Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

What terrible news for the 'Bomb Iran' brigade:

From The Hindu:

Tehran: Iran on Monday agreed to swap a major part of its low enriched uranium stocks on Turkish soil for an equivalent amount of uranium enriched to 19.75 per cent, potentially ending a stand-off with the U.S. and Europe that threatened to spiral into sanctions.

Iran needs the higher grade enriched uranium to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor, used by it to produce medical isotopes.

The deal was reached after 18 hours of negotiations ending 4 a.m. among Iran, Turkey and Brazil, leaving Washington and its allies red-faced. The U.S. and Europe are pressing for the punitive route and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had predicted last week that the Brazilian-Turkish attempt at mediation would fail.

And what is the response of Britain’s neocon Foreign Secretary to this news?
Reuters reports:

Britain said work on a new U.N. sanctions resolution must go on. Iran's move "may just be a delaying tactic," said Foreign Secretary William Hague.

How utterly predictable. And how utterly pathetic. Hague and co are itching to impose swingeing new sanctions on Tehran - and the nuclear issue is just a pretext.

Does Hague’s reaction remind you of anything? Think back to the period 2002-3, when no concession that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government made was ever enough for the neocon warmongers. The very same people who were gunning for Iraq then, are gunning for Iran now.

As Alan Hinnrichs says in his excellent letter in the Morning Star:

The UK anti-war movement needs to get off its knees and mobilise now for the possible eventuality of war with Iran. It will simply not be enough to do as the SWP would have us do and march from A to B then go home.

0 comments

It’s exactly eleven years ago this week since NATO launched its illegal attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and seven years since the equally unlawful aggression against Iraq.

To mark the anniversaries, here’s my 2006 Morning Star article on how the road to Baghdad began in Belgrade - and why it won't end there until liberal left supporters of US sponsored ‘humanitarian’ interventions start to see the bigger picture.

FROM BELGRADE TO BAGHDAD AND BEYOND

Divide and conquer has been the classic Imperial strategy since Roman times.

Today’s Empire builders are no different. The particular genius of the modern neo-conservative project has been the use of the theory of ‘humanitarian intervention’, to co-opt liberal-left support for a centuries old project of conquest.

In 1990s it was the Serbs- and their “extreme nationalist” leader Slobodan Milosevic who posed the threat to peace and civilised values. In 2001 it was Mullah Omar and the Islamic hardliners of the Taliban. In 2003 it was the turn of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its deadly arsenal of WMD. Now its Iran’s President Ahmadenijad’s alleged attempts to develop nuclear weapons which need to be countered.

Each time a sizeable section of the liberal-left has supported, not those attacked or threatened, but the aggressors. You might have thought that by now, the pattern would be clear to all. But the enduring success of the New World Order’s propaganda machine can be seen by the reaction of many on the left to Milosevic’s death.

Milosevic, a life-long socialist, was a man all true progressives should have mourned. A man steeped in partisan culture, (both his parents fought the Nazis in World War Two), he never once made a racist speech: the famous Kosovo Polje address of 1989 which his critics claimed whipped up ancient ethnic hatreds, was in fact a statement of support for multi-ethnic, socialist Yugoslavia. Far from being a rabid warmonger, the late Yugoslav leader was, in the words of Lord Owen ‘the only leader who consistently supported peace’ and ‘a man to whom any form of racism is anathema’.

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was initiated not by Milosevic, but by the German decision to prematurely recognise the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia, against all the norms of international law. And war in Bosnia would have been avoided too had US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman not personally intervened at the eleventh hour to sabotage the 1992 Lisbon Agreement which provided for the peaceful division of the republic. ‘If you don’t like it, why sign it’ Zimmerman told the hard-line Bosnian separatist leader Alija Izetbegovic, thereby lighting the touch paper to a conflict which would claim over 90,000 lives. Even after the 1995 Dayton agreement which ended the war in Bosnia, the Imperial appetite was not satiated.

Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia had to be destroyed too, by providing weapons and training for a separatist terror group, the Kosovan Liberation Army. When the inevitable security clampdown from Belgrade came, the West was at hand to issue the ultimatum, producing a document at the Rambouillet Peace Conference, which as Defence Minister Lord Gilbert has conceded, was deliberately designed to be rejected by the Yugoslav delegation.

Why was it all done? Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was targeted not for ‘humanitarian’ reasons as many still believe, but simply because it got in the way. ‘In post Cold War Europe, no place remained for a large, independent minded socialist state that resisted globalisation', the words not of a left-wing conspiracy theorist, but George Kenney, an official at the Yugoslav office of the US State Department.

