George Galloway - Morning Star articles

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Greeks beware of EU gifts
George Galloway
16 September 2011

It is three years since the masters of the universe at Lehman Brothers went supernova. The financial crisis unleashed then has morphed around the world and shows no sign of abating. Indeed the normally news-light summer months brought a slew of shocking surveys revealing falling business confidence, plummeting employment and economic activity from the US, through to Europe to Japan. Of the big zones of the world economy, only China showed a pulse.

Now we stand on the brink of further round of chaos and collapse. Talk of a double-dip or W-shaped recession is misplaced. We have had no recovery to speak of and instead have been locked into an L-shaped limbo for many months, shuffling towards another precipice.

The full scale of what lies in store is only beginning to register in the public consciousness. The riots last month were a foretaste of the social consequences of the slash-and-burn policies which Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are pursuing. Look to Latin America, Africa and Asia at so many points over the last 30 years and you see the effects of structural adjustment programmes designed to hammer public spending and squeeze the public as a whole in order to meet the insatiable appetite of private bankers. Put simply, people die - and more of them and younger.

And make no mistake - what is being imposed on Britain, Europe and elsewhere is a structural adjustment programme of that kind, not merely some unwelcome cuts that will be reversed after a few years of growth, for growth is the last thing that the austerity-mongers are talking about. To see where all this is leading, look at Greece. In the business section of the news broadcasts the economic data flashes across the screen and talking heads refer to "bond yields," "haircuts," "rescheduling" and an alphabet soup of international agencies and the latest European financial initiatives. Grey is the dismal science of economics. Blood red is the reality behind this blizzard of buzzwords.

Children returned to school in Greece last week. They are without textbooks - the education ministry does not have the money to print them - and soon many may be without teachers. The troika of the IMF, European Union and European Central Bank which is enforcing the savagery flounced out of Athens a few weeks ago saying that Greece had not slashed enough. The government swiftly announced the immediate sacking of 10,000 public-sector employees, with another 10,000 after, on top of the mass redundancies already underway. Pay for many households - not the shipping magnates and business elite, of course - has fallen 20 per cent.

Now, in another panic move to secure October's tranche of loans to stave off bankruptcy, the Greek government is imposing a €2 billion tax on housing. It is simply going to add the charge to household electricity bills. Greece has a state-owned electricity company that will cut off anyone who doesn't pay the tithe. It is of course a supreme irony lost on the free marketeers that they are demanding that that enterprise is privatised and broken-up, which had it already happened would now deprive the government of income and revenue-raising power.

Such ironies are built in to this Greek tragedy because the entire play is in the theatre of the absurd. The European elites seem surprised that by forcing Greece - and before it Ireland - to destroy large chunks of the economy, that the result has been a greater gap between government revenue and the amount it must spend, increasingly to the banks. But you don't have to be an economics Nobel laureate to know that if the economy shrinks, then the amount paid in tax goes down while the amount paid in welfare - minimal in Greece - and in debt repayments - huge - tends to go up.

Yet this kind of austerity dogma, which tipped the world into the Great Depression of the 1930s, is now being inflicted on Greece and here too. So obviously destructive are the results that doubts are expressed even among the partisans of capitalist globalisation. So US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently complained that too many governments, in Europe in particular, have lost faith in what he called traditional fiscal tools to deal with a slump, which means state spending and investment to counter the failure of businesses and households to borrow and spend.

His words would be more credible if the Obama administration were boldly doing that. Instead we have the woefully inadequate so-called jobs package. Some of it is for investment, which is more than can be said for any of Osborne's schemes, but most of it is to cut taxes on business. These are the very businesses which, despite record low interest rates, are refusing to invest, expand and employ. Instead they are stashing their money in the banks - about $2 trillion of it - from whence it ricochets from one commodity to another via gold, forex, oil, bets upon bets upon bets, and never finding its way into producing real things and employing real people.

