Why 'Outside the Gates'? There are many gates isolating people from each other. 'Gated communities' being the most obvious, where the affluent try to segregate themselves from the poor.
The most insidious though are the gates within our minds which separate us from, make us
think we are different to, even better than the 'other'.
Yet we all experience the same emotions, feelings, wants and needs irrespective of gender, colour, race or creed.
The Anglo/American Alliance and Alternatives. Part 1
Wednesday, 02 May 2007
Seeing as an internet friend considers me some sort of thinking blogger I had better write some more, more often as she has requested. No better place to start than revisiting the Anglo/American relationship. An alliance that needs to be broken if humankind is to find a way forward without war. The playing out of the recent events around the 15 Marines and Sailors apprehended in disputed waters by Iran, has helped in clarifying some ideas.
As the event first started to unfold blair came out of the blue corner throwing haymakers at shadows, claiming the moral-high ground and Britain as victim in the hope to build an escalating confrontation with Iran at the behest of Bush, his praying-mate. His cowboy 'n' injuns playing-mate. Ratchetting up the tension by requiring what can only be described as unconditional and abject surrender by Iran to the Anglo/American's unilateral right, as of its might, to impose a maritime border on Iran with nautical maps drawn up by the Anglo/Americans. The safety and well being of the British Navy personnel in Iran were of no consequence in blair's considerations of how not to solve the diplomatic flare-up.
blair must have known that no independent, self-respecting nation could entertain such an insult to the integrity of their borders. Then again he probably didn't, having taken this country into a servile, arse-licking relationship to one of histories most accomplished mass murderers. The epitome of his sycophancy to all things American has been his governments, a Labour governments passing of the 2003 UK/US Extradition Act. Any British national can be extradited to the USA without having the prima facie case being presented to a British court, but solely on the say so of an American bureaucrat able to label someone - anyone - an "enemy combatant". We no longer have borders against America's judicial system - what's left of it .
All the rest of the world meanwhile wonders why our self-respect has deserted us when we haven't throw blair out of office instead of waiting for him to go at a time of his own choosing. From Putin's speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy held on 10th Feb. 07 ;
"..... The need for principles such as openness, transparency and predictability in politics is uncontested and the use of force should be a really exceptional measure, comparable to using the death penalty in the judicial systems of certain states.
However, today we are witnessing the opposite tendency, namely a situation in which countries that forbid the death penalty even for murderers and other, dangerous criminals are airily participating in military operations that are difficult to consider legitimate. And as a matter of fact, these conflicts are killing people – hundreds and thousands of civilians!" (Russia presently has a moratorium on the death penalty - Les).
It's hard to see "airily participating" as referring to any other than Britain. In the language of Diplomatese, "airily" is a devastating critique of political engagement comparable to Marie Antionette's dismissal of the starving Parisian masses when informed there was no bread to feed them, "Let them eat cake". A bit of an exaggeration, I don't think we are quite that disengaged as a people from what is being done in our name.
But "airily" fits blair to a tee. His conscience is a hollow as vacuous as his rhetoric; a void where ethics and morality fear to freely roam on the certainty of being lost amongst the vague; a chasm where his mendacity is never confronted, where the whinning cadences in his voice with its false piety are occulted from the echoing screams of eviscerated Iraqi children.
The latest Iran fiasco displayed blair's typical belligerent exercise in hubris when faced with uppity natives whilst trying to pander to his master's quest for more murder, more lies, more fear. But he came up short at the UN's Security Council who refused to fully endorse his position. It seems the USA was not yet ready to launch an attack on Iran - the plans are set, have been for two years this coming June, but the necessary military hardware was not yet in place. The Iranians had surprised everybody and Bush left blair hanging in the wind. He kept on blathering for a few more days while pleading with Europe for support. Then his pronouncements disappeared from the media.