There's no doubting who has benefited from the wars which the West is happy to pin on Milosevic. One militarily and economically strong independent nation, has been replaced by a series of weak and divided World Bank/IMF/NATO protectorates. Western capital has unhindered access to raw materials and markets throughout the region, while in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, the U.S.'s biggest from scratch military base since the Vietnam war, jealously guards the route of the $1.3bn Trans Balkan AMBO pipeline, guaranteeing Western control of Caspian oil supplies.

It’s worth remembering that the very same people who clamoured most loudly for action against Milosevic in the 1990s, were those who were at the forefront of the propaganda war against Iraq a few years later. And today, the very same hawks are trying to convince us of the necessity of ‘strong action’ against Iran.

Among the members of the executive of the Balkan Action Committee, who lobbied for US involvement on the side of Izetbegovic in Bosnia, and then for full scale war against Milosevic’s Yugoslavia in 1999, are three names that will need no introduction: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. ‘It‘s either take action now, or lose the option of taking action’ was Perle’s recent comment on Iran: in addition to signing (along with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) a notorious letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for a ‘comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime’, he also acted as adviser to the Izetbegovic’s delegation at Dayton.

It’s time those who supported the military actions against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the current 'strong' line on Iran, realised that the biggest danger to peace did not come from Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, or, now, from President Ahmadinejad, but from the serial warmongers who threatened them.

The road to Baghdad began in the Balkans. But it won’t end there, unless the liberal-left supporters of U.S. sponsored “humanitarian” interventions start to see the bigger picture.

0 comments

It seems the British authorities are building up lists of 'domestic extremists'.

I wonder if our old friends the neocons will be on the database and monitored by the authorities. And if not, why not?

For surely you can't get much more 'extreme' than propagandising for and urging illegal military attacks on sovereign states?

1m people in Iraq have died due to the neocons' extremism. (Mehdi Hasan has more on the latest victims of that 'war of choice').

How many have died due to the 'extremism' of environmental groups like Plane Stupid- who were are told will be monitored?

0 comments

Here's why.

0 comments

I've just received my 'Geneva Press Kit' from 'The Israel Project', a Zionist lobbying organisation whose aim is to 'inform' journalists about the threats that Israel faces and why it is so imperative for the 'international community' to impose even more draconian sanctions on Iran. I'd like to share it with you.

Economic sanctions helped to end apartheid in South Africa. They also helped change Libya’s nuclear policy. Now they can be used to end the nuclear crisis in Iran.

The Iranian nuclear program must be halted to protect everyone. Only economic sanctions can peacefully require Iran to stop pursuing nuclear weapons.

That’s why the international community must take urgent action now to peacefully stop the threat of a nuclear Iran. Here are nine ways to curb the threat and avoid war.

• Until Iran halts its nuclear program, the international community should stop doing business with companies that supply refined petroleum to Iran. Due to a lack of oil refinery facilities in Iran, it must import 40% of its refined fuel. Halting such imports into Iran will help encourage it to stop its nuclear program and support of terrorism.

• Governments that care about security and peace must ban banks from providing credit, insurance or loan repayment guarantees to foreign oil companies that supply fuel to Iran or help expand the country’s domestic refining capacity.

• The international community should prohibit insurance companies from insuring
tankers going to Iran. The majority of tankers carrying gasoline to Iran are insured by Lloyds of London, a company that should be forbidden from helping the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.

• Freeze more Iranian bank assets. In 2007, Bank Melli, Iran’s largest state-owned bank, cashed in its dollar assets for Euros. The Iranian banking strategy depends on the Euro. In June 2008, all of the EU’s 27 member-states agreed to freeze any assets held by Bank Melli in their jurisdictions. Those EU measures, taken in 2008, signaled growing impatience with Iranian foot-dragging in negotiations over halting uranium enrichment. Now that more time has passed with no changes to the Iranian enrichment program more must be done. The French and German governments must divest their large holdings in Bank Melli Iran.

• Issue travel bans. All Iranian government employees and their families should have their foreign assets frozen. They should also be subject to travel bans until Iran is verified to have stopped its nuclear program and support of terrorism.

• Ban arms sales to Iran. In 2006, the United States called on all countries to stop arms exports to Iran but much more must be done to verify that it has occurred.

• Increase targeted broadcasting into Iran through various communications channels including Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, the BBC and especially private broadcasting entities. Support the democracy activists by broadcasting events inside of Iran so that the activists can more easily learn what is occurring in the various cities and towns in Iran.

• Ban Iranian commercial airlines from entering European Union countries for failure to meet international safety standards.

•Work quickly and effectively with the international community to ensure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons.