I don't know if Obama will turn the corner and retain the presidency. That matters of course, but we already have the frightening spectacle of a White House enthralled to the Tea Party vandals, the Texacutioners, the Bachmanns and Palins. And so we have the further absurdity of endless summits and emergency meetings, each one hearing that the policies are driving the problems deeper and wider, and each sticking with the course, a little tinkering on the side - no U-turn, not one step back.

As what has already been called a depression threatens to gain a capital letter and become something akin to the Great Depression of the hungry '30s, so all the old filth is bubbling up from the sewer. We've already had two decades of intensifying hostility to Muslims and to immigrants in Europe. As the borders went higher around the continent, leaving desperate African migrants to be washed up on the tourist beaches of Tenerife, there was at least the faint consolation that they were coming down within Europe. Not now. Xenophobic nationalism is back within the EU itself.

It is not only the fascist and far-right populists who are promoting it. So too are those who claim that only austerity can save us, that more power must be centralised in the unelected bureaucracies who roll up into Athens and demand ever harsher measures, countersigning government Bills and decisions in a way that marks a dangerous curtailment of democracy.

Remember the European anthem played at the launch of the euro over a decade ago? Schiller's stirring words, "All men shall be brothers," rang out to Beethoven's immortal chords. Now the saviours of the euro talk of the Greeks and others in southern Europe as lazy, swindlers, irresponsible, not fit to run their own affairs. This from big business such as German-based Siemens, whose contracts took the lion's share of the largesse heaped upon the Athens Olympics, the biggest single source of public debt in Greece which the Greek people are still paying for.

For this is the nasty little secret of the whole euro enterprise. I have never been with the "little Englanders" or the narrow nationalists who look with contempt at our neighbours on the continent. What is not to like about the peoples from the Mediterranean to the Baltic? Who could be against the closer union of working people in a continent which bled two generations of their blood last century? But that was the last thing on the mind of the European elites.

They didn't want an entity that would be responsive to the popular will, redistributive from the very rich to the poor, capable of balancing out production and consumption across the continent so that rational investment decisions of the kind that are sorely needed now could be made by a benevolent public authority big enough to face down the men behind the bond and currency markets. They wanted to enforce the visibly failing free-market nostrums everywhere through a race to the bottom in which the most aggressive capitalists, mainly in the north of the continent, had a larger region to exploit.

Now it is crashing down. And it is the people - especially the most vulnerable and exploited - who are getting the blame. The fact that there are new scapegoats - Europe's Muslim communities, African migrants - has not taken the heat off the old ones. It must surely be the shrillest of alarms for anyone acquainted with 20th century history that Roma are being rounded up and expelled by public authorities, vilified by politicians and their camps burnt by racist thugs.

It's not only in Europe. The eviction of the traveller community at Dale Farm has been attended by an orgy of bigotry in the Daily Mail and elsewhere. Not everyone has joined in, by any means. It was a ray of light to see the Irish traveller participant Paddy Doherty win Celebrity Big Brother, demonstrating that public bigotry is not so overwhelming. But it is nothing short of sickening to read from Mencap and other charities that the press and politicians' lambasting of people on benefits is leading to rising levels of verbal and physical attacks on disabled people.

Those of us who count ourselves as on the left or progressive must set our face against all of this and at the same time embrace those who seek to come together and resist the economic onslaught, from protesters and occupiers in Greece to the unions in Britain who are standing up for dignity in retirement, not only for hard-pressed public servants but for the people as a whole.

And we must find ways to force some basic truths into the political sphere. We cannot cut our way out of a slump. Ending recession means growth, and that means investment. The state has printed vast amounts of money and is about to pump out more. It is sitting in the banks. If the captains of industry won't change course and invest, then the state must - not through PFI schemes and other privateers' scams, which merely hand the assets and the profits to those who will put them to no productive use. But through state enterprises, well run, responsive to the people, building homes, employing people, bringing hope and banishing the breeding grounds of hate.

It is not an easy task. The political class seem inured despite the dawning reality, just as they did at the beginning of the 1930s. But if the left does not make that case now, how will that ever change?

