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Introduction: Dr Saed Shahabi Iraq
will remain a hot potatoe for some time. It is an important
big country in the Middle East strategically located with a
long history of civilisation and a troubled recent past.
Nobody on this earth can ignore the importance of events which
are taking place in that country. We have discussed it in the
past and we will continue to discuss it now and in the future
until things settle there. Everybody is feeling the pain of
the prolongation of the crisis in that country, even those who
have toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein have started to feel
how difficult the situation is and how important it is to
leave that country alone – otherwise they may find that
country in bigger trouble. Tonight we are discussing Iraq once
again and our discussion comes on the backdrop of several
developments in recent days. Today one of friends in the House
of Commons has been dismissed because of his stance. It is
really surprising that what he considered to be an illegal war
at the time seems to become the fact of the day. No weapons of
mass destruction have been found in Iraq, nobody has ever
loved the regime of Saddam Hussein. He has gone and not many
tears have been shed on his behalf. But the footing of the war
continues to be a problem for those who have fought it and the
consequences of the war are reverberating in the Muslim
capitals, in London and in Washington. Many more consequences
are likely to follow. The Iraqis are happy that Saddam Hussein
has gone but their happiness is tainted by their grievances at
what is happening in their land – the lack of amenities is the
most important of all. Jeremy Corbyn was in the forefront of
those who opposed the war and he is here with us tonight to
discuss the topic of Iraq.
Jeremy Corbyn: I would like to
thank the Gulf Cultural Club for inviting me here tonight.
What London needs and what we all desperately need are
opportunities to have effective, serious debate about current
issues and the Gulf Cultural Club provides this opportunity.
While the audiences might not be as big as at public meetings
and demonstrations, it is the fact of being able to come
together for a serious discussion which is very valuable. Long
may it continue.
I have to say that the forums for
discussion in the Labour Party are a bit closed down. I am
very sad and angry this evening at the way in which George
Galloway has been expelled from the Labour Party. The reasons
for his dismissal are that he allegedly provoked people to
attack the soldiers in Iraq. I think that what he was actually
doing was pointing out that the British and American invasion
of Iraq had no basis in law whatsoever and that British troops
would be acting illegally. They seem to be trumping up these
charges. They have dropped the charge that he called Bush and
Blair wolves. I always had my doubts about that because the
wolf is quite a fine creature and George was mistaken. I guess
he will be trying to appeal. We will see what comes out from
this.
It seems ironical that George is expelled
from the Labour Party for speaking what many people in this
country think and agree with. Yet Tony Blair carries on as
prime minister despite telling parliament that there was a
real, present and credible threat from Iraq, that it had
weapons of mass destruction, that the war was justified and so
many other things which were said during the period when
George Bush led us into war. I hope that you will send
messages of support to George. Those of us who are in the
Labour Party will continue to try and reverse this trend of
authoritarianism and centralism in the Labour Party and go
back to the internationalist roots which allowed a broad
coalition to exist and debate within the party. That is what
brought Labour to power. Its authoritarianism and centralism
will defeat it, not the Tories. It will be defeated internally
because of the arrogance and attitude of the party leadership
at the present time.
I want to talk about Iraq and there is a
lot that can be said. First of all let us look at the
situation in the country at present. There are 130,000
American troops, 12,000 British troops and around 15,000
troops from mostly central European countries (mostly Poland)
and others including Nicaragua which sent 100 troops. Goodness
knows what they are doing and achieving there but I would
imagine it is in return for paying off some debt that
Nicaragua allegedly owes to the United States.
There is news today from the donors’
conference of a number of countries queuing up not to give
money to the coalition forces in Iraq. The Americans have
already handed out contracts to Bectel, Halliburton and many
others. I was doing some rough sums on the internet this
morning and it looks as if they have handed out contracts of
much greater value than the money that has already come in.