The Israel Project's Geneva Press Kit very helpfully provides a list of
'Expert Sources on Iran'

And guess who's on the list? Dr. Michael Ledeen, Freedom Scholar, Foundation for Defense of Democracies;
Tel: 202-207-0190, Tel: 301-370-1443 (cell); E-mail: mledeen@defenddemocracy.org

Ledeen is a notorious neo-con propagandist, a fanatical supporter of the illegal invasion of Iraq.
John Laughland has the low-down on Ledeen here.

No further comment is necessary.

0 comments

Always beware of people who say that they are 'all in favour of free speech' BUT...
And people who say that they are 'all for demonstrations', BUT.......

Here's Dave on his plans to remove the anti-war camp in front of Parliament if he gets into power.

"I am all in favour of free speech and the right to demonstrate and the right to protest. But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look like a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it.
I am all for demonstrations, but my argument is 'enough is enough'.

What a load of Castor and Pollux. Dave is not against the anti-war camp because it makes Parliament Square look like a 'pretty poor place', but because he's in hock to the neo-cons.

Neocons love demonstrations and protests. So long as they are in Iran. Or Belarus.
Or in Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia.

Back home, they're not so keen.

0 comments

Anti-War.Com reports:

New International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano may have been the candidate of choice for Western nations, and in particular Israel, but he sought to assure the world today that he would remain independent and would seek to de-politicize the office.

In particular, Amano noted that going through the IAEA’s documents he didn’t see any evidence that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons. The IAEA had repeatedly certified that Iran was not diverting any of its civilian program’s enriched uranium to any other purpose, but outgoing chief Mohamed ElBaradei claimed to have a “gut feeling” that Iran secretly wanted the technology.

Amano seems less inclined, at least so far, to rely on his gut and is looking for hard evidence to back up the allegations by Western nations in general and Israel in particular, that the Iranians have a covert program.

More on this story here. But don't expect to read about it on any neocon websites.

0 comments

This article of mine on how a David Cameron government would be brimming with hawks, appears in the First Post.

The Iraq war is widely discredited. George W Bush and Tony Blair are both out of office. Barack Obama has talked of a "new beginning" in his country's relationship with the Islamic world. Surely it's game over for the neocons, the small group of hardline hawks commonly held responsible for the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003?

Don't bet on it. If, as bookmakers believe, an overall majority for the Conservatives in the next election is a racing certainty, then the proponents of 'Shock and Awe' will once again be back in the corridors of power in Britain.

To understand why the neocons would be in such a strong position if David Cameron does make it to Number 10, we need to go back to the autumn of 2005, the time of the last Conservative party leadership election.

Fearing that in a head-to-head contest between popular former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke and right-winger David Davis, the more charismatic - and anti-war - Clarke would win, the neocon faction within the party started to champion the cause of a young, relatively little known MP for Witney, promoting him as the man who would 'modernise' the party and lead it back to power. The strategy worked a treat, and the little known MP - David Cameron - pulled off a surprise victory.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.
The Society supports the 'maintenance of a strong military' with a 'global reach'; among its international patrons are the serial warmonger Richard 'Prince of Darkness' Perle, a former staffer of Henry Jackson who was considered one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, and Bill Kristol, the influential American journalist, formerly with the New York Times, who called for military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2006.

As for Osborne, Cameron's Shadow Chancellor and right-hand man; he praised the "excellent neoconservative case" for war against Iraq.

There are other strong neocon influences on Cameron. Policy Exchange, which has been described as the Tory leader's 'favourite think-tank', and which will have an open door to Number 10, was set up in 2002 by Michael Gove and fellow hawk Nicholas Boles, a member of the Notting Hill set who the Tories plan to parachute into the safe seat of Grantham and Stamford at the next election. Dean Godson, the group's research director and adviser on security issues, has been described as "one of the best connected neoconservatives in Britain".

When Godson, a former special assistant to the disgraced publisher Conrad Black, was dismissed by the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper's editor Martin Newland said of him (and Black's wife, fellow neocon Barbara Amiel, who also wrote for the paper): "It's OK to be pro-Israel, but not to be unbelievably pro-Likud Israel. It's OK to be pro-American but not look as if you're taking instructions from Washington."

In 2007, Policy Exchange was accused of deliberately stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain after a controversy over the veracity of some of the evidence it used in its report 'The Hijacking of British Islam'.

Although he said that Britain should learn from the 'failures' of neoconservatism in a speech in September 2006, and denied that he was a neocon himself, Cameron's public pronouncements on foreign affairs since then certainly give the Tory uber-hawks no grounds for believing that they have backed the wrong man.