Being slapped by Putin then abandoned by Bush is not a good run-in to his leaving international politics. Good. And it brings me to the relative power of America in the Anglo/American alliance. It is undoubtedly the case that the USA controls our nuclear 'assets' - our missiles - and has penetrated every level and department of our political, cultural, economic and military establishments. They have immense influence but they do not have absolute control over the actions of the British state. Nearly, but not yet.
Right from the get-go of the apprehension of the Navy personnel by Iran, there were elements in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office looking to solve the problem diplomatically in the best interests of the 15 Marines and Sailors. This was brought home to me by an article Craig Murray published early into the flare-up about some of the contacts he had at the FCO who were working against the Bush/blair agenda and for a peaceful, negotiated settlement. They knew the map produced by blair was a fake .
With the opposition to the war in Britain running at 80%, the simmering anger and hatred - yes hatred - of blair and his diabolical works that pervades the popular tenor of this land, is bound to be reflected in the activities of some Whitehall Mandarins. The desire to conduct our own foreign policy independent of the USA has many supporters.
Another indication of the malign influence that an adherence to the USA's foreign policy agenda brings can be seen in the recent speech delivered by deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clarke, head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard. A part of it lambasted those who leaked an anti-terror operation to the press about alleged homegrown Muslim terrorists - "clean skins" in the racist parlance of the security apparatus - conspiring to kidnap and Internet behead a British Muslim soldier. It was leaked before the investigation was finalised and all arrests made. Select London journalists had been tipped off and were in Birmingham the night before the arrests and had been briefed on the lurid nature of the offences people were arrested for. DAC Clarke claimed that those doing the leaking could have put lives at risk and were trying to "squeeze out some short-term presentational advantage".
Following Clarke's speech more leaks started to appear, this time suggesting that the original leaks came from the Home Office and Scotland Yard. One report, in the Guardian claims an aide to Home Secretary John Reid was one of the leakers. According to the BBC , "....Home Secretary John Reid has already denied that his special advisers had anything to do with leaks of police anti-terror intelligence over the Birmingham raids in January." So that cuts down the number of suspects then!
Could DAC Clarke be suggesting "presentational advantage" as a euphemism for political propaganda? Psy-Ops even? They're the interpretations I would put on the phrase. What this shows, to me anyway, is the undermining of police and judicial process for the exigencies of propagandising a war the British people believe is illegal, long lost and which shames us more each day we allow it to continue. blair's pro-war supporting claque are so desperate to try and counter this popular view they are prepared to cynically let loose a process of demonisation of British Muslim and Asian citizens which is increasing racist assaults, physical and verbal, from the thicker, thuggish and lumpen elements of our society. Who would have believed it, a Labour government opening the way for fascism. Did these post WWII baby-boomers now in government not absorb anything from the upwelling of new, dare I say revolutionary ideas and actions during their university salad days in the 1960s and 1970s, or were they mere opportunists all along?
(The anti-terror operation in this case could itself have been an entrapment or sting run by the secret intelligence services - it's not unknown , and in a time of war the state is capable of anything. Whatever, it's all part of the strategy of fear for the 'Other' underpinning a racist foreign policy.)
As I've mentioned before, opposition within the state to our present foreign policy is not confined to the FCO, but permeates all levels of government. It represents an aspect of the struggle against an American global agenda that is threatening the interests - financial, political and cultural - of some sectors of the middle-classes in British society. These are not revolutionaries or anti-imperialists and should not be relied on to stop the war, but they are working with the zeitgeist. Like most of the population they probably believe the state they work for is basically benign and the war an aberration due to blair's malevolent political judgement. But so what. Stopping our involvement in the war is going to require a very wide range of forces with wide differences in world view. Ideological purity, so beloved of Marxist/Leninist grouplets mirroring the absolutism of the religious right, is a no-no at this juncture. If people are opposed to the war and are working against it, that is all that matters, excepting the fascists and nazis who have no answers for a global, multi-race humanity other than it's extinction, and in that they are little different from Bush and his cabal of neocons.
And lets make no mistake, there will be no progress in the alleviation of poverty and inequality for the global population unless the war is stopped and the Anglo/American imperial agenda forced into retreat. Forget facing the quite daunting challenges of climate change and peak oil, the energy war is a roadblock that cannot be detoured as it is the direct response of a decaying system to these phenomena.
In the aftermath of the Iran/Royal Navy fiasco, almost once the 15 were flown back from Teheran, all reports turned, in lockstep, to the story of the Royal Navy's public relations department giving the go ahead for some of the returnees to sell their stories to the newspapers and telly. The row drowned out, marginalised from the mainstream any serious analysis of the fiasco being a direct result of our alliance with the USA in an illegal war, one of choice, of aggression in the region. The Naval PR department took a lot of heavy flak from the newspapers for the ethical implications - I know, 'newspaper ethics' is an oxymoron - of the decision. It was a diversion, achieved with a faux sacrificial gambit by Navy PR which the press, knowingly and unkowningly lapped up. A well executed piece of perception management for which the Naval PR didn't really mind taking some flak.
But in what may be an unforeseen consequence of the PR decision, squaddies are speaking out to their local papers that the war is lost, that they can't win and are taking casualties for no reason other than saving face . (They can't be sending that gung-ho goon Harry Wales, grandson to the Queen to Iraq so as to gee up the troops and put an end to defeatist talk, can they? No? Never? It's not - 'For Queen and Country by Jove' - time again is it?)
Those news outlets more questioning of the Bush/blair pro-war propaganda machine, like the BBC and Daily Mirror, were slapped very hard early into the war. The BBC now seems to be in line with the government judging by the gentleness with which they question war criminals, though this can be mitigated by viewers responding with well argued and non-abusive criticisms sent to the BBC. The BBC is not ideologically monolithic and Media Lens' campaigns show some effect as their latest posting points out, but they require more readers to send more emails to affect more change. A personal failing I must rectify.
The media's influence is immense and no media, be it newspapers; magazines; TV; video games; advertising; films; internet, is neutral. The promotion of unrealisable wants; fantasy life-styles; vapid aspirations to emulate grotesqueries of celebrity a la Paris Hilton or Jade Goody; violence as the first choice in problem solving, is a political decision by owners and editors even if they claim it is what people want in their morning paper. A political choice is also applied to amplifying the governments pro-war strategy of fear of the 'Other', passed off as a purely marketing strategy to gain share in a highly competitive environment. Yet the anti-war media and voices have miniscule circulation in comparison, so they must be competing amongst themselves for the press awards, 'Racist Rag of the Year'.
But none of this can disguise the fact that a large majority of the British population see the war as a catastrophe and blair's leadership as Labour prime minister the cause of our involvement. What has been brought in its wake has rended the fabric of society; the continual enacting of more laws with more punishments; ubiquitous surveillance by CCTV with its built-in assumption of guilt; the metronomic lying; the corruption and cronyism; the perpetually school and health reforms undermining their universiality, has left people more fearful of where Labour are taking us than of al Qaida. Using fear as a mobilising tool is double edged. The Labour Party's political integrity has been shattered for at least a generation, if not permanently. The elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and English local authorities tomorrow will make it clear how far they have fallen. Depending on the turn-out, they could lose control in all.
The only chance the Labour Party has of getting close to winning a general election in 2009, is start withdrawing the troops from Iraq and ending this unmitigated disaster of a military alliance with the USA. That will not be done with Brown as the new leader. A challenge to his coronation is needed and one seems to be in the offing. Michael Meacher and John McDonnell are both trawling for endorsement from Labour MPs to force an election, 45 are needed. Some sort of arrangement between them has been made which would ensure that the one with the most endorsements would be the challenger.
Thin hopes but hopes all the same and even if an anti-war candidate did win the leadership they would still need the support of non-violent mass participatory civil disobedience and direct action to ensure they are able to end the military adventurism.
This essay has been cut short to ensure it is posted before the elections and the next part will look at what alternatives are available to us.
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