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This article also appears on Infowars.com
I am very pleased to be able to offer news of a Labour
MP telling the truth for a change.
The member for Leyton
and Wanstead in London's East End sets out the following:
- How unpopular the British presence in Basra is
- More Government lies
- US attempts to force civil war
- British helping US take over Iraq's assets
- US/UK failure to ensure security, humanitarian aid
and economic investment
- US to stay in Iraq for the long term to rob the
country of its resources
- One of the largest humanitarian crises of our time
ignored by Government
Harry Cohen MP
June 2008
Socialist
Campaign Group News
Profiting from Iraq's occupation
The British in Basra are unpopular and mostly ineffective.
The last survey of Basra residents by BBC Newsnight
indicated that 86 per cent believe British troops have
had a negative effect on the Iraqi province since 2003.
More than half felt the troops presence had actually
increased the overall level of militia violence over
the past four years. Twelve per cent believed that British
troops had made no difference at all. Only two per cent
believed British troops had had a positive effect. And
83 per cent said they wanted British troops to leave
Iraq without delay. Hardly a ringing endorsement of
the British role, carried out at great cost, including
of many lives.
Soon after becoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown promised
to reduce British troops in Iraq from 4,500 to 2,500.
On 28 April, Defence Secretary Des Browne abandoned
that promise in parliament.
The troops were also supposed to be no longer involved
in day to day operations in the province and confined
to their Basra airport base. That implied non-engagement
has been undermined, as the troops gave support to the
forces of the Iraqi government in their offensive against
the forces of Moqtadr al Sadr.
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent’s well-respected,
non-embedded, journalist in Iraq, pointed out that elections
are due in about six months time and the Shias of Prime
Minister Maliki’s faction are trying to gain advantage
over the popular Shia faction of al Sadr. They are using
force to do this and want to draw in the British in
Basra. The US are also spoiling for a fight. They are
in the middle of their ‘surge’ in troop numbers. Very
sensibly, al Sadr calculated he could wait them out
and called a cease-fire. He then extended it.
The US would like to goad him into a fight and are
using the Maliki forces to do it. US troops have moved
into the Basra area and have goaded UK forces into taking
part too. The weak British government has caved into
this pressure, but even if for a short while they back
up one faction over another, they will remain largely
ineffective.
Of course, the US has no respect for any of the Shias,
or Sunnis either, and an understandable reading of their
strategy since they replaced the secular government
of Iraq with a religious-based Shia one, is to keep
them at each others throats. The factions are well prepared
to change alliances, at least temporarily according
to circumstances. So the Sunnis too have quietened their
opposition to the US.
Also perhaps it is unfair to call the British completely
ineffective. In March, in Kuwait, the Basra Development
Commission was launched. This is a ‘joint initiative’
of the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Barham Saleh,
and British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. At the launch
the governor of Basra, Mohammed al-Wa’ili said ‘Basra
welcomes private sector investors’. As Basra province
holds 80 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves and is home
to the country’s only deep sea port and trade routes
to the Gulf, the private sector is likely to be primarily
US or US allies and not Iraqi. The British helped with
the drafting of the new oil law, and with this commission
are moving along the take over of Iraq’s assets and
the long-term expropriation of massive profits from
them. In this way we are doing our bit for our US allies.
Britain’s Labour government, in effect, has one last
chance to get out with a modicum of reason. The United
Nations mandate, which currently authorises the US and
British presence in Iraq, runs out at the end of this
year. That mandate does not really legitimise the occupation
as the US and Britain were charged with ensuring the
security of the Iraqi people and facilitating humanitarian
aid and economic investment. The coalition has totally
failed on both counts. The commitment to leave should
be required of the Labour government at every opportunity,
and not just by the end of the year. Our presence serves
no national or international interest. We do not want
to fight for one side in a civil war or to try to give
advantage to one side in Iraqi elections. Those purposes
are not worth the life or health of another British
soldier.
However the US has no intention of leaving when their
UN mandate runs out. They are already negotiating a
bilateral contract with their puppet, dependent government
in Baghdad, to ‘supply security’. The US will, in effect,
turn itself into a mercenary army of occupation. They
will be securing their pay out by robbing Iraq of its
resources. No wonder Republican presidential candidate
John McCain, in answering a question about whether US
troops would be in Iraq for 50 years, replied ‘make
it a hundred’.
Nobel Prize Winner for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz,
recently published his new book The Three Trillion Dollar
War: The true cost of the Iraq conflict. At a meeting
in Parliament he described it as a ‘war totally financed
on the credit card’. It has been a factor in the current
global economic crisis, he said. The high price of oil
also owes its genesis to the Iraq war and its aftermath.
The US has created this crisis and is calculating it
will, over time, be in a powerful position by grabbing
control of Iraq’s oil. This, though, is not just illegal
by any recognised standard, but a formula for never-ending
conflict in Iraq as its people fight a nationalist war
of liberation.
Iraqis are already victims. As well as the dead and
maimed, there are approximately two million widows with
very little economic means, according to one respected
charity. The four million refugees are a scandal the
west studiously ignores. The International Rescue Committee
(IRC) has just published its report Five Years Later:
a Hidden Crisis. In their letter to MPs the IRC state
‘The US led invasion of Iraq five years ago and its
violent aftermath have produced one of the largest humanitarian
crises of our time, yet the “Coalition of the Willing”
has been mostly unwilling to own up to it and provide
aid for the innocent bystanders’. It is of fundamental
importance to get this matter discussed in parliament.
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