Because of the sabotage of the oil pipelines there is no
income coming in from that and various other countries are now
demanding the repayment of their debt. So I suspect that it is
the American taxpayer who will end up subsidising Enron and
Bectell. There was a very good comment by one of the Democrat
contenders for the US presidency. He said it was very
interesting that George Bush would now be finding money to
reconstruct the national grid in Iraq but could not find the
money to rebuild the national grid in the United States which
is having huge power cuts. The politics of what is going on in
the United States are going to impact very heavily on this
whole process. I will return to this later. I want to give an
overall snapshot first.
Moving on to the situation between Israel
and Palestine. The strategy of the West has been essentially
to fully support Israel from its formation in 1948. US and
British foreign policy has been one of underwriting Israel
since than. Foreign aid that has gone to Israel amounts to
more or less half of all US foreign aid over the past 50
years. It is the most supported society in the world. That
support has meant almost totally ignoring the Palestinian
people and Israel’s suppression of them.
The policies of the leftist parties in the
West began to change after the Six Day War and particularly
after the horrors of Sabra and Chatilla in 1982. That was the
first time that the British Labour Party ever passed any
resolution not in support of Israel. That was the turning
point. The adoption of a two-state solution by the PLO meant
that there was a kind of handle which the rest of the world
could grasp onto in the need for the recognition of a
Palestinian state. In the debates about the recognition of a
Palestinian state one should remember two things: first of all
Palestine was once the area from the sea right across the Dead
Sea to the Jordanian border.
There is an acceptance of the pre 1967
borders of Israel but when Israel talks about trading land for
peace and says that 95 percent of what Palestine wanted is now
being adhered to is simply not true. It is simply not viable
to say that Palestine is a state which consists of a series of
small holdings of land, often lacking water, resources and
communication in order to accommodate wholly illegal Israeli
settlements. The political strategy has been to try to divide
Arab opposition to Israel like the deal that was done with
Egypt. That is why American presidents have successively
sought to involve in any kind of peace solution or peace
settlement to divide the opposition in that way.
We now have the decision by the United
States that it is going to decide who the Palestinian
leadership is. It reminds me very firmly of a visit I made to
Palestine. I was talking to a shop keeper in Ramallah and he
asked me ‘what are you doing here?’ I said that I was on my
way to see Yasser Arafat. He than got extremely angry and
spend 20 minutes telling me what a horrible, vile, disgusting
person Yasser Arafat was. I asked him if an election was held
for the Palestinian authority who he would vote for and he
replied Yasser Arafat because he is symbol of Palestine. The
British and the Americans cannot get their heads past this.
As far as the Palestinian people are concerned they have
asserted their right to statehood, they have elected an
authority and a leadership and it is not up to George Bush and
Tony Blair to decide who the Palestinian Prime Minister should
be, anymore than it is legal for the Israeli cabinet to
discuss who to assassinate in Palestine. If we went into a
discussion about who we wanted assassinated tomorrow and we
had the power to do it, we would be criminally liable for a
conspiracy to kill somebody. We are not going to do that but
the Israeli cabinet does it every week. They decide who to get
rid of, who to get rid of, who to assassinate so lets have a
sense of proportion and reality about this.
The road map seems to me to be essentially
dead and the conditions of the Palestinian people are getting
progressively worse. I have been to Palestine twice in the
recent past and had lots of discussions with lots of people
including Hamas and other groups who are all perfectly
sensible, logical, intelligent people. But you can’t drive a
people into a corner and humiliate a whole generation, deny
them the right of return and say you better accept 95% of 50%
to make us happy. They don’t accept it, you say it is
unreasonable and then their leaders are assassinated, 16 jets
are used to destroy their homes or peoples homes are destroyed
you are going to get a reaction to it. The United States and
Britain better understand you cannot go on treating people in
Palestine, or anywhere else in the world like that without a
huge problem and a huge comeback.
The third background point I want to make
is about oil and resources because I think while this is not
the only factor it is a very large factor in American, and to
some extent British, international thinking. I looked at a
study that had been undertaken by a German SPD deputy –
somebody who is very anti war. It deals with the US dependence
on imported materials. Basically he looked at all crucial
materials. The USA is a highly developed, industrialised
economy. Between 70 and 90 percent are imported. Seventy
percent of oil requirements are imported. Ninety five percent
of gold is imported. The figure for coltine, used in the
manufacture of mobile phones, is 100 percent. You see an
economy that has grown very fast over the past 200 years,
destroying its own natural resources, using them in a very
wasteful way and getting all the raw materials it needs from
the rest of the world. The current strategy of the project
for the New American Century is not that different. It is
just more militarily backed up and more clearly put but it is
not that different to what Jessie Helms was saying in the mid
1980s in terms of attitudes to Latin America – it has taken on
a wider scale and a wider scope. So I do believe oil is part
of the issue surrounding the war on Iraq and the strategy
adopted in the Middle East area.
But the US is now finding itself in
difficulties. It has sent 130,000 troops to Iraq. It will
probably have to increase those numbers – I can’t see anyone
else providing the kind of numbers that they want in order to
continue their strategy there and they have serious problems
with the war in Columbia which, again, is heavily related to
oil. There is also the problem of potential wars in many other
places.
So there is the issue of resources but let
us go through the recent past: 9/11 and related events. It was
a tremendous shock to the USA, it was a shock to their psyche
that somebody would actually do such a thing to the USA.
Obviously it was horrific, obviously it was bad and it was
wrong.
The interesting thing was the US reaction
to it. It was not the only place in the world that suffered
that kind of terrorist attack. Maybe the scale was different
but it was not the only place that suffered that kind of
attack – what was the response? Britain had a lot of Irish
bombings in 1980s but even Margaret Thatcher did not propose
the bombing of Dublin as a solution. Maybe she did in her
dreams but she never said anything. In the end there was a
political process and the political process will work that
out.
The United States is a very insular
society. Whenever I go there and stay for more than a few days
I wonder what planet I am on. Nobody ever talks about anything
beyond their locality, apart from the USA nowhere else seems
to exist. Nine eleven was a huge shock to them and the
reaction was an interesting one. First of all George Bush
disappeared to Montana or Wyoming and there was an 18 hour
gap before he reappeared. Goodness knows where he was during
that period. Maybe he was looking at a map. He reappeared and
announced that it was all the fault of Al Qaeda and bin Laden
and that was directly linked to the taleban and therefore
there had to be a war against Afghanistan. Very simple, quite
straight forward. Then we had a diplomatic towing and throwing
with the taleban, which was never intended to be a towing and
throwing. It was simply a matter of how long it took to get
the troops and hardware in place before the war started.
We then had the Afghan war which I opposed
because I could see it was a war about resources, oil and
military power and the results of that war are 8,000 dead
Afghan civilians. As the US bombs fell on their homes some of
them had probably never heard of bin Laden or George Bush.
They did not have a clue about what the World Trade Centre was
and their memory is obliterated but the memory of those that
died in 9/11 is not obliterated. An American mother cries just
like an Afghan mother and any other mother whose children do
not deserve to die.
But what was the follow-up to the Afghan
war? The installation of the Karzai regime in Kabul, the deals
with the various warlords who continue their control over the
country and the construction of pipelines across Afghanistan
as a route to the sea. On the back of that is the declaration
of the war on terror. The ease with which the USA got more
military bases then it could ever dream of during the Cold War
of the 50s. All those bases all along the southern border of
Russia and the southern Soviet Republics and even in the Horn
of Africa to develop this global war on terror. There has
been the biggest ever increase in arms expenditure in non WW1,
WW2 period to the extent that in one year there increase was
the equivalent of the total annual defence expenditure of this
country. A massive increase and of course many of those
contracts went to friends of George Bush.
So in the global war on terror, invade
Afghanistan, develop all these bases and get all these
contracts going through. But also there was a very serious
attack on civil liberties throughout the world. The US passes
the homeland security act, Britain passes the anti-terror
legislation. This was copied in almost every European country.
Look around the world and you will see that most countries
have copied that legislation in some way giving them the power
to arrest and detain foreigners indefinitely, without charge,
without trial, on the say so of the Home Secretary or in
other countries the Minister of the Interior. Then there is
this legal void of Camp Delta and Guantanamo Bay where no law
applies of any sort. In Camp Delta there is no legal process,
no legal power – people are just held there.
Tony Blair kept on assuring us very
earnestly at meetings of the parliamentary Labour Party that
he has huge influence over George Bush. I asked him one
question. I said ‘Tony what has all this influence brought
about. When you have had all this influence on George Bush can
you actually point to one thing that happened because of your
influence that benefited anybody’. He replied that if we
revealed the success of the influence we are having the
influence would be destroyed. Great answer but it does not
meet the question, not even half way. If that influence is so
great how come he cannot even get British citizens brought
back from Guantanamo Bay to this country to face charges here
if there are charges to be brought against them. He can’t.
The other area in which major damage has
been done is to the role of the United Nations. The UN is an
organisation with many faults. It was created after WW2, it
has this curious system of the Security Council and the power
of veto of the five permanent members. But nevertheless it
has provided the basis on which one can argue for a legal
basis for a conflict that is taking place. In the UN charter
it is absolutely clear that there is no legal basis for war
unless you are invaded or threatened by your neighbour or
another country in a position to do that. Iraq certainly
wasn’t, Afghanistan certainly wasn’t. George Bush declares a
global war on terror and, in my view, is strongly in breach of
the UN charter.
The UN gave its support for US activities
in Afghanistan but crucially did not support the ultimate
strategy in relation to Iraq. That was largely because of the
size of the anti-war movement around the world. That is
something we can be very hopeful and enthusiastic about
because I think it provides some degree of hope in the future.
The UN is now in a position where the US
is asking it to endorse what it has already done, illegally. I
suspect that at some point, it has almost done it already, the
United Nations will actually endorse what has happened there,
endorse the imposed government in Iraq which would be given a
sort of retrospective legality to a wholly illegal situation.
Discussion about the power of the UN really has to be round
the democracy of the UN itself, the continuing nature of the
Security Council and the power of the General Assembly.
I am going to set that against what I
think is the most serious threat to world peace and that is
the strategy being followed by the United States as a whole. A
few minutes ago I mentioned the project of the New American
Century. It is the project of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearle,
Wolfitz etc which essentially says that the US can do what it
wants, go wherever it wants and it is not going to be hampered
by what its allies may or may not so because it has the right
to do so.
I have always been puzzled by the
arrogance of US commentators who go along with the project of
the New American Century. I did a large number of radio and
tv discussions in relation to Iraq in the USA with people in
the USA. With one of the people in the administration I
thought I had landed the killer blow when I said this is going
to be a war for oil. He just came back and said ‘what’s wrong
with that – what is wrong with a war for oil, there is oil
there, we need oil and we are going to have a war to get it.’
It was like a sort of non-engagement. You or I would say that
is ridiculous – you can’t go to war over somebody else’s
resources.
Then I had the misfortune last week to
watch Cheney’s speech. He doesn’t make many speeches – thank
goodness for that. He did make this quite lengthy speech in
which he did set out this sort of pax Americania which for the
historians amongst us is not actually that different to the
sort of pax Britannica speeches that were made in the 19th
century. Other European countries did the same thing. They
said we are Europe, we are advanced, we are civilised, we need
resources, we need power and this is how we are going to go
about getting it. I suppose that whole 19th century
colonial period culminated in the 1884 Congress of Berlin when
they calmly sat down for a couple of weeks and divided up the
whole world. Hence the straight lines on the map of Africa and
other places.
I thought that that degree Western
arrogance, white man’s burden and the racism that is behind
it had disappeared. And then Dick Cheney comes up with a
repeat of all of that in the 21st century. When
asked a question about whether the USA acted in a unilateral
way he said we can’t allow any other country to have a veto on
our foreign policy. If we are going to go to war others may
come with us and they may not – we will decide. Pretty scary
stuff.
I have been in parliament for the last 20
years, but especially during this period of 9/11 and the anti
war movement it has been quite a fascinating experience. I
have kept lots of papers and lots of letters. I have never
known such an intense period of political activity. After 9/11
the assumption was that the whole world would somehow accept
that it was right to go to war in Afghanistan. We formed the
Stop the War Coalition, 3,000 people turned up to the opening
meeting. It was in Friends Meeting House. We had to have
overflow meetings in every room and we ended up with Tariq Ali
and me addressing people at the bus stop outside, some of whom
actually wanted to catch a bus. We had that fantastic launch
of it. We then had demonstrations : if we get 50,000 people we
think we have done very well, if we get 100,000 we think we
have done very well, if we get 400,000 we think we have done
very well and then we get that astounding demonstration when a
million were in Hyde Park and goodness knows how many in the
streets around.
That was repeated in capital cities all
over the world. The number of people attending rallies was
phenomenal. I went to San Francisco just after the London
rally and arrived there the following afternoon. They had
400,000 people in the centre of San Francisco which is
actually not a very big city. That was the sign of the
strength of the US anti-war movement.
We did not succeed in stopping the war. We
didn’t win the vote in parliament. I was there that day, I
remember every moment of that day very well, I remember Tony
Blair’s aids dragging MP’s. He sat across the table from them
and said trust me I know about these weapons of mass
destruction, they are really dangerous, we have to do
something about them. They said ‘okay Tony, we trust you’. I
am not sure they would say that now, but they said it then and
the vote duly went through.
The anti-war movement did not succeed in
stopping the war. It probably succeeded in Germany not
joining in, it probably had a big influence on the French
government. It certainly had an influence in Spain in the
sense that Berlusconi gave his support and did not do anything
about it.
I also think that the development of the
world-wide anti-war movement has had a knock on effect in
other areas. The back of this whole project for a New American
Century is economic. Why was it then the World Trade
Organisation was not able to reach any conclusion at its
recent Cancun meeting? What is it that despite 30 years of
pressure to divide up the Third World countries and their
trade relationships and to get through the Urugay round and
all the other rounds of GATT and later the formation of the
World Trade Organisation that they failed at the last hurdle
at Cancun. This was after the Western countries had withdrawn
the tabled resolution which allowed 100 percent of return of
profits from foreign companies investing in Third World and
preventing nationalisation of any overseas assets. They
withdrew all that but they still could not get the resolution
on food dumping through. The talks collapsed because of China,
India and Brazil who stood together and presented a united
front. And the European Union and the USA could not stand up
against that.
That in my view was in part the product of
the anti-war movement and the growing realisation on the part
of many people in the West that the world simply cannot go on
either playing poodle to the United States military ambitions
or living in such an unsustainable way and ending up with the
disparities of wealth and power that we have in this world.
Much of what has happened has been very
encouraging in the development of the anti-war movement and
the development of a growing political consciousness. That has
been fantastic.
What is also interesting is the way in
which modern information and media has changed. As a young
person I strongly opposed the Vietnam War and was involved in
the anti-war movement. I did not really know a lot about
Vietnam. It was very difficult to find anything out. I
remember a man coming round from the anti-Vietnam War campaign
to my house and giving me some newspapers with some
information. The level of information was very, very low
compared to what we have now. Now I meet school kids in
parliament square who have been through the internet and know
a great deal about this. Internet access is not equal around
the world but there is an opportunity to understand far more
about cultural diversity and challenge the media perceptions
about the war.
I power of the media is very important. I
am sure you watched a great deal of media during the war
itself and watched the different forms of presentation of this
conflict. I had various parts of Al Jazeera translated to me,
I watched some American channels as well as others. What
struck me about the American channels was the sense of
cultural arrogance, that somehow the USA had the right to go
to war because these were backward, uncivilised people who did
not know any better. No sense of understanding of the history
of Islam, the history of Mesopotamia, the huge achievements of
the civilisation of Babylon of all the learning that went with
it. There were universities in the 8th century in
Baghdad, quite a long time before Harvard was founded. There
was a lot of cultural arrogance in the America. It was not so
true of BBC reporting.
That partly backfired because the anti-war
movement were able to put across a more logical, intelligent
position.
So where do we go from here? Sometimes I
feel very depressed that we come from a country that has gone
into war, that Tony Blair has taken us into war. But things
must be changing if the Prime Minister thinks he can get out
of a political hole by setting up a commission of inquiry
about what happened to Dr Kelly. The commission then promptly
summons him to give evidence to the commission. It hasn’t
reported yet. In a sense the results of the Hutton Inquiry are
not important. The fact that it was held at all is an
indication of the strength of the opposition to the war in
this country, the sense of unpopularity that Blair has and the
pressures he is under in the Labour Party are a result of
that.
I hope that the anti war movement goes
from strength to strength. We recognise that political change
to what happens in Iraq is very fundamental to the whole
region. If Iraq becomes a vassal state with a government
appointed by the USA to pump out the oil to Israel and be a
standing example to the rest of the world of what happens if
you fall foul of US interests the US will have gained
something – they would have become a threat by example. But if
the opposite happens and the US position in Iraq either
becomes too expensive or untenable for them and different
political forces arise which will control the country not in
the interests of the USA but show it is possible to create
something different, that would be a very important message
to the whole region.
I don’t know how
this is going to pan out. I follow and read very carefully
what Robert Fisk and others say will happen in Iraq but two
things come through: one is that the American invasion was
brutal, destructive and very damaging. Secondly that the US
forces were not overwhelmingly popular and welcomed in Iraq
and thirdly many of those people who would have opposed the
Saddam Hussein regime with its brutality are equally opposed
to what the US is doing within that region. I think it is very
important we try to understand something about the politics of
that region. Great empires eventually suffer from problems at
home and watching the run-up debate to the US presidential
elections and seeing democrat candidates all bar won actually
voting for the war now pretending they never did vote for the
war. Now they are trying to garner support on the basis of
pulling the US out of Iraq. Now we have to make sure that we
don’t indulge in anti-Americanism in terms of being anti the
American people. There are peace groups and leftist groups in
the USA that are trying to put forward some kind of rational
alternative. There are signs of a great deal of hope in all
that. The past two years have been an absolutely fascinating
time politically and not without a great deal of achievement
and a great deal of hope. I never thought I would see a
million people in Hyde Park – for me that was one of the best
moments of my life.
* Jeremy Corbyn has been a Labour MP for
Islington North since 1983 with a majority of 12,958 at the
2001 election. He is also Vice Chair of the Parliamentary
Human Rights Group, Chair of Liberation, the anti-imperialist
anti-racist organisation, steering committee of Stop the War.
His national profile is based on action against poverty and in
support of social security, environmental and human rights
questions at home and internationally. As a member of the
National Council of CND Jeremy Corbyn has spoken at and
attended human rights and peace conferences including Beijing,
New Delhi and UN/Geneva. He has had significant involvement in
campaigning against miscarriages of justice, e.g. Birmingham
Six, Guilford Four and Bridgewater Three. Since September 11th,
Jeremy has spoken at anti-war meetings relentlessly in the UK
and abroad. He has also attended the UN Human Rights
Commission in Geneva regularly.. | 
