Warring on
Ex-Forest Stop the War secretary speaks out in despair.

Before the invasion of Iraq actually began, I had the honour and stress of being nominated Secretary of our local antiwar campaign ‘Forest Stop the War’.  

Officially affiliated with the eponymous national movement, many of us opposed the attack primarily because we could see through the excuses for war on offer. Instead we recognised creeping American hegemony in an oil-rich region.

Today, the bitter taste of having been right never felt so wrong.

At the time, the excuses paraded by our leaders included the pre-empting of an Iraqi attack: they could hit us with a nuclear weapon within 45 minutes of launch. Or so we were told. But this proved to be an awful untruth, as Dr. David Kelly would attempt to unveil to his own tragic demise.

Another reason offered was the deposition of a cruel dictator, using the massacre of Kurds as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. But this event actually took place over a decade before. The then Tory government did nothing when the crises was raised by Amnesty International and neither did the Labour Party in 1997 and all the years that followed, so this too seemed a pretty weak argument for a belated invasion. Indeed, if we followed-through on that basis, surely we are about to launch an all-out attack on Rwanda for the genocide that took place there. Of course, and on the same premise, we’ll need to wait another 8 years or so before we do anything about the killing fields of Sudan.

These then, were lies that contradicted at once both Government’s action and inaction. They were excuses.

Clearly, we the cross-party, cross-campaign, cross-denomination supporters of the Stop the War movement could never support the mobilisation of British forces against the Iraqi people on those terms.  They were already suffering the slow-drip strangulation of Western sanctions and trade embargos. But when the war began proper, civilian deaths quickly mounted and have ever since continued to do so as a slow internal decay leads to a terrible civil war.

Morally, those of us who opposed the war (and Conservatives and much of New Labour are not among our number), might feel we played our part in the fight for a just peace. But we failed. And our failure is the failure to protect the innocent from those which our great democracy had us elect: those that started this war, those that had no way out, no exit strategy (see leader in the last Clarion), no clue of the bloodshed they had unleashed.

Roll-forward to 2007 and our distaste is palpable when we read that the head of MI6 John Scarlett is named as a benefactor in this year’s New Year Honours list, receiving a knighthood [1]. Surely, the buck has to stop somewhere and he is the man that endorsed the now infamous dodgy dossier which was the cornerstone of those pre-war excuses.

While Mr. Scarlett supped on the canapés and polished his new silverware, innocent people continued to die in Iraq.

In fact, December 2006 turned out to be the month when the highest number of civilians were killed since the war in Iraq began. 12,320 dead was the shocking estimate offered by Iraq’s new Interior Ministry [2] [3] and even the United Nations put the figure around at least 120 civilians EACH DAY [4].

3,000 American soldiers have also been killed in the invasion [5], nearing the total number killed in the two towers, yet despite the findings and recommendations of his own Iraq Study Group, still Bush presses on with the building blocks of his very own Vietnam. Now he even wants to send in another 21,000 US troops. [6]

Meanwhile, the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan with its leaders vowing more guerrilla and suicide attacks on US, government and NATO forces in 2007 [7]. Their numbers swell as for many this is now a war against the West, a war against the enemies of Islam. The fundamentalists are becoming the populists and it is all of our own doing.

What have we let our leaders get away with?

If, as I believe, a failure of foreign policy is behind the attacks on 9-11, the attacks that kicked off this so-called ‘war on terror’, then now is the time to start looking toward a new foreign policy. One based on informed, rational, reasoned thinking; a new ethical foreign policy. But currently, I fear, all that is fantasy.

34,000 people died in Iraq in 2006 [8] and many more will die continue to die in the civil war we have created. We may have had the biggest march in British political history but the noise we made was never really heard. Perhaps it was too soft, too polite. Either way, they never heard us, much in the same way they somehow never hear the dying.

Dying with all those people is the hope of demanding change through marches and demonstrations. Maybe, that had died in Tienanmen Square, I don’t know.

So, I put it to you, dear Clarion readers: we failed to Stop the War. The question now is, having finally made useless our marches and demonstrations, how we will stop the war on Iran or the death of the NHS; how do we catch in time the suicide of the Labour Party or reverse the current impotence of British socialism, the worldwide battle for social justice?

SOURCES
[1] ‘Rod and Zara winners in politics-free New Year honours’ by W. Woodward, The Guardian 30/12/06
[2] Reuters ‘Iraqi deaths hit record high’ by A. Macdonald 2/1/07
[3] Both Reuters (see [2]) and Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme reported the number of deaths as under-estimated
[4] Reuters ‘Iraqi deaths hit record high’ by A. Macdonald 2/1/07
[5] Reuters ‘Iraqi deaths hit record high’ by A. Macdonald 2/1/07
[6] Reuters ‘Bush sends more troops to Iraq’ by Aseel Kami & A. Macdonald 11/1/07
[7] Reuters ‘Taliban commander vows bloody year in Afghanistan’ by Saeed Ali Achakzai 2/1/07
[8] Reuters ‘UN says 34,000 Iraqis killed in '06 ‘ by Claudia Parsonsi 16/1/07