Don't let them get away with this crime
George Galloway
07 October 2011
morningstaronline.co.uk

Surveying the media on the 10th anniversary of the war on Afghanistan yesterday left little doubt - the war is lost, was ill-conceived and all that is left is to limit the damage. How different it all seemed a decade ago - the Taliban were routed, women's rights were coming to Afghanistan along with democracy and Kabul was to be redeveloped as the jewel in the crown of a country now rescued from decades of neglect and war.

Some of us said at the time that it was bunkum. We said it again five years ago when British forces were deployed in Helmand - to Helmand, of course, because the much-routed Taliban had regrouped across the Pakistan border and were now firing an insurgency across the south and east. We said it when US troops surged under Barack Obama, thus increasing many times over the number of Afghan doors that are kicked in each night leaving every occupant and their extend family even more embittered at the occupation.

Now it is echoed from the comment pages of every serious paper to the musings of diplomats and generals retired and serving. US General Stanley McChrystal now says that the US, Britain and its allies "had a frighteningly simplistic view" of Afghanistan and how things would turn out 10 years ago.

The US state under George Bush and Dick Cheney Cheney could be expected to hold such childish illusions. But in Britain, surely somewhere in the recesses of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office there was some collective memory or even folkloric wisdom about just how treacherous military adventures have turned out to be in Afghanistan and along the "North West Frontier"?

It seems that there was, according to a former British ambassador to Moscow earlier this week, who is the latest to reveal the forebodings at the time. But they were all brushed aside by the messia-maniac in Number 10 with the full support of the two other establishment parties - lest that be forgotten.

The results are there for all to see. Billions have gone into reconstruction alright but in Dubai with the greenbacks flown out daily from Kabul. The insurgency is growing, bringing gung-ho calls from US ambassador to Kabul Ryan Crocker for the Taliban to be made to suffer more before they see the value of negotiating. It would be laughable were it not for the tragedy of who is suffering.

Countless - or at least uncounted - Afghan dead and getting on for 3,000 dead for the US and its allies. At the time of writing 382 British forces personnel had been killed. More and more of their families and of those who have to serve in now extended tours of duty are asking, why? To that question comes the ugly management-babble answer - we must now look forward not back - we are where we are.

Let's leave aside the case that the anti-war movement made before the invasion that treating the criminal mass murder of 9/11 as a cause for a global "war on terror" would certainly bring widened war but would not end terror. Let's leave aside the alternatives at every stage over the last 10 years that might have left us somewhere other than where we are now.

Let's just look at where we are and where we are going. Because the frightening and deadly reality of the whole imbroglio is, when it comes to British public life, bathed in haze of chloroform. Few public figures speak of it, certainly not politicians.

When we do hear from the government and Her Majesty's Official Opposition it is usually to talk about progress in handing duties over to the Afghan security forces - the ones riddled with corruption, loyalties to rival warlords and who occasionally open fire on our troops - and always to emphasise that the whole thing will come to an end with the drawdown of troops in 2014. That is two bloody years away. More importantly, it is two years during which there is every indication that matters are going to get even worse.

Take the strategy of talks with the Taliban. The first problem is that US policy, divided along its own tribal/departmental lines, appears to be taking a tilt towards more and more "targeted assassinations" through the use of drone attack planes. The number of drone attacks on targets in Pakistan is increasing.

The assassination of a US-born al-Qaida figure in Yemen seems to have reinforced Obama's and the Pentagon's penchant for the weapon. But - and putting to one side the soaring civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a policy of taking out the hierarchy of your opponent cannot sit with seeking stable negotiations with them.

The Taliban and others who are fighting the occupation have responded likewise. No less than five of Hamid Karzai's top aides and negotiators have been assassinated in the last few months. The latest, Burhanuddin Rabbani was the warlord responsible for the execution of president Najibullah when Kabul fell to the US-backed obscurantists a decade and a half ago.

So it was little surprise that the clotheshorse kleptocrat Karzai announced a few days ago that he was no longer seeking talks with the Taliban. But it was to achieve those talks, we are told, that young people from our country have to go to kill and be killed in Afghanistan - there is no longer the pretence that this is about something called "victory."

The endgame seems further away than ever. Worse than that, the instability is spiralling outwards. It seems clear that the divisions in Washington over what to do about Pakistan are deepening. The Pentagon shot out a deafening blunderbuss last month claiming that Pakistan's ISI intelligence service was directly supporting the Haqqani network which spectacularly seized a tall building in Kabul and kept the US embassy under fire for 20 hours.

The already cool relations between Washington and Islamabad became glacial. They must now be heading to absolute zero at the news that India has signed a security and military agreement with Karzai, thus giving Pakistan's regional rival a foothold to its west and north.

Fanciful, was how Labour ministers responded when I and so very few others in parliament raised exactly this spectre of Afghanistan being turned into the epicentre of a regional power-struggle. We were moving towards and era of greater co-operation between states, you see, hampered only by residual anti-liberal, anti-modern ideologies - principal among them, given the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islamism.

Instead, what we are seeing in Afghanistan and across the globe is a resurgence of something just as much part of modern, liberal capitalism as the boom and bust cycle and class inequality - rivalry between competing nation-states economically and militarily.

The fact the US has declined as the global hegemonic power means that far from less rivalry, it is intensified as Washington attempts to shore up its position in the face of an economic balance that is shifting towards the east.

The local satraps jockey for position as the overall hierarchy can no longer be kept firmly in place by a weakened overlord. The Pakistani military, so long an American ally, from the days of the Baghdad pact on, now finds itself at loggerheads.

The US would like to draw back and reposition. The financial cost of these failed wars is now a serious factor in these straitened times. The Pentagon does not have infinite largesse - what it has it wants to focus in the Pacific to ensure that the system of power and states that was put in place at the end of the second world war remains in place, compensating with military bases and aircraft for rising Chinese trade and commercial influence.

So there are powerful pressures to withdraw. But on the other side is an increasingly vocal lobby that says, as so many generals before have cried, one more push, extend the front to the enemy across the border, give us just a bit more time.

How all of this plays out, nobody knows. What we do know is that it is playing out badly on every front. The seductive illusion in the media, in collusion with most the Westminster, is that despite the setbacks and disappoints, this is moving towards some kind of planned ending. It won't be perfect, they say; but then nothing ever is.

It is another great lie. They have no idea exactly where this is leading. They are battered by events. Every week that passes brings more problems and dangers.

And so the message from Trafalgar Square, where the anti-war movement is rallying today to mark the anniversary, must ring out over the months to come.

It is not only that we must get out of Afghanistan as a foolish and bloody catastrophe. It is that we must fight for a change of course. It is recognised - at least in rhetoric - that the economic model of the last 30 years has failed.

So too has the neo-imperialist model of the last 20 years. It is time to end it.

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I really can't be bothered with the appeals for the happiness of soldiers (they're hired thugs, fuck em), but the rest is good.

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Murder for dinner
George Galloway
16 October 2011
morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/110795

"It reads like a Hollywood film script," said FBI director Robert Mueller at the podium on the breakfast news unveiling what might be an Oscar winner in the Wag The Dog category. Iran, so it seems in the script, planned to blow up the Saudi ambassador to Washington in a restaurant frequented by US senators and scores of other diners. And it contracted - through an Iranian-US citizen who appears to have been convicted long before his presumably forthcoming trial and who was guided by a named "member of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard," - a Mexican drug cartel to do the job for just under £1 million.

Only the hired assassin was in fact an FBI operative, turned by them from his drug-dealing past into a sting operator. Thus the $100,000 down-payment the Iranian-US allegedly paid into the agent's bank account goes to the US Treasury to reduce President Obama's deficit. Which may of course be where it came from in the first place.

During my long years writing for Private Eye, the then editor Richard Ingram often used to opine as to whether or not a story had the "ring of truth." This one has more than a tinkle of falsehood. If Iran wanted to attack Saudi Arabia, which itself wants to "cut the head off the snake (Iran)," according to WikiLeaks, it could do so on its doorstep in Iraq or in the kingdom itself. And it could have chosen a more exalted target than the inconsequential commoner installed in Saudi Arabia's US embassy since the mysterious disappearance of its former occupant Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

He's the man George W Bush called "Bandar Bush," so close was he to the long-ruling family in the US. And it would surely have the means to carry out such an attack itself rather than hire a Mexican drug cartel which turned out not to be what it seemed. But if Iran, for reasons of deniability, wanted to appoint a proxy to carry out such an attack it would surely approach a proxy it knew something about rather than an undercover US policeman.

One scenario being advanced is that a rogue section of the Iranian regime might be involved, rather than Ahmedinijad himself. Equally plausible is that the rogue section lies within the US administration itself. Would the Iranian regime really be so stupid as to kill perhaps 100 diners, including US politicians, in the capital of their most threatening adversary? And for what? Who would benefit from such an act of mass murder and what would they gain? Who benefits in this story - Iran or those who wish to make war upon Iran and change its regime?

This mangy wag the shaggy dog story may well run out of the same trap as any one of a long line of FBI entrapment tales like the "Breaking News" plot by "al-Qaida" to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which started life on CNN as a Bin Laden plot but which turned out be the ravings of a mentally ill Muslim US citizen, set up to talk about such a plot by the FBI itself.

Or is it in the longer tradition of false flag operations that anyone who has read Graham Greene's Quiet American will recognise. The US has never shirked from even the crudest of such operations, from the Bay of Pigs and other Cuban adventures through the fake Gulf of Tonkin incident which was used to propel US forces into the disastrous quagmire of Vietnam.

This story does seem to mark a stepping up of US preparations for aggression against Iran, involving as it does the highest Washington officials in a claim which the gullible will regard as a legitimate casus belli. That includes the British government, which was quick to say that Iran must be held "accountable" for this alleged crime. After all, when George Bush Senior was held to be the victim of an assassination plot during a visit to Kuwait, it troubled few that a semen-stained Bill Clinton spilled the blood of innocents - including my friend Leila al-Attar, Iraq's pre-eminent woman painter - in both Iraq and at Sudan's pharmaceutical plant in al-Shiffa.

The clearly choreographed statements coming out of Riyadh within moments of the US Attorney General's press conference indicate a way in which this story could now unfold. The Saudi regime says that evidence of Iran's guilt in this plot is "overwhelming" and that action must follow. Notwithstanding the hundreds of billions of Saudi riyals spent on Western weaponry, the Saudis cannot hope to prevail in any action against Iran. But any action on which it did embark could swiftly bring in the US which has long been pledged to protect Saudi "security."

There is an Arabic saying, unique I think to Iraqis, which translated says: "You cannot hurt someone who is holding you by the balls." Iran is holding the US by the balls in Iraq and in the Gulf region as a whole. The destruction of the former regime in Iraq, as any half-informed observer must have known, could only have as one of its principal consequences, a surge in the power and influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran next door.

Frustration at this and at the losing battle in Iran's other neighbour Afghanistan may well have tipped the ailing and failing US administration of Barack Obama into a disastrous attempt to break the logjam. If it has, then they and us as their shoulder to shoulder ally may have plenty of cause to regret it. Iran is not Iraq in 2003, enfeebled by more than a decade of punishing economic sanctions, its regime isolated and hated. Iran is a strong country and whatever its internal divisions likely to unite overwhelmingly against any US aggression. And it has friends all over the region and the world. The capacity for blowback in such an aggression appears to be being disastrously "misunderestimated" as George W Bush would put it, in both Washington and London.

This hoary "restaurant plot" may tip us into a new cauldron in the Muslim world, containing a soup hotter than hell.

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I had no idea GG wrote for Private Eye - I'll need to see if I can find some old issues for scanning.

[Brown Sauce]

Didn't know exactly what the austerity measures are .. -

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Global leaders: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
Shakespeare would have had little difficulty in scripting the drama unfolding on the European and global stage.
George Galloway
votegeorgegalloway.com
13th November 2011

The troupe of players from the political class have their "entrances and exits" until they reach this latest scene: a "second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Toothless, wilfully blind, gaudy and impotent sums up the Cannes summit meeting of the richest 20 countries last week and the ongoing response of political leaders to the crisis engulfing the Eurozone and global economy.

Behind the talking heads and cliched headlines lies a barely spoken truth - the whole model of managing global capitalism of the last three decades is breaking down as the financial crisis unleashed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers three years ago morphs and mutates from one geographical or economic area to another. There is no end in sight.

In Europe, it is a 60-year compact among the elites at the expense of the peoples that is coming unstuck. Through the fraying seams are poking through monsters from the last century which we were told were safely shrouded and buried.

For while defanged when it comes to halting the crisis itself, big business and its acolytes across the establishment political spectrum have their claws out and sharpened, slashing into every gain working people have made since the hungry thirties.

Half of young people in Spain are unemployed. In Britain, it's already a record at one million and is set to rise much further, not least as the decades-long expansion of university education goes into reverse. Every aspect of life in Greece is already being lopped and squeezed. The predictable result according to the prestigious medical journal the Lancet is that people are dying, more of them and earlier.

The bail-out of Greece is anything but. It is like a payday loan of the type that more and more people in Britain are being forced into: witness the proliferation of loan-shark outfits popping up in abandoned shops on run-down High Streets across the country. No sooner is the money received at exorbitant interest rates than it is handed straight to corporate creditors and banks.

According to the plan for Greece - the plan, remember - the debt-burden is to rise to twice economic output as the austerity measures sink the country into deeper slump. In 10 years it's supposed to fall back to 120 percent. That's the level now in Italy, which has just put it at the eye of the storm. No wonder no one really believes the austerity plan will work, even in its own terms.

But still, like some demented general in the bloodbath of the First World War, they press on, hurling men, women, children and the social fabric over the top against the machine-guns of the markets. Perhaps in years to come they'll concoct an equivalent of the poppy to mark another fallen generation. The hypocrites and hirelings can wear it ever larger - maybe chrysanthemums for them.

And with the pain inflicted on the millions by the millionaires, come all the old elitism, scapegoating and chauvinism.

Instead of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian nuns, we have the despicable lie that the common people of southern Europe are cheating scroungers who have brought this all on themselves. Murdoch may be on the ropes, but this week Channel 4 stepped in, like a tag-team partner, to beat up on the suffering people of Greece. "Greek for a Week" could have bubbled up straight from the Wapping sewer. Its premise, never questioned, was that the average Greek is lazy, coddled by generous state provision and expecting handouts from the rest of us. Another feckless Johnny-foreigner.

In truth, Greeks are at the top of the European league table for working hours and at the bottom when it comes to pay. The people protected by the state are the oligarchs, the shipping magnates, media barons and associated bankers. Just like here really.

If anyone you know is tempted by this xenophobic drivel, remind them that welfare dependency and pampered public servants are exactly the insults hurled by the government and its friends here in Britain at disabled people and the unemployed, and at the nurses, hospital porters, school caretakers and hundreds of thousands of others who are set to strike later this month against a pensions robbery greater than anything even dreamt of by the unlamented Robert Maxwell of 20 years ago.

There are other similarities too, which any opposition worthy of the name would be skewering David Cameron on every day - kebab-style. The Greek oligarchs - the 1 percent who lord it over us - are not the wealth creators. They are sucking up everything they can and investing just 7 percent of national output back into the economy. The rest is being siphoned off and splashed out in the property market of London's Chelsea and the financial speculation which inflated this crisis in the first place.

That's exactly what the bankers and captains of industry are doing in this country. Investment in making real things, in infrastructure and in vital services has plummeted. Instead, we have more speculation and indulgence on everything from fine wine and property to currencies and lumps of precious metal - as the Christmas bonus bonanza in the City is about to show.

None of the right or centre-left parties, which have in effect converged in a fictitious consensus, are prