Nox Magazine column

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After the unleashing of some genuine democratic forces in the Arab world, George Galloway cautions the US to stay away

The Bush/Blair "great war for democracy" has just suffered a serious reversal thanks to a sudden outbreak of, well, democracy. It's left headline writers on both sides of the Atlantic terribly confused. You only needed to glance at events in Beirut at the start of this month to have some sympathy with their plight. There were hundreds of thousands of Lebanese on the streets, mobilised outside of state structures in protest at a government that has lost whatever scintilla of credibility it might once have possessed.

Thousands of protesters camped out in the centre of the city. Everywhere there were Lebanese flags. The air was thick with energetic chants and impassioned speeches. Yet, at the time of writing, no PR hack at the US State Department had come up with a snappy epithet to describe this manifestation of popular power; you know the kind of thing - something like "Cedar Revolution". And I assure you no such soubriquet will be forthcoming from Washington. Instead, all the guff that accompanied the carefully orchestrated protests in March of last year has been turned into the complete opposite.

Despite the fact that Michel Aoun, and with him a considerable number of Christians, joined the protests, the Western media, almost without exception, both downplayed the numbers taking part and gave every impression that they were purely from the Shia segment of Lebanese society. Instead of paeans to popular protest, CNN was full of pundits warning of mob rule and proclaiming the sanctity of the Siniora government. And missing from the babbling heads was any recognition that Israel's defeat in Lebanon this summer has changed everything - and changed it utterly.

There is a renewed aspiration in Lebanon for precisely the independence the pseudo-Jacobins of last year's Cedar (aka Gucci) "Revolution" claim they stand for. But in this case it is independence from the true mischief-maker in the Middle East - the US and its client Israel. That resurgent hope is not restricted to Lebanon. For Britain and the US, the Iraq disaster unfolding on a daily basis illustrates the limits of their power. So, too, are the continuing inroads made by the radical left much nearer Washington - in Latin America.

The extraordinary third electoral triumph by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela shows how the popular movement unleashed by Fidel Castro half a century ago is again on the streets - marching, in a reversal of the pattern of the 1980s, this time through big victories and only small defeats. In what could prove a deadly blow to the US's world position, the developments in Latin America are commingling with those in the Middle East.

It was Hugo Chavez who won a place in the hearts of tens of millions of Arabs when he withdrew the Venezuelan ambassador to Israel over the summer in protest at the invasion of Lebanon. It was the great black consciousness leader Steve Biko who taught us that the "most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed". For the long suffering people of the Middle East, and for those who stand in solidarity with them, the greatest danger today is not to sense that the tide has turned and must now be taken at the flood.

You can read Galloway's monthly column in Nox Magazine here: www.nox-mag.com/web/noxweb/gallowayupdate.html

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[mickyv]

Interesting mag, wonder if it's available as a PDF download somewhere ?

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[nekokate]

Look at those eyes! *faints*

[IRiSHMaFIA]

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Writing moments after Saddam’s execution, George passes sentence on Western hypocrisy

The death penalty upon Saddam Hussein has been greeted with a frenzy of comment – heavy on cliché, light on explanation. Those who attempted an explanation risked being traduced as apologists for mass murder. I declare an interest. I met Saddam Hussein twice, precisely the same number of times as the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The difference is that he was meeting him to sell arms, the means of making chemical weapons and the satellite images the better to aim them: I met Saddam in 1994 and 2002 in an effort to avoid war and bring an end to murderous sanctions.

There’ll not be much remarking upon Rumsfeld’s visits over the coming days and weeks, and the reason is not hard to fathom. It is the same reason why Saddam’s trial, appeal and sentencing have been so rushed. Any trial to answer charges of, for example, gassing the Kurdish village of Halabja in March 1988 would ineluctably implicate the governments of the US, Britain, Germany and others which were complicit in that crime. I remember that atrocity well. All 72 Scottish MPs at the time were invited to attend a rally in Glasgow to protest at the massacre. I was the only one to turn up.

In any case, with every day of the trial Saddam succeeded in stacking up the charge sheet against his accusers. That’s why the judges were changed until the verdict could be relied upon, why his legal team was harassed and assassinated and why there was a 20 minute delay between events in the courtroom and what was broadcast – the most damning glaring holes in the prosecution were excised.

Despite the moves to draw a veil of ignorance over events in Iraq over the three decades Saddam was in power, the awkward little facts won’t go away. I recall in 2002 appealing to Saddam to invite in Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors who had been withdrawn at the behest of Bill Clinton in 1998. He looked me directly in the eye and said, “We don’t have any weapons of mass destruction. I am telling you in all honesty – we don’t have any.” It turns out that the “evil despot” was telling the truth about that, and that Bush and Blair were not. Yes, there are a great many facts that Washington and London vainly hope will be buried with Saddam.

It is testimony to the calamitous Bush/Blair policy that they have succeeded in awaking among such people warm memories of life under Saddam compared with the hell that is Iraq today. That blunder is compounded many times over by the decision to execute him. In the minds of Iraqis and Arabs – for it is they who were his audience – Saddam’s call for national unity behind his “sacrifice” in the execution chamber will evoke the words, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.”

With each day the passes the full magnitude of this folly will become clear. Already it has brought about what Ayatollah Khomeini failed to: a pivotal role for Iran in the south of Iraq and by extension into the rest of the region. Could it possibly achieve what Saddam so dismally failed to in life – his status as an Arab hero?

It would be perverse. But in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. There are already many Arabs, ruled by blind tyrants, who say that Saddam at least had one eye. All that should concentrate the minds of the Iraqi functionaries who are sheltered in the Green Zone, revelling in Saddam’s fate. His death will bring no respite in the violence sweeping Iraq. It will fan it further. His execution will not be the last.

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A bit late in posting this, but there you go... I'd imagine the next issue isn't far off.

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Like the US media, George is gearing up for the next race for the White House. Barack Obama is already a man to watch

The absurdly neo-conservative Fox News has started its campaign for the 2008 presidential election; in its sights is the junior senator for Illinois. Mark my words, this man Barack Obama is a star to watch. Rupert Murdoch’s sewer of choice certainly thinks so: during a recent piece on the Democratic Party hopeful it flashed up his name as Barack Osama. No prizes for guessing what this heavy-handed subliminal message was designed to convey.

Obama himself graciously accepted that the change in his family name had occurred in error – though, as he pointed out, “s” and “b” are not easily mistaken on the English typewriter keyboard. Less egregiously than Fox News, the American media has relished in pointing out that Obama’s middle name is Hussein. When I mentioned on my weekly radio show my hope that Obama might go the full mile and reach the White House, several listeners phoned in to wonder aloud whether an assassin’s bullet might intervene before then.

It is a chilling and ghoulish thought. But it’s not groundless. Between 1962 and 1968 four outstanding young American leaders – two of them scions of the Democratic Party – were gunned down. John F Kennedy, then the two great black leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, finally Robert Kennedy.

There was something of the spirit of change and optimism epitomised by the 1960s in the mesmerising speech Obama made to the Democratic Party convention. Now don’t get me wrong: I am less than enamoured of the Democratic Party. I regard their winning seats in the mid-term elections last November as a necessary concomitant to George Bush losing them, which was the actual cause of celebration throughout so much of the world.

The Democratic Party, at its core, remains as hostile to justice for the Palestinians as the Republicans, even though it lacks the extreme Bible-belt fundamentalists. This isn’t because of some mythical “Jewish control”. It is because the Democrats are a thoroughly establishment US party and the American state backs Israel because Israel does the US’s bidding, not the other way round.

That said, only the most extreme dogmatist would say that the outcome of internal US political contests has no impact on what US does externally. Any US administration would have lashed out violently in response to an attack such as 11 September 2001. But it came as a gift to the neo-conservatives who harboured dreams of imposing Florida-style, corporate-friendly “democracy” throughout the Middle East.

But had Al Gore been president, I don’t believe we would be facing quite the catastrophe we are now. Even if he had felt pressured to go down the neo-con route, his election would have galvanised at least to the same measure those who in the US who want it to be a force for peace and co-operation.

The same is definitely true of Obama. The buzz around him – especially among African- and Arab-Americans – is not only about him, it is about a thirst for change, about the fulfilling of what the great Harlem poet Langston Hughes called “a dream deferred”. And because the forces of darkness want to extinguish that hope, those who want justice and peace should seek to fan its flames, wherever they might be.

Read George Galloway's exclusive colmun every month in NOX.


www.nox-mag.com

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that wasn't me who wrote "colmun" btw!

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Tony Blair’s decision to withdraw British troops from Iraq maybe a sign of positive moves. But signs are all they are

In a carefully choreographed announcement, Tony Blair apparently told the British public that 1,500 troops were to be withdrawn from Iraq. Except… that turned out not to be the whole story. Or, indeed, the story at all – which ought not surprise anyone, given Blair’s increasingly distant relationship with the truth. All Blair did was to reaffirm the government’s position that the number of troops might be reduced “as circumstances on the ground permit”. And patently the conditions in Iraq are very far from those that could conceivably be claimed to be such that the Anglo-US invasion may be judged a success.

It is a sign of the visibly loosening grip of Downing Street on British politics that the day after the non-announcement the true news that Prince Harry was heading out to Iraq – when we were meant to be disengaging – as a British army officer overshadowed Blair’s spin. Then came further news that an additional 1,000 British troops are on their way to Afghanistan, which is already a more dangerous place for the British forces than southern Iraq. They will arrive there just in time for a “spring offensive” by what the media here keeps calling the Taliban, but what is in fact merely a semi-organised section of the Afghan population.
How light-mindedly does this government ignore the lessons of history. It was Robert Peel who, as prime minister in the first Anglo-Afghan war in 1839-42, presided over the first disaster suffered by the British army in a land that resisted being conquered by Alexander the Great. Blair has authored the fourth British disaster in Afghanistan.

And still he and his ministers hubristically press on – none more so than Margaret Beckett. Not since Caligula appointed his horse a senator of Rome has there been such an incongruous elevation of a politician as her rise to foreign secretary. Within minutes of the leaders of Hamas and Fatah agreeing to form a coalition government in the Palestinian Authority, Beckett announced that the British government would not recognise the new formation – before any response from Washington or even Tel Aviv.

I have seen so much from British governments to make my stomach turn – but this is surely amongst the worst: a British Labour foreign secretary out-Likuding the Likud, more aggressive in its denunciation of an elected Palestinian government than the neo-conservatives in Washington.

There is something crazed, something delusional about all of this. The same people who are busy crushing the democratically elected government of Palestine are busy trying to convince us that they are occupying Iraq and war-gaming against Iran in the name of “democracy”. This is cutting little ice in the Middle East and I have to tell you it is increasingly being discounted in Britain too.

I have never known a time when the institutions of the British state were held in such contempt by the mass of the people as now. I do not hesitate to broadcast this fact to all who will listen. In fact, it is vital to the wellbeing of my countrymen that as many people as possible in the Middle East and elsewhere know that the British government is hated at home.

It poses the question of what they intend to do about it. People on the receiving end of British guns might accept once that they are not aimed in the name of the majority of people in my country. But if the majority keeps quiet and allows its leaders to continue such carnage, for how long will the suffering not implicate all of us in the crimes our state is committing?

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Last March signalled the four year anniversary of the US misadventure in Iraq. A fifth year can bring only more tragedy

As we enter year five of the catastrophic war and occupation in Iraq, the authors of the tragedy are engaging in an extraordinary attempted sleight of hand. It’s at its most developed in the US but has echoes in Britain. I noticed it most recently while addressing students at one of those lesser private schools that clearly has an inferiority complex. A surprising number of pupils wanted to talk about the conflict in Darfur.

In the US, pro-Israeli and other lobbying groups have paid vast sums for an advertising campaign highlighting the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan. The propaganda offensive is light on facts, and deliberately so. Those who excoriate the government of Sudan and wrongly talk of genocide in Darfur are very happy that very many people in Britain and the US believe the conflict there is between Christians and Muslims, or between Arabs and Africans, or Sunnis and Shi’ites. In fact all Darfurians are Sunni Muslim and all Sudanese are African.

I often get callers to my radio show who are shocked when confronted by the facts: that there is a civil war in Darfur with very old roots and that the force fighting the central government is itself Islamist. Other facts are that, according to UN figures, 200,000 people have been killed in the Darfur conflict since 2003 and two million have been forced to flee as refugees.

It’s an appalling level of suffering, but it is not on the same scale as what the occupiers have done to Iraq, the occupiers who so-called muscular liberals would like to see extending their boot print into Darfur. Iraq has the worst refugee crisis in the world. The UN High Commissioner estimates that two million Iraqis have fled the country, mainly to Jordan and Syria. A fifth of the population of Damascus is now Iraqi. A further 1.9 million have fled from their home to another area within Iraq. That is one in six of the population who have been driven out.
As for the number of dead, the world-renowned British medical journal The Lancet published a study that said the most likely figure for the number killed in Iraq between the invasion and June of last year – nine months ago – is 655,000. There has been the usual cavilling from the dwindling band of supporters of the war, but no one has seriously challenged the study’s legitimacy. And ask yourself, who is more credible as a master of
the science of medical statistics, the editor of The Lancet or George Bush?

That the most obscene warmongers of our age are trying to wrap their aims in a shroud of humanitarianism is testament to the strength of the anti-war movement. But it also points to the need for the movement against war to maintain and develop a hard anti-imperialist core. Some audiences in Britain find what I have to say on this difficult, but a surprising number readily agree: the blunt fact is that no one, least of all god, gave us in Britain the job of going around the world sorting out other people’s countries. That is a job principally for the people in those countries and secondarily for neighbouring people and states who can have some claim to act for the common good.

That’s the last thing that Britain under Blair can claim. There was a brief moment between the end of the Empire and now when Britain did have some standing in the world. That has gone. It won’t return until the new imperialist pretensions in the British establishment are torn out from the roots.

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I forgot to check for updates on this earlier, so these are March and April's issues...

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The capture of British troops in the Persian Gulf by Iran shocks the Western World – they were treated well and then released

"I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.” Those words attributed to the Duke of Wellington, describing his own soldiers, have long expressed the self-confidence and pride of the British armed forces. I wondered, last month what Arthur Wellesley the first Duke of Wellington, would have made of another Arthur serving in Britain’s armed forces, Arthur Batchelor. He was one of the 15 British personnel captured by Iranian forces in the Gulf, and the one who, back in Britain, described the fiendish tortures he was subjected to by the Iranian regime.

The perfidious Persians took the poor lad’s iPod away and compared him to Mr Bean so incessantly that this representative of Her Majesty’s navy broke down in tears. He was so traumatised that the first thing he did was sell his story to a down-market tabloid for $60,000. I have laboured through Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, von Moltke and other martial classics but, alas, I can find no reference to this fearsome manoeuvre – “the Mr Bean offensive”. Now that the secret is out, however, those confronting Britain’s forces in the region know that all they have to do is hurl childish insults and Britannia’s guns will fall silent.

Of course, I am certainly not the only one to have reached for the stock English response of sardonic humour in the face of the fiasco of the 15 captives. The entire affair is a national humiliation, and has rudely deflated the last pretensions of imperial power – which were very much in evidence when the commander of the sailors’ mothership, HMS Cornwall, declared the Iranian forces had captured his men “in our waters”. Whether Iraqi or Iranian waters, the Arabian Gulf or the Persian, one fact is beyond dispute – these are not British waters.

When they get back to Britain, we are told that behind the joking, smiles, table-tennis games, sweetmeats served on fine china and Muslim hospitality, the British were “tortured”, two newspapers paying over $200,000 to publish the stories of two of the captives. The cheques were signed on the day that the bodies of four British soldiers killed west of Basra were returned to their grieving relatives. Thankfully, most British people say they think the captives were lying when they describe the torture at the hands of the Iranians.

Jingoists in Britain started to beat the drum of war against Iran over the crisis, many in the gutter press. But the more they roared, the more they announced their impotence. For what this fiasco has shown is twofold: first, if history repeats itself first time as tragedy and second time as farce, then the “Mr Bean 15” are the farcical echo of that moment in 1956 when Britain’s imperialists suffered the humiliation at Suez; second, it underscored to any who might somehow not yet have noticed the premier result of Anglo-US policy towards Iraq and the Middle East over these last few years.

Washington and London have unwittingly helped transform Iran into a regional power – stronger within its own borders, despite the US sponsoring Jihadist groups against it; stronger in Iraq than at any time for a quarter of a millennium; stronger in the Gulf; and stronger on a world stage, so much so that the considered opinion of every serious analyst and news organisation from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur is that Tehran bested London in the war of words last month.

A mountain of dead in Iraq, an Iran unbound – look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

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quite a good one I thought

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The attacks on the Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon shows that Arab unity has never been more vulnerable
June 2007
Are honourable Arabs forever to sit back while the Palestinian people are made the whipping boys of the entire Middle East? The images of the assault on the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon have left my cheeks burning with tears of rage, grief and almost despair – I say “almost” because it would be purely self indulgent to allow yourself to slip into deadening despair.

Let’s deal first with the specious argument that a shockingly large slice of Lebanese political opinion bought into to justify the murderous assault on the refugee camp. It is true that the Lebanese army came under considerable provocation from the small, and hitherto largely unknown, Fatah al-Islam group. In the motion I tabled in the British House of Commons I acknowledged the sacrifice the army had made. But in no way can that vindicate the shelling of the camp followed by the denial of aid to those left trapped there.

The Islamist Fatah al-Islam organisation has nothing to do with the Palestinians. In fact, it used the Nahr al-Bared camp as cover. As a Lebanese friend of mine put it, the shelling of the camp was the equivalent of responding to a plane hijacking by blowing up the aircraft, killing all the passengers. The scale and duration of the fighting is ominous. It points to the involvement of those forces who are happy to see Lebanon used to further undermine Arab unity. Already there are the usual bellicose voices in the West calling for the attack on Nahr al-Bared to be followed by moves to forcibly disarm “more substantial armed groups”. They have in mind the mass resistance forces, including Hezbollah, which inflicted such a heavy defeat on Israel last summer.

Talk of disbanding Hezbollah by force is foolish daydreaming. But it ought to remind everyone who the ultimate targets are in this sickening episode in the north of the country. The imperialist forces, and their allies in Israel, have suffered a string of setbacks – from the failure of the invasion of Lebanon last year through the disaster of the occupation of Iraq to the unintended consequence of strengthening the Islamic Republic of Iran throughout the region. They are responding with a series of cynical ploys aimed at recovering lost ground. The destabilisation of Lebanon is one. It comes with the absurd, ritual refrain: “Damascus must be to blame”.

The fomenting of sectarian division between Sunni and Shia in Iraq and elsewhere is another. Washington’s regional proxies are spreading the poison that it is necessary for the Sunni Arabs to stand with the Pentagon in the face of the Shia Persians. Does anyone imagine that the US is acting in the interests of Arabs in its confrontation with Iran? The third panel of this unholy triptych is the attempt to tear the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank asunder. The renewed stoking of conflict between legitimate sections of Palestinian society cannot be separated from the wider divisions being prised open in the region.

The hero Marwan Barghouti has issued a call on behalf of all the Palestinian political prisoners for unity among the patriotic forces in Palestine against Zionist aggression. There is time yet for honourable Arabs, particularly the young, the educated, the idealistic, to adopt Barghouti’s words and amplify them from Beirut to Basra. It is only by resolving to act that it is possible to refuse despair. As the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who knew a thing or too about fighting colonialism and imperialism, put it: “For the only true prophets are they who carve out the future which they announce.”

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Tony Blair may have finally relinquished control of the British Government, but his legacy as a neo-con imperialist remains
July 2007

"The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do let us reorder this world around us....” Those words were chilling enough when Tony Blair uttered them at the Labour Party’s annual conference a month after the 11 September attacks in 2001. Time has not dulled their demonic glare. This course had been laid down well before George Bush stole the US presidential election. Speaking in 1999, Blair chided the Americans not for stomping around the globe: “Americans are too ready to see no need to get involved in the affairs of the rest of the world… The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts.”

Thus was born his doctrine of “humanitarian interventionism”. Or rather, it was the rebirth of the discredited dogma of liberal imperialism that blighted relations between the West and the East from the late 19th century. Even the constant refrain of modernisation and markets was an echo of the British Empire; just like Sykes and Balfour, Blair understood that open markets for the great economic powers depended on the deployment of military might and the redrawing of lines on the map.

Some rather odd commentary has attended Blair’s departure from office in London. One theme was to bemoan the fact that the folly of Iraq had killed the policy of humanitarian interventionism – as if liberal interventionism is somehow separable from the Iraq disaster. The reality is that Iraq is not an aberration. And the failure of the US and Britain in Iraq is not unique either. The new and deadly twist in the suffering of the Palestinian people is a direct product not only of the West’s craven support for Israel, but also of its response to Palestinians people voting for Hamas. The people were not to be trusted with democracy.

Instead, it was yet more sanctions until the wayward inhabitants placed themselves under the watchful eye of Washington. The result is appalling suffering in Palestinian society, to be sure, but it has also been another own-goal for Israel and its imperialist backers. The discredited Abbas hasn’t emerged as the dominant force – despite money and arms from the US. The enemies of Palestinian aspirations are doing their best to shore up Abu Mazen, but its lifespan under the constitution is only 30 days before it must be renewed by a two-thirds majority of a parliament – where Hamas is a majority. Even the most deluded soul must accept there can be no settlement without Hamas.

Delusion brings us back to the war criminal Blair. His apologists claim in mitigation that he genuinely believed in what he did. In fact, that aggravates the crime. He pressed on to disaster – over the corpse of international law left unburied on the fields of Kosovo – against all advice and argument. This is Blair’s lasting legacy. Where the Victorian imperialists sustained their fantasy for three generations or more, the neo-conservatives’ and Blair’s has come crashing down in half a decade.

In my first NOX columns, I wrote how the writing was on the wall for Bush, Blair and the crazed worldview they embody. A friend pointed out an additional meaning: In biblical tradition, Daniel interprets the mysterious writing on the wall at King Belshazzar’s feast. The message of doom is that “your kingdom will be divided and given to the Persians”. It is the supreme irony of Blair’s imperialism that it has helped make Iran, a country the West has sought to suborn, weaken and isolate, top dog in Iraq with powerful friends in Lebanon and Gaza.

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Our columnist is suspended from Parliament – not for doing anything wrong, but for saying he didn’t a little too forcibly
August 2007

"It was like a scene from Kafka’s The Trial, when the hero Joseph K was forbidden to speak in his own defence. In my case the chairman of the proceedings – the Speaker of the House of Commons – while promising to afford me every protection, in fact intervened no less than 17 times to protect my accusers. You see, it is an offence punishable by instant banishment to stand up in the British Parliament and accuse one of its committees of double standards. I dared to call the Committee which had overseen a monstrous investigation into me the Committee of Double Standards in Defence of Privilege.

Mild stuff, you might think. Not so the thin-skinned parliamentarians. No one watching it could have come away with anything other than a deeper contempt for the Parliament, which styles itself the zenith of democracy, the model for the poor benighted Orientals. That Westminster has fallen into such disrepute is not my doing, but it is the responsibility of those who have sought to preserve in aspic the organised hypocrisy that now mires its proceedings.

For that is what my suspension from the House amounts to. The 10 MPs on the Committee admitted in the course of their report into my charity, the Mariam Appeal, which was set to help the Iraqi victims of sanctions, that my suspension was not for wrong-doing on my part, but because I had the temerity to defend myself robustly. That amounted to insubordination, indeed insolence. They operate on that class-based mentality – displayed with cruel abandon in Britain’s colonies – which simply cannot understand how their “inferiors” could answer back. Well, just as Britain’s former colonial subjects gave the stiffs in pith helmets a rude awakening, so the MPs who authored the report into me have had something of a shock.

It might have seemed like a good idea at the time to suspend from the pro-war British Parliament its best known anti-war voice, but it has turned into a colossal own-goal. I have been inundated with letters and emails of support which go way beyond those who might be described as my natural supporters. There is a rich seam of people in Britain who are saying that while they don’t often agree with me, they are outraged that I should be suspended from Parliament.

They invoke the notion of a British sense of fair play to slam the hypocrisy of the main parties which are happy to take money from all and sundry – without asking where it came from – but which condemn me for not interrogating the donors to the Mariam Appeal campaign. Hands up. I did not ask the King of Saudi Arabia or the late Emir of UAE from which part of their considerable fortune they donated to the campaign. I was just grateful that they did. My only regret is that we were not successful in lifting the sanctions against Iraq.

I am very proud of my role in this whole Iraq affair. The same cannot be said by the majority of MPs who voted for this appalling slaughter. This latest report into me is the last. The witchhunt has run its course. For sure, they have done some damage – there are always some people who will be happy to believe the worst about me because they cannot abide my stand over the Middle East and my implacable opposition to Israel.

But the damage to me has been slight – insignificant compared with the damage inflicted on Iraq and the wider region. And that is something that is not going to go away. Nor is my determination – shared by many tens of millions – to bring those responsible for the tragedy to account

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Our columnist assails the prevailing imperialist idealogies in Washington and London

Not since Dorothy waltzed down the Yellow Brick Road has such a fantastical tale come out of Kansas as George Bush’s speech last month. The imbecilic US president compared Iraq with Vietnam. The beginnings of wisdom, you might think. Well, here’s what he had to say: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields’.”

“Millions of innocent citizens” were thrown into the pit of agony because the US left Vietnam? What a monstrous inversion of the truth. Millions of Vietnamese were killed or maimed on account of that occupation and war. Millions more suffered from the poison which was pumped into the country’s rainforests and rivers in the form of napalm and the like.

As for the killing fields, so unforgettably revealed by the peerless John Pilger, these were the product not of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, but of its destruction of Cambodia and then support for the butchers of the Khymer Rouge on the principle of my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

This is a desperate throw of the dice by Bush in the dying days of his administration to stretch out the surge of troops into the New Year, no matter what the cost. It means, strategically, that the pressure that can be brought to bear now to force the British government to pull out of the south of the country is critical. That is going to be a focus in Britain this autumn for all who have opposed this war.

In upping the pressure for swift withdrawal from Iraq, we are also confronting another argument which has been with us since 2001, but has for most of that time been overshadowed by Iraq. It is that the Afghan war – the precursor to the Iraq disaster – was in some way justified and that the occupation of Afghanistan is somehow a kinder, gentler, more humanitarian occupation.

Some of those establishment figures who want to bring our beleagured forces out of Iraq want to fling them into the hellfire of Helmand Province. They are casually informing us that “we could be in Afghanistan for decades”. We are being soft-pedalled into an escalating involvement in a country we have attempted to occupy three times before in British history.

On each occasion we have been driven out – in one case suffering one of the worst disasters ever to befall Britain’s armed forces. It’s not surprising when you consider that every other attempted occupation of Afghanistan has failed – from Alexander the Great onwards. Britain’s part-time Defence Secretary, Des Browne, is no Alexander the Great.

Back in Palestine, we have the scandal of the British government banning the Palestinian under-19 football team from coming to play a series of games. As if the reputation of Albion were not perfidious enough! I’ve written to the Foreign Secretary David Milliband urging him to reconsider.

Having already helped to author the Palestinian tragedy, does Britain really need to add double standards to the charge sheet? The Israeli football team was due here just weeks after this ban on the Palestinian youngsters, who no longer have a stadium in Gaza after it was blown up by Israel.

The Palestinians were due to play against Blackburn Rovers – the team Jack Straw took Condoleezza Rice to see. Just how steeped in hypocrisy do we want to be? The only positive thing that has come out of this spiteful, hypocritical ban on the Palestinian footballers is that the plight of Palestine is now reaching a wider audience in Britain.

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Religious protestors seeking an end to oppression are just fine when they’re Burmese Buddhists – and not Muslim mullahs

There was a revealing reaction in the Western media to the protests by Buddhist monks in Burma, which were taking place as I wrote this column. Strongly religious men taking to the streets in demonstrations designed to effect a change in political power.

Of course, if these were protesters pouring out of madrassas in the Middle East, Pakistan or elsewhere in the Muslim world you would be able to write the script in advance. They would be traduced in the tabloids as “mad Muslims” or agents of Osama bin Laden, while former leftists would be mangling the history of the European continent as they pronounced the need to defend what they claim to be secularism against the religious masses.

Yet the response to the saffron-clad monks taking to the streets of Rangoon and other Burmese cities at the end of last month was very different. Here were brave idealists, said the European media. And they were right about that. It’s just that they didn’t stop to ask themselves a number of questions. Why, for example, are Burmese religious protesters “brave idealists”, but religiously inspired Egyptian or Jordanian protesters described as fundamentalists who seek to destroy all freedom?

Why were the Burmese protests given such favourable coverage in the West while the repression of people’s protest in neighbouring Thailand – now under military rule like Burma – gets scarcely a mention? And are these Burmese generals who are coming in for criticism by the British media and government the same Burmese generals who successive British governments were prepared to sell arms, including torture equipment, to?

They are, for the ideologues of the new imperialism, uncomfortable questions. They are prepared to shed crocodile tears for those who have been beaten off the streets in Burma only because it suits their real politik calculations – despite all the neocon rhetoric of bringing democratic revolution to the world. Thailand remains firmly in the pro-US camp, so its generals get a green light for their coup and repression.

Burma was broadly pro-western and so its barbarous generals too were tolerated. Now, however, it is perceived to be something of an anachronism and possibly too close to the rising dragon of China for comfort. In addition, the main opposition in Burma has trimmed its sails, announcing that right at the centre of its programme is not radical social change to benefit the mass of Burma’s 53 million people, but a structural adjustment and privatisation programme that concords with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

And so we see the flurry of protests from European capitals about the repression in Burma. But that is far from the end of the story. The protesters in Burma are not limited in their aspiration by what appeals to international bankers. They want a democracy that is rich in content, not flat in form.

The extraordinary and wonderful feature of today’s world is that through email and mobile phone we have been able to see and hear the voices of a people on the streets. They are talking about a far more wide-ranging freedom than simply the election of a national assembly. All in all it’s not the kind of example that the West’s rulers would like to see deepened or extended.

I mean: imagine if there were to be similar scenes in Cairo, Amman… Riyadh. Who knows what might happen.