Last summer, during the South Ossetia conflict, he called for Russia to be expelled from the G8, for Georgia's Nato membership to be "accelerated" and lambasted the British government for allowing Moscow's "aggression" to go unchecked.

He has consistently called for a tougher stance on Iran, warning that "every week, every month that goes by brings Iran closer to possessing a nuclear weapon." And, while staying largely silent on Israel's military assault on Gaza, he has declared his belief in Israel to be "indestructible" and pledged that he would be an "unswerving friend" to the country if he became Prime Minister.

Just as significant has been the way Cameron has protected his neocon allies during the expenses scandal - although they were arguably among the worst offenders. Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who was described by the Daily Mail's political commentator Peter Oborne as "one of the most notorious milkers of the expenses system", for spending thousands furnishing his London home before 'flipping' to a new property and claiming £13,000 in moving costs, came under no pressure from Cameron to stand down. He is likely to play a major role in the next Conservative government.

So too will fellow flipper George Osborne and Ed Vaizey, who claimed for over £2,000 in antique furniture bought from a business owned by David Cameron's mother-in-law.

The trio will not be the only hawks in Cameron's Cabinet. Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox, is the founder and UK Director of the 'The Atlantic Bridge', an organisation which promotes closer US/British foreign policy ties. Members of the group's advisory council include Gove, Osborne, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling and Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague, a strong supporter of the Iraq war who has attacked Europe's "extraordinary weakness" in dealing with Russia.

It's a sobering thought that before the Iraq inquiry has finished its work, some of the war's most fervent supporters may, if the bookies are right and the Tories win the May 2010 election, once again be guiding Britain's foreign policy.

0 comments

I’ve written before on how keen Parliamentary supporters of the neocon Henry ’Scoop’ Jackson Society seem to be on ‘scooping’ British taxpayers’ cash.

Today’s Mail on Sunday has more. It’s not often a story in a leading British Sunday newspaper originates as a comment posted on this blog.

Bravo to regular reader and commenter ‘Coventrian’ for his brilliant detective work regarding the Brothers Matyjaszek and the ‘European Policy Institute’. And remember, if you are a British taxpayer- its YOUR money that is being 'scooped' here. No wonder Macshane has such a broad grin in the photograph above.


Labour MP Denis MacShane charged taxpayers more than £8,000 for ‘translation services’ carried out by a mysterious think-tank run by his poet brother.
The former Europe Minister submitted more than a dozen invoices to the Commons bearing the heading of the European Policy Institute (EPI), with each bill justified by just one line – ‘research and translation’ – followed by a demand for fees ranging between £550 and £950.

The names and signatures on the bills, sent between August 2005 and January 2008 and totalling £8,050, have been blacked out by the Commons censors, but The Mail on Sunday has established the EPI is controlled by his brother Edmund Matyjaszek.
Mr Matyjaszek, a 59-year-old poet and playwright, kept the surname of their father, Jan Matyjaszek, while his brother adopted the maiden name of their Irish mother, Isobel MacShane, when he joined the BBC in 1969.

The link between the siblings is not apparent from the documents submitted by Mr MacShane.

The EPI appears to have a ghost presence on the internet, with the only identifying information appearing to be the London phone number of a direct-mailing company called European Marketing Services.

The company, which has its website registered in the name of an ‘Edmund Matthew’, is listed by the Poetry Society as the contact point for its Isle of Wight branch – which is run by Edmund Matyjaszek.

Last night, when he was initially contacted, Mr MacShane said: ‘It is no secret that I do more work for Europe than any other MP, and people connected with the institute help me with that. That is all I can really help you with.’ The line then went dead.
A couple of hours later, Mr MacShane, who served as Europe Minister between 2002 and 2005, sent a text message saying: ‘The EPI was set up 20 years ago by a network of people on the Left working in Europe and the US. It has organised conferences and published books and reports.

‘Ed is my brother, but simply administrates it. The claims refer to work in connection with my well-known Parliamentary activity on European and global politics. When I stopped being Europe Minister, I used the EPI to claim for research and translation relating to my work as an MP on European politics.’

Mr MacShane was first dragged into the expenses controversy when The Mail on Sunday disclosed last month that he claimed nearly £20,000 a year in expenses for an office based in the garage of his South Yorkshire home.

The claim, totalling £125,000 over the past seven years, covered the costs of running his official constituency base from the shabby-looking garage at his semi-detached home in Rotherham.

According to literature distributed by ‘Tongues & Grooves’, a poetry club, Mr Matyjaszek ‘has had more than 80 poems published, many of them prizewinners in various competitions.

His prize-winning play The Consultation on the Israel/Palestine issue was performed at Sevenoaks Arts Festival.

‘Poetry-reading is a particular interest, and he has written and performed scripts on subjects as various as the War Poets, John Donne and Ted Hughes.’
The telephone number given to book him for readings is that shared between the EPI and European Marketing Services.

Mr Matyjaszek’s wife answered the door last night at his £500,000, stone-built home in an exclusive area of Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, and said he was not available for comment.

0 comments

Michael Crick writes:

I'm interested to see that the distinguished war historian Sir Lawrence Freedman has been appointed to the new inquiry into the Iraq war, announced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown today.
Critics of the war might argue Sir Lawrence was himself one of the causes of the war!
The professor once told me how, back in 1999, he was contacted by Downing Street seeking his thoughts for a speech on humanitarian intervention which the-then Prime Minister Tony Blair was about to make in Chicago.
When was military action justified for, liberal, humanitarian reasons?
Sir Lawrence says he was astonished when he heard and read Mr Blair's famous Chicago speech - perhaps the most important of Blair's premiership - that it was based largely on the memo he had sent to Number 10.
And the rest was history.
Nor will critics of the war be very happy about the appointment of the other historian Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill.
In 2004, he went so far as to compare US President George W Bush and Mr Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really disappointed that Gordon Brown hasn’t gone the whole hog. Why doesn’t he put 'Neo' Con Coughlin, Nick Cohen, and Melanie Phillips on the inquiry team too?

0 comments

Svetlana reports:

Foreign ministers of the 57-nation Organization of The Islamic Conference (OIC) did not adopt the original text, written by Albanians, of the resolution pushed by Saudi Arabia — American proxy in the Middle East — which urged all the members of the international Muslim organization to immediately recognize independence of southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija.

What good news.

The modus operandi of the neocons and their ‘liberal’ imperalist allies is the same as all imperialists down the ages: to divide and conquer. In the Balkans that meant pitting Orthodox Christians against Muslims, Catholics against Orthodox Christians- Serbs against Croats, Kosovan Albanians against Serbs and so forth. And while Serbs, Kosovan Albanians, Bosnian Muslims and Croats were fighting each other-in conflicts instigated from without- the imperialists came, set up military bases and stole their land and resources.

It’s good to see that the vast majority of Islamic countries aren’t falling for it.

0 comments

This week's winner, from W.H. Doe of Arnold, Notts, appears in today's Daily Mail.

"It shows how bright most of our MPs are- no one put in a claim for a shredder, except Tony Blair."

ps Tony's shredder really did exist, unlike Saddam Hussein's which, like Iraq's WMDs, was a neocon conspiracy theory.

0 comments

I’ve written before about the decline in simple journalistic standards and fact checking at the newspaper which purports to be Britain’s 'newspaper of record'.

The Times comment/editorial section, has in the last few years, been more interested in acting as the last remaining propaganda outlet of British neo-conservatism, than in getting simple facts right.

In today's paper there is a comment piece entitled 'The Pope is deeply suspect in Jewish eyes', written by Stephen Pollard.

You would have thought that an article attacking the Pope (pictured above), would at least get the man's real name right. It doesn't.

The article refers to the Pope as 'Thomas Ratzinger'.

His name is Joseph Alois Ratzinger.

It beggars belief that no one who dealt with this article knew the Pope‘s real name or bothered to check it.

But then again, judging by the comment/editorial section's previous form on getting facts right, perhaps not.

(Hat tip for spotting this one to Martin Meenagh).

UPDATE. Oh dear. It's not been a very good day for neocon writers at The Times has it?

As David Lindsay says, lets hope he takes the rest of Policy Exchange and the Henry Jackson Society with him as he leaves Parliament.

FURTHER UPDATE: The Times has amended the article in question so that the Pope is now 'Joseph Ratzinger'. But the erroneous information highlighted by Martin Meenagh
in the comments section below is still up there.

AND THERE'S MORE....
What a day of unmitigated embarrassment at Britain's 'newspaper of record'. The excellent Guido Fawkes reports:

Why has a regular Times T2 columnist had a piece called ‘How Not To Spend It’, which was due to be published today, pulled by The Times. The reason? Might be sensitive, given MPs spending habits. The columnist?
Could it be that the columnist is Sarah Vine? Also known as Mrs Gove.....

FURTHER UPDATE.
Neo-cons not very happy about this blog post, it seems.

I receive a sneering email overnight from 'anonymous' to draw my attention to a blog post of last night by Pollard's little pal and fellow neocon smear merchant Oliver Kamm in which he accuses me (falsely) of using quotations from Cicero and Mahatma Gandhi from the internet without checking them. You can imagine the exchange of emails which preceded the blog post, can't you?

0 comments

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days but I have been busy taking part in and attending the various events in Serbia to mark the 10th anniversary of the illegal NATO aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Over the next month or so I’ll be posting plenty on this brutal war and its significance.

To kick off our series of posts on 1999- here’s my 2006 article from The Morning Star on how the road to Baghdad began in Belgrade - and how it won’t end there until supporters of US sponsored ‘humanitarian interventions’ start to see the bigger picture.

In the words of E.M. Forster: 'Only connect'.


FROM BELGRADE TO BAGHDAD AND BEYOND

Divide and conquer has been the classic Imperial strategy since Roman times.

Today’s Empire builders are no different. The particular genius of the modern neo-conservative project has been the use of the theory of ‘humanitarian intervention’, to co-opt liberal-left support for a centuries old project of conquest.

In 1990s it was the Serbs- and their “extreme nationalist” leader Slobodan Milosevic who posed the threat to peace and civilised values. In 2001 it was Mullah Omar and the Islamic hardliners of the Taliban. In 2003 it was the turn of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its deadly arsenal of WMD. Now its Iran’s President Ahmadenijad’s alleged attempts to develop nuclear weapons which need to be countered.

Each time a sizeable section of the liberal-left has supported, not those attacked or threatened, but the aggressors. You might have thought that by now, the pattern would be clear to all. But the enduring success of the New World Order’s propaganda machine can be seen by the reaction of many on the left to Milosevic’s death.

Milosevic, a life-long socialist, was a man all true progressives should have mourned. A man steeped in partisan culture, (both his parents fought the Nazis in World War Two), he never once made a racist speech: the famous Kosovo Polje address of 1989 which his critics claimed whipped up ancient ethnic hatreds, was in fact a statement of support for multi-ethnic, socialist Yugoslavia. Far from being a rabid warmonger, the late Yugoslav leader was, in the words of Lord Owen ‘the only leader who consistently supported peace’ and ‘a man to whom any form of racism is anathema’.

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was initiated not by Milosevic, but by the German decision to prematurely recognise the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia, against all the norms of international law. And war in Bosnia would have been avoided too had US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman not personally intervened at the eleventh hour to sabotage the 1992 Lisbon Agreement which provided for the peaceful division of the republic. ‘If you don’t like it, why sign it’ Zimmerman told the hard-line Bosnian separatist leader Alija Izetbegovic, thereby lighting the touch paper to a conflict which would claim over 90,000 lives. Even after the 1995 Dayton agreement which ended the war in Bosnia, the Imperial appetite was not satiated.

Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia had to be destroyed too, by providing weapons and training for a separatist terror group, the Kosovan Liberation Army. When the inevitable security clampdown from Belgrade came, the West was at hand to issue the ultimatum, producing a document at the Rambouillet Peace Conference, which as Defence Minister Lord Gilbert has conceded, was deliberately designed to be rejected by the Yugoslav delegation.

Why was it all done? Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was targeted not for ‘humanitarian’ reasons as many still believe, but simply because it got in the way. ‘In post Cold War Europe, no place remained for a large, independent minded socialist state that resisted globalisation', the words not of a left-wing conspiracy theorist, but George Kenney, an official at the Yugoslav office of the US State Department.

There's no doubting who has benefited from the wars which the West is happy to pin on Milosevic. One militarily and economically strong independent nation, has been replaced by a series of weak and divided World Bank/IMF/NATO protectorates. Western capital has unhindered access to raw materials and markets throughout the region, while in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, the U.S.'s biggest from scratch military base since the Vietnam war, jealously guards the route of the $1.3bn Trans Balkan AMBO pipeline, guaranteeing Western control of Caspian oil supplies.

It’s worth remembering that the very same people who clamoured most loudly for action against Milosevic in the 1990s, were those who were at the forefront of the propaganda war against Iraq a few years later. And today, the very same hawks are trying to convince us of the necessity of ‘strong action’ against Iran.

Among the members of the executive of the Balkan Action Committee, who lobbied for US involvement on the side of Izetbegovic in Bosnia, and then for full scale war against Milosevic’s Yugoslavia in 1999, are three names that will need no introduction: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. ‘It‘s either take action now, or lose the option of taking action’ was Perle’s recent comment on Iran: in addition to signing (along with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) a notorious letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for a ‘comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime’, he also acted as adviser to Izetbegovic’s delegation at Dayton.

It’s time those who supported the military actions against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the current 'strong' line on Iran, realised that the biggest danger to peace did not come from Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, or, now, from President Ahmadinejad, but from the serial warmongers who threatened them. The road to Baghdad began in the Balkans. But it won’t end there, unless the liberal-left supporters of U.S. sponsored “humanitarian” interventions start to see the bigger picture.

0 comments

Today is the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

Let’s spare a moment to think of the 1.3 million people to have lost their lives since the invasion-Iraqi civilians, Iraqi soldiers, US and British soldiers.

And then let’s spare a moment to remember the lies we were told in order to justify this illegal war of aggression.

We are told by our masters today that we must ‘move on’ from Iraq.

But we must never do so until those who planned this supreme international crime are brought to justice.

0 comments

Thank you to regular commenter 'Dan from Portsmouth' for pointing out that there is an online petition, organised by the Blair War Crimes Foundation (BWCF), calling for Tony Bliar to be indicted for war crimes. The petition sets out in detail the charges against Bliar relating to the illegal war against Iraq; let's hope a similar petition is soon up and running in relation to the illegal war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

You can sign the petition here. Please take the 20 seconds or so to do so and then email the link to your friends. The more people who sign the better (currently there are around 2,000 signatures).

Let's try and do all we can to make sure that this time next year, Bliar is not gallivanting round the world earning a fortune, but sitting in a small and none too comfortable prison cell.

0 comments

This article of mine appears in The First Post.

So, Tony Blair has been awarded a $1 million prize for "his exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict".

Some will argue that Blair should be on trial for war crimes, not receiving prizes. Others will say that the award, made by the Dan David Foundation of Tel Aviv, is a huge own goal for Israel because it sinks the country's international standing even lower after its actions in Gaza.

But they are missing the point.

The award - along with many of the other riches which have come Blair's way since he left Downing Street - is the payback for doing 'the right thing' by way of the US and Israel while he was in office.

The £2m-plus annual fee from JP Morgan Chase... the $250,000 for a 45-minute speech on the US lecture circuit... the all-expenses paid jaunts to Jerusalem as the Quartet's (ineffectual) Middle East envoy... it all serves as a reminder to members of the western political elite of the enormous financial rewards that will come their way if they toe the line.

It makes no difference that the $1m from Dan David will go to the former Prime Minister's 'Faith Foundation'; it is still heading for the overall Blair kitty.

Over the past six years, there has been much debate as to why Blair led Britain into a disastrous and illegal war with Iraq. Some say it was due to a passionate belief in spreading democracy. Others maintain that he genuinely believed that Iraq possessed WMD. But the simple, unavoidable truth is that Anthony Charles Linton Blair is now a far richer man than he would have been had he followed the example of French President Jacques Chirac and opposed the war.

For Chirac there have been no offers from JP Morgan Chase, no US lecture tours and absolutely no prospect of a Dan David leadership prize. John Howard, the former Australian Prime Minister who, like Blair, supported the Iraq war, has fared rather better: he too has been booked to impart his 'wisdom' on the US lecture circuit.

We know that money has always been a major motivator for the Blairs, as it is for most politicians everywhere. The number of genuinely principled politicians - the Tony Benns and Enoch Powells of this world, who are prepared to put their beliefs before their careers and long-term financial security - is very small indeed. And Washington and Tel Aviv know this.

The message from both the US and Israel to Britain's political elite could not be clearer: if you continue to follow the 'right' foreign policy and take your country into wars which we desire - such as Iraq - you can look forward to a very comfortable retirement.

Today it's Blair who’s reaping the financial benefits for his Atlanticism and his pro-Zionism; tomorrow it will be David Cameron, who also supported the Iraq war and who stayed silent as Israel bombarded Gaza.

After the disaster in Iraq, many Britons would love to see a reorientation of our country's foreign policy. But they are likely to be disappointed until other countries can offer our opportunistic and unprincipled leaders the lucrative pension plans that the US and Israel can afford.

UPDATE: Here's some more interesting news about the oh-so-principled former British Prime Minister from today's Sunday Times.

TONY BLAIR is cashing in on his experience as Britain’s longest-serving Labour prime minister by setting up a “commercial partnership” that offers clients political and economic advice.

The business venture, Tony Blair Associates, has been disclosed by the official watchdog that scrutinises paid employment undertaken by former ministers.

The advisory committee on business appointments said in a statement on its website this weekend: “Tony Blair has established Tony Blair Associates which will allow him to provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on a commercial and pro-bono [free] basis, on political and economic trends and governmental reform.”

Mike Warburton, a senior tax partner at the accountants Grant Thornton, said that if Tony Blair Associates had been set up as a simple partnership rather than as a limited company, it would not have to make public its income and profit.

0 comments

As I've said on many occasions, when it comes to conspiracy theories, the neocons are in a league of their own. In 1999, they peddled the fiction that Yugoslav forces were committing 'genocide' in Kosovo. Four years later, they peddled the lie that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed WMD. (whatever happened to them, I wonder?). Now in 2009, the neocon conspiracy theory is that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme.

Never mind that US intelligence agencies published a report claiming that Iran has no such programme, or that not a scrap of evidence exists to show that Iran is developing nuclear weapons- the neocons still continue peddle the theory.

Here's 'Mad' Melanie Phillips, writing on her Spectator blog

As was entirely predictable, the Iranian government has reacted with utter contempt to the exciting new approach of US President Obama towards resolving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme

Note that Ms Phillips talks of a 'crisis' regarding a country's non-existent nuclear weapons programme- the neocons, like their jack-booted predecessors, love to stoke up artifical international 'crises' every three years or so to get the wars they are so addicted to.

And in The Times, arch neo-con Daniel Finkelstein writes:
As Iran gets a nuclear weapon , as if Iran getting a nuclear weapon is as inevitable as night following day.

In the same way that neocons felt obliged to write of 'Iraq's WMD' in every article they penned in the lead up to the 2003 war, they now feel obliged to write of 'Iran's nuclear weapons programme' as a matter of fact, when it most clearly isn't.

Now there are conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories: Professor Cornelius Wacky-Backy's view that little green men made of cheese live on Mars might be silly, but it doesn't cost any lives. The neocons' conspiracy theories do - at the latest count 1m in Iraq.

Which is why it is so important that we should not allow their unsubstantiated claims regarding 'Iran's nuclear weapons programme' to go unchallenged.

0 comments

The Guardian reports:

One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante".

Lord Bingham, in his first major speech since retiring as the senior law lord, rejected the then attorney general's defence of the 2003 invasion as fundamentally flawed.

Contradicting head-on Lord Goldsmith's advice that the invasion was lawful, Bingham stated: "It was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had." Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions "passes belief".

Addressing the British Institute of International and Comparative Law last night, Bingham said: "If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK, and some other states was unauthorised by the security council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.

Of course Lord Bingham is right. The Iraq war was blatantly illegal, as I have always maintained. But it's not good enough, five years on, to merely state that the war was unlawful.

We need to make sure that the perpetrators of the war- namely George W. Bush and Tony Bliar- a man who is millions of pounds richer because of the conflict-and the neocon men and women who planned it, are bought to justice. The Nuremburg judgements held that to launch a war of aggression is the 'supreme international crime'- and it is obscene that five years on, those responsible for this outrageous crime- which has led to the deaths of up to 1m people, are still at liberty.

Furthermore, it's also important too that those journalists and writers, who propagandised for an attack on Iraq- in contravention of international law- are also are held accountable for their actions. The trial of Julius Streicher after WW2 sets the precedent.

0 comments

"Obama will not win the presidency: America will have been made to feel sufficiently good about itself simply by his nomination and the way it responds to him as a candidate not to feel the need to put him in the White House. America will decide that in such dangerous times, it must choose the wise older leader, the war hero, the statesman who talks about foreign policy and national security with real authority."
Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph, January 2008

"For what it is worth, I think it will be a close presidential race with the favourite, Obama, winning by a squeak."
Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph, November 2008.

Well, I hope you took my advice and headed down your local bookies to bet on an Obama landslide. If Daley, the world's worst pundit, said that Obama would win by a squeak, we knew for sure he'd win at a canter.

'The scale of Obama's victory exceeded Democratic expectations' reports The Guardian as the man Ms Daley assured us "will not win the Presidency" recorded the most emphatic win in a US Presidential election for two decades.

It's great to see the uber neocon McCain/Palin combo suffer such a heavy defeat. The American people have delivered a damning verdict on the past eight years- and disastrous neoconservative/neoliberal policies pursued by Bush and Cheney.

But while public opinion in America (and Britain too for that matter) has undoubtedly shifted to the left, neocon/neoliberal voices are (scandalously) still disproportionately represented in both countries mainstream media. Expect that to change over the next couple of years: people will simply stop reading columnists- and the newspapers they write for, if they consistently tell them things that they know not to be true (such as 'unregulated free market capitalism is good for everyone'; 'Barack Obama is a hard-line socialist' and 'soft' on terror, or that Russian and Iran pose 'a grave threat' to the west).

With their ridiculous attacks on Obama and bellicose pro-war rhetoric, uber neocon writers like Janet Daley, William Kristol and Melanie Phillips are totally out of step with the new spirit of the age. They've been proved wrong on virtually everything they've written about over the past ten years and their moment has well and truly passed.

0 comments