations to business, predominantly multinational corporations. As never before, companies are centre stage in sustainable development, yet by and large the Summit has proved futile in providing a sufficiently strong regulatory framework to guarantee that their activities really serve the interests of those in greatest need. At Johannesburg the US delegation blocked all proposal involving regulating multinational corporations or dedicating significant new funds to sustainable development.


With the blessing of the UN, multi-nationals negotiated a number of “partnership agreements” – quite simply voluntary commitments obliging corporations to respect the environment and protect human rights. There is nothing really positive in “partnership agreements” – it is basically big business saying that rather than creating international laws that compel us to respect human rights and the environment, we will instead promise to do so. But in an increasingly globalised world, where there are mega profits to be made, and wherever these profits will come into conflict with environmental and human rights issues, any directors not seen to have profits forefront in their minds will be shown the door pretty damned quick. Thus, such promises are in truth not worth the paper they are written on. Insane? Yes. But this is actually capitalism functioning efficiently.


The importance of the meeting was perhaps best revealed by the absence of George W Bush who, despite massive international lobbying for him to attend, decided that a ‘war’ with Iraq was more important – this was understandable considering the numerous oil giants and weapons manufacturers he is indebted to, and not least because his advisors were all too aware he would have been heading for the mother of all heckling bouts and would undoubtedly have proved an embarrassment to the US delegation. Moreover, as US Capitalism plc was aware, they were going to get their way anyway at Johannesburg, so why send Dubya who was more valuable at home promoting the case for US oil companies?


The debating aside, this was a meeting at which US Sec of State Colin Powell was booed and jeered by US environmental campaigners and by many delegates and at which Tony Blair was lambasted from the speaker’s platform by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Namibian president Sam Nujoma as an interfering ‘colonialist’


Were he not such an arrogant, murderous, hypocritical and corrupt agent of capital, Mugabe’s five minute bluster could have been applauded as sound socialist criticism. Apart from his much publicised anti-Blair broadside he angrily declared: “The programme of action we set for ourselves at Rio has not only been unfulfilled but it has also been ignored, sidelined and replaced by a half-baked unilateral agenda of globalisation in the service of big corporate interests. The focus here is profit, not the poor; the process is globalisation, not sustainable development, while the objective is exploitation, not liberation.”


And Mugabe was, for once, right!


Bearing in mind that previous world summits, and there have been several in recent years – and analysed in this journal – called to address the problems of the planet, have been subordinated to the interests of big business and have consequently proved to be a waste of time in so far as addressing the problems they were called to address, is it any wonder that not only NGOs, but the wider public have little faith in them? Furthermore, with corporate accountability high on the agenda at Johannesburg and the Enron and WorldCom scandals still finding column space in the broadsheets, what can be envisaged but despair in companies who can not even keep their own books tidy, let alone take care of the planet in a responsible manner.


We can perhaps salvage one thing from Johannesburg that will serve the interests of humanity, and that is the fact – reinforced at this Summit - that capitalism can not be trusted to run he world in the interests of humanity; that governments serve the interests of profit first and that if we are ever to take control of this planet and run it in the real interests of its inhabitants, then we must do so ourselves, without leaders and with a view to establishing a global system of society in which production is freed from the constraints of profit and in which each person will have free access to the benefits of civilisation.

BOOK REVIEW - MARX IN SOHO

By Howard Zinn
Published by South End Press

Distributed by Pluto Press

Granted his request to return to earth for just one hour, to clear his name and refute the rumour that his ideas are dead, a bureaucratic mix up finds Karl Marx in Soho, New York, instead of Soho, London where he once lived.

This short, one-man play sees Marx alone on stage, with only a table, a chair, books, newspapers and a glass of beer as props, reminiscing about his family life, enthusing about the Paris Commune and reliving an imaginary confrontation with the ‘shaggy anarchist’ Bakunin.

Zinn’s Marx can be humorous one page, and deadly serious the next in vitriolic condemnation of a system he spent his life trying to overthrow.

One moment Marx is recounting his countless journeys home from the British Museum, past open sewers telling how it was “only fitting that the author of Das Kapital should slog through shit while writing the condemnation of the capitalist system.” The next he is grappling on the floor with a drunken Bakunin. Then, just as suddenly, we can hear the bearded man launch a vehement attack upon the notion that the Soviet Union was socialist: “Do they think that a system run by a thug who murdered his fellow revolutionaries is communism? Scheisskopfen…can that be the communism I gave my life for?…[Angry]…Socialism is not supposed to reproduce the stupidities of capitalism!”

For anyone coming into contact with Marx’s ideas for the first time, dreading the thought of long, studious hours in front of volumes of insipid texts on political economy, having only ever heard second-hand and distorted accounts of Marx’s theories, fear not; this is a welcome first point of reference in which Zinn makes his ideas accessible and the man himself , less the spectre that haunted Europe, than some 19th century alternative comedian who just happens to know what capitalism is really all about.

Transatlantic Gobbledegook

A reader in the USA, though full of praise for Socialist View asks: “There is one thing I’d like to query. How is it you regularly highlight President Bush’s gaffes? If this is a British journal how come you don’t focus on British politicians and their lack of eloquence? Or are British politicians models of fluency?”

In reply, we highlight President Bush’s gaffes for two reasons. Firstly, he is an elected leader, and as we reject the concept of leadership, believing that workers are more than capable of sorting out their own affairs, he serves as an excellent example of the folly of trusting in leaders. Secondly, we find his gaffes amazing and amusing – though admittedly it is not amusing to have such an imbecile at the head of a military superpower, with his finger on the nuclear trigger. As for your query regarding the eloquence of British politicians, we must confess that we have a right bunch of gloopy bastards running British Capitalism plc from their executive meeting places in the Houses of Commons. One such is John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister and Member of Parliament for the Hull East constituency.

On Thursday, 4th July, Mr Prescott appeared on the BBC Question Time programme, and baffled the audience with a barrage of mind-boggling waffle. Below is a partial transcript of the answers he offered the audience.

On the question of cheap housing for nursing in the wake of rising property prices he said, “ The massive rise in house prices has caused us very real difficulties. We have put extra money available to meet some of those requirements, but the scale is far greater quite frankly, and we are now looking very seriously now at how you can actually do more that what we’re doing at the moment. Because the whole quality of life affected by public services are being affected by that, and if you want to provide houses, you can’t just provide it by simply giving the subsidies between the market price and what people can afford. We’ve got to do something much more effective than that. There’s going to be a statement by Gordon Brown on our public expenditure, then a number of statements flow from that. Let us wait and see. I’d like to see a step up and hopefully I’d be able to promise you that.”

Asked to explain the government’s stance on ID cards, Bulldog Prescott blurted: “We’re in, in fact, a situation where we’re going to try, consult about things. The piece I mean about the illegal trafficking that goes on, in immigration in some places, tremendous fraud that goes on, it will be used in those circumstances to help that. There is card benefit. Everyone knows how much we get caught on our credit cards and things like that. It can help with things like that, but a judgement hasn’t been made. But let me be clear. Forty-three people have some identity in a passport. Thirty-eight million people, I think, are the ones who have driving licence, so that’s an awful lot of our population and I must say, when I was a seaman, I had to have an ID card for ten years.”

Of course, Prescott is not alone in expressing such waffle. It’s a fair bet that the majority of MPs in the House of Commons, caught unawares, would struggle to answer the simplest of questions. Indeed, so afraid is the government of being caught on the hop that the questions asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons are actually put to the Prime Minister three days in advance.

Not only doe British MPs speak a load of twaddle, they are first class liars, hence the socialist quirk: How do you know when MPs are lying? Answer: When their lips move. Moreover, they are amongst the most disingenuous people in the country.

Back in 1999, Michael Meacher had this to say to a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference: “One of the things I would argue for over the question of second homes- and let me say I am someone who has a second home so I am not denigrating the possession of a second home [is that] people like me who are privileged should not be in the position to rob other people of a home which is a basic right.” It was later revealed that Mr Meacher had in fact 9 homes (he boasted he had 12) valued between £250,000 and £500,000.

At that same conference, incidentally, Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, said to the assembled faithful: “We will be giving the police the money they need to recruit 5,000 more officers.” However, Alan Milburn MP had written to Straw three days earlier saying: “I must stress…the package does not provide for 5,000 additional officers. There should therefore be no reference to this.”

And, forgive us for dwelling on that year, but only weeks after this, an all party committee of MPs condemned Labour’s Stephen Byers MP for his “regrettable habit” of giving “potentially misleading information” – a skill Mr Byers has perfected to a fine art these past three years.

But to your initial question: why do we highlight George Bush’s gaffes? Again, because here is the most powerful man in the world, the No. 1 representative of US Capitalism basically telling the workers of the world ‘hey, this is what you get when you vote for capitalist politicians.’ Or in his own words:

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — so long as I'm the dictator." —George W. Bush, 19/12/200

Book Review - QUESTION EVERYTHING

Nowhere in this book, or in his previous Third Millennium Press publications, does Melvin Chapman claim to be a socialist - he is indeed dubious of word ‘socialist’ - but throughout Question Everything, as in his previous publications, we find the author clearly propagating the case for a world without money and articulating many of the arguments Socialist Party members have been using against their political opponents for decades

Chapman, for instance, tears into the concept of leadership on a number of occasions, arguing that we have been conditioned to accept that we are ‘intellectually deficient’ and in need of betters who are “capable of organising and directing us”. And they of course can not control events because it the system that controls them; they too are “conditioned by the economic and political structures in which they were born.”

He is also critical of the reformist mentality, informing us how “No reform, nor attempt to improve the system…can do more than ameliorate its inconsistencies.”

He is derisive of what passes for democracy in capitalist society, observing that there “can be no democracy in a complex system designed to justify inequality, a system in which the power of money carries the right to govern, in which the governed accept their own inferiority, lack of self-respect and sense of worth, a system in which crime, conflict, nationalism, racism, ethnic cleansing…is inevitable.”

“Only in self government can there be freedom with order.” And ‘freedom’? Chapman insists that “Freedom lies in a society in which we can work together free of the social structures that inhibit consensus and in a social, political and economic environment that does not actively promote differences and confrontations.” The rub is that “Freedom depends upon knowledge…knowledge upon information…[but ] information is not knowledge… {because it is}limited and controlled….The individual has to have the facilities to understand and interpret, to know what there is to know and what questions to ask”

Chapman is at his best in attacking the logic of the profit system, for instance noting how “the money system has enabled the human species to develop the technology with which it dominates the earth, but it has become an excuse for ignoring the factors that impede its own social advance.” Highlighting the alienation the money system gives rise to, he comments: ”This creature Man…has allowed itself to be treated – and to treat itself – as of less consequence than a few copper coins, a few electronic pulses, no more than a dollar a day.”

He challenges the assumption that without money no one would work, pointing out how “the money system has given work a bad name, with connotations of long hours, stress, tiredness, monotony…even in this acquisitive society of ours, most of us do some sort of voluntary work…working for others is enjoyable provided that we do not feel that it is augmenting other people’s interests at our expense.” In a moneyless world, he maintains, “the man/woman power available would be virtually limitless. There would be plenty for them to do…our fellow man, our environment, our towns and cities, our talents and potentialities… there would be enough to keep us occupied for generations.”

He continues: “We assume that without money there would be anarchy, but it is the chaotic complexity of the money system and the governments required to maintain it that is anarchic.” There then follows a lengthy section in which Chapman envisages the benefits of a money less world before concluding that “the greatest benefit of all would be in the reduction or elimination of the anti-social emotions of greed, hatred, selfishness and aggression, which the money system makes inevitable and we would be able to treat ourselves and each other as the sort of human beings that we claim to be.”

A lot of this book is given over to how capitalist society conditions our consciousness; how it determines the way we think and act. Chapman is adamant we can overcome this conditioning and achieve the maturity needed to help forge a better world. And this ‘maturity’ he contests, lies “in the ability to question our inherited assumptions and to replace our primitive responses, our need to compete with an eliminate each other, by recognition of our responsibility to ourselves and to the wider universe. To free ourselves we have to “run the gauntlet of inherited impediments.”

The books great weakness lies, perhaps, in the suggestion of how we can get from capitalism to the moneyless world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. For Chapman, “the actual process of getting rid of money would require no more than the creation of a single International currency, followed by the gradual reduction in interest rates and an expansion of the quantity of money in circulation until it ceased to have any value.” Here, a closer scrutiny of the workings of capitalism and the implications of such a process, might have prompted the author to rethink this statement.

Moreover, emphasis on the democratic road to a money less world, how it must be the free and class conscious decision of the majority, would have enhanced this short book.

Accepting that Chapman does not claim to be a socialist and criticism aside, this work does have its merits in revealing, quite succinctly in places, the insanity of capitalism and in advancing the benefits of establishing moneyless system of society.

This self-published, short print-run book is available from the author at: Third Millennium Press, 51 Newton Road, Bath, BA2 1RW. No price is given.

Worldcon

“When abuses like this begin to surface in the corporate world, it is time to reaffirm the basic principles and rules that make capitalism work: truthful books and honest people, and well-enforced laws against fraud and corruption. All investment is an act of faith, and faith is earned by integrity. In the long run, there's no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character.”

Thus spoke President George W Bush to Wall Street on 9th July in the wake of the biggest corporate fraud in history as stock markets around the world were reeling from the news that WorldCom, the US phone company, had admitted to a $4 billion hole in its accounts. As WorldCom’s share price fell from $60 to $2 it was further revealed that Xerox, the multinational photocopying and printing company had similarly overstated its profits by $billions.


At the end of last year energy multinational Enron, caused panic on the world’s stock markets when it emerged the company had hidden debts of $9 billion. Other financial scandals have involved Global Crossing, Arthur Andersen, Tyco and Adelphi Communications, prompting many investors and economists to wonder just how deep corporate malfeasance is and whether any company offering shares can really be trusted.


The truth is that there must be thousands of firms out there telling porkies about their profits in an attempt to raise their stock market rating. And there are reasons for this. Because capitalism is a ruthlessly competitive system, each company aims to maximise its share of its respective market and to get the better of its competitors. When a company inflates its profits its share price increases. More people are prepared to buy shares in profitable companies and ‘profitable’ companies find it easier to borrow with a view to investing in newer technology that can win them a greater share of profits and undermine the efforts of their competitors. The problems, however, is that future profits are purely guesswork. No one can realistically predict demand (it’s not a natural science). And when a company can’t meet the expectations of its shareholders, panic sets in, with all concerned running away from the sinking ship with whatever they can carry.


Bush would do well to remember that it is not ‘truthful books and honest people… that make capitalism work”, but the drive to make profit, whether it be through the creation of false needs, warfare, artificial scarcity or planned obsolescence. And if there were ‘well-enforced laws against fraud and corruption’ in the corporate world, Bush himself would never have become president and America’s prison population would be twice its present size.


More importantly, however, Bush’ speech focused on a few individuals, giving the impression that a few nefarious persons had tarnished the good character of capitalism – a move totally designed to distract from the real nature of the beast. Capitalism is an oppressive and exploitative system in which human needs come a poor second to the requirements of profit, a system that consigns billions to lives to abject misery. It’s indifference to the hardship of the real wealth creators is evidenced in the present instance by the fact that while the ‘honest’ bosses at WorldCom have pocketed $millions in the perpetration of their scam, the company now wants to sack 17,000 of its workers; the same workers it encouraged to invest their hard-earned retirement funds in company shares in the full knowledge those same shares would lose value. Prior to the recent scandal these retirement plans-cum-shares shares were worth almost $220 million; at the moment they are valued at $4.4 million. “No capitalism without conscience” Mr Bush?


Neither was there room in Bush’s lecture on corporate ethics to Wall Street for mention of the practices of monopolies and oligopolies, of the market power of the likes of Exxon-Mobile, Ford or Wal-Mart, whose revenues are larger than the national budgets of many countries; whose power is such that even the US government is afraid to curtail their shenanigans. While Bush can lecture Wall Street on corporate ‘ethics’, given half the chance these bastards would apply for a patent on the very air we breathe. Where there are profits to be had, honesty and conscience, ethics and values are swept under the carpet and trodden upon.


So is current crisis evidence that the capitalist system about to come tumbling down? No. Its foundations are as sturdy as ever. Production for profit continues apace and will still be impinging on every aspect of our lives for quite some time to come. What the recent scandals do reveal is that corporate greed is endemic to the system and that financial regulators were not regulating all that well. Indeed, US Capitalism PLC may come away from this fiasco stronger than ever, with corporations, in the wake of Bush’s speech and the now widespread demands for tighter regulations, winning more the confidence of investors.


So put away the bunting and party-poppers and calm down. Capitalism is going to have to be dismantled the hard way – with a class conscious majority bringing about its end by democratic means. This is one storm capitalism will weather.

THE CONFLICT OVER KASHMIR

In recent weeks, the eyes of the world have once again turned to Kashmir and the ongoing antagonism between India and Pakistan over who should control it. Though the two countries have three times gone to war (1945,1961 and 1971) without much western interest, this time round the sabre-rattling is attracting wider attention, not least because it could very rapidly result in a nuclear exchange with the loss of an estimated 25 million lives.

The Kashmir situation is a hangover from the age of Empire and British colonialism, when India was ruled by Britain and Kashmir was a principality ruled on behalf of Britain by the repressive Hindu Dogras dynasty.

For the British, the Kashmir region was a strategic asset, of paramount geo-political significance. It could serve as a listening post for the tracking of Soviet-Sino ambitions in the region and be militarily important should Russia or China decide to attack. Indeed, even the US now views Kashmir as part of their on-going plan to circle China with their military bases.

In 1947, however, Britain’s rule of India was coming to an end and the region was being plunged into an orgy of religious bloodshed. As had been the case with some 580 other Indian principalities and states, Hari Singh, Kashmir’s maharajah, was given the choice either to join India or Pakistan or of remaining independent. Although the majority of the people of Kashmir were Moslem, he chose to surrender the territory to India. The ‘official’ initial intention of Lord Mountbatten - the British governor-general – was that a plebiscite of the Kashmiri people be held. This has never happened, in spite of numerous UN resolutions on the issue,

One common view is that Lord Mountbatten, was really the architect of the handover, believing India to be far more capable than Pakistan of repulsing any Soviet and Chinese advances in the subcontinent, acting as a proxy army on behalf of western interests in the area.

Whilst Islamabad insists Kashmir should belong to Pakistan, citing UN resolutions on the issue and pointing to the Moslem majority in Kashmir, India is insistent that under the terms of the 1972 Simla Agreement both countries decided to settle the dispute through bilateral negotiations and minus UN Interference. And Whist India insists that the accession of Kashmir to India in 1947 is complete and that Kashmir is an integral part of India, Pakistan contests that the region is in fact disputed territory and that it has the right to provide moral and diplomatic support for an indigenous freedom struggle there.

At one stage of the recent crisis, one and a half million soldiers face each other across their respective borders and there were regular artillery exchanges. Though tensions are still relatively high, the situation is not considered as threatening as it was weeks ago, when western governments were asking their nationals to return home. Since then, both countries have been involved in diplomatic talks with the US, Britain and Russia. None of which, however, has helped remove India forces from the Kashmir border or lessened the likelihood that renegade anti-Musharraf groups in Pakistan could take matters into their own hands. Analysts in Washington still maintain that any terrorist attack from Pakistan’s militants could easily result in a swift Indian nuclear response. And as Musharraf may sue for peace, he is mindful that he needs the support of the army and its hawkish generals, many of who see the Kashmir cause as a religious duty.

For Britain’s part, whilst Blair is playing his trite role as global peace-maker, this can only be considered an act of hypocrisy. It has been after all a Labour government these past two years that has helped up the anti there. In 2000 alone, the peace-loving Blair government granted India and Pakistan some 700 military export licences (just as Britain armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war). Moreover, India is currently under licence to build the British-designed Jaguar bomber – the type of bomber that could deliver atomic bombs to Islamabad and other Pakistani cities

In January this year, Tony Blair travelled to India on a “peace mission”, intent on lending the Kashmir crisis his diplomatic skills. He did just that, returning a week later with a £1 billion order for 66 Hawk fighters. Three weeks later the British High Commission there organised a party for British arms salesmen attending the Defexpo arms fair – dealers who openly acknowledged that they were hoping to cash in on the crisis. The same old excuse applied – “if we didn’t, somebody else would” (the kind of defence you could use for kicking Blair up the arse)

The US and Britain may well be critical of either side in this conflict threatening the use of the ‘first strike’, but George W Bush has already intimated that he would use the ‘first strike’ option against seven countries in four different scenarios, with British Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon suggesting Britain would do similar.

Although the US has resisted selling arms to India and Pakistan, it must be remembered that both India and Pakistan’s nuclear programme was initiated by the US “Atoms for Peace” programme, that India’s first nuclear device was produced in plant built with US assistance and that Pakistan’s first research reactor came from the US.

So, While there is much evidence for the continuance of the war industry, the peace industry seems to be pretty limp. The United Nations, set up to prevent conflicts, is all but lame. The Security Council is yet to invoke Article 34, which calls for investigations of disputes “likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security.” The UN Charter further allows any country or even the Secretary General (Articles 35 and 99) to place any threat to global peace before the Security Council.

The impact of a nuclear exchange between two impoverished countries and the knock-on effect for the rest of the globe is unimaginable. The death toll would be in the tens of millions, with many more dying months and years later. Millions of acres of land would be uninhabitable and the fallout would contaminate many neighbouring countries for centuries. The humanitarian mission to treat the survivors would have to be the biggest rescue mission in history – perhaps as big as all previous rescue missions combined. That such a scenario is possible is a damning indictment of capitalism. We stepped out of the 20th Century – a century of bloodshed in the name of profit – into the 21st dragging every social ill behind us, with ten times as much global injustice abounding than existed 100 years previous. What a barbaric age we live in. Still, borders are to be fought over. Still gods to be avenged and, still, that age-old cursed prize – profit – to be sought in every stinking orifice. And were the mushroom clouds to start rising over Islamabad and New Delhi, western capitalists would still ponder how they could cash in on this hell, this hell of their making.