For Britons, The Party Game Is Over
SHOES THROWER
By John Pilger
September 17, 2009 "Information Clearing House" - -- On the day Prime
Minister Gordon Brown made his �major policy speech� on Afghanistan,
repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun
tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh
hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the
poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to
siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water
buckets and cooking pots. �At least� 90 were killed, although Nato prefers
not to count its civilian enemy. �It was a scene from hell,� said Mohammed
Daud, a witness. �Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere.� No
parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.
I saw something similar in south-east Asia. An incendiary bomb had razed
most of a thatched village, and bits of charred people were hanging on
upended fishing nets. Those intact lay splayed and black, like large
spiders. I have never believed you need witness such a hell to comprehend
the crime. A standard-issue conscience is enough for all but the morally
corrupt and powerful.
Fresh from another dysfunctional photo opportunity with troops in
Afghanistan � a contrivance far from the impoverished suffering of that
country � Brown �authorised� the Rambo-style rescue of Stephen Farrell, a
journalist of British and Irish nationality, at the site of the Nato attack.
It was a stunt that went wrong. A British soldier was killed and Farrell�s
guide, Sultan Munadi, an Afghan journalist, was abandoned and killed. Munadi�s
family now fully appreciates the different worth of British and Afghan
lives.
During the 1914-18 slaughter, Prime Minister Lloyd George confided: �If
people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of
course they don�t know and can�t know.� Have we not yet advanced over a
century�s corpses to a point where the likes of Brown are denied their
mendacious subterfuge? The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American
vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001
attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are
Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly
with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to
apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this
was rejected.
The establishment of a permanent US/Nato presence in a resource-rich,
strategic region is the principal reason for the war. The British are there
because that is what Washington wants. Preventing the Taliban from storming
our streets is reminiscent of President Lyndon B Johnson�s plaint: �We have
to stop the communists over there [Vietnam] or we�ll soon be fighting them
in California.�
There is one difference. By refusing to bring the troops home, Brown is
likely to provoke an atrocity by young British Muslims who view the war as a
western crusade; the recent Old Bailey trail made that clear. He has been
told as much by British intelligence and security services. Brown�s own
security adviser has said as much publicly. As with Tony Blair and the bombs
of 7 July 2005, he will bear ultimate responsibility for bringing violence
and grief to his own people.
More than MPs� fake expenses, it is this corrupting and trivialising of life
and death that mark a fitting end to the �modernised� Labour Party, the
party of criminal war. Do the delegates preparing for the party�s annual
rituals in Brighton comprehend this? It says enough that most Labour MPs
never demanded a vote on Blair�s bloodshed in Iraq and gave him a standing
ovation when he departed. One timid motion proposed by the �grass roots� at
Brighton might be allowed. This concludes that �a majority of the public
believe that the war [in Afghanistan] is unwinnable�. There is no suggestion
that it is wrong, immoral and based on lies similar to those that led to the
extinction of a million Iraqis, �an episode more deadly than the Rwandan
genocide�, according to one scholarly estimate.
This is largely why the game of parliamentary politics is over for so many
Britons, especially the young. In 2005, a bent system allowed Blair to win
with fewer popular votes than the Tories in their electoral catastrophe of
1997. New Labour�s greatest achievement is the lowest turnouts since
universal voting began. Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public
money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed
their practices as an inspiration �for the whole economy�. At the recent
meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing,
and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and
penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in
Britain is now the widest since 1968.
New Labour�s causes and effect extend from the one in five young people
denied employment, education and hope to the �12m that Blair coins in a
year, �advising� the rich and lecturing to them at �157,000 a time.For the
more extreme among Blair's and Brown's mentors and courtiers, such as the
twice disgraced Peter Mandelson, this represents the most sought after
achievement of all: the positioning of Labour to the right of the Tories,
though it is probably correct to say the two main parties have converged,
now competing feverishly with each other to threaten cuts in public services
in order to pay for the bailing out of the banks and for the druglords of
Kabul. There is no mention of cutting the billions to be spent on replacing
Trident nuclear submarines designed for the defunct cold war.
The game is over. Corporatism and a reinvigorated militarism have finally
appropriated parliamentary democracy, a historic shift. For those Afghan
villagers blown to pieces in our name, one craven motion at Labour�s
conference is too late. At the very least, the party�s �grass roots� might
ask themselves why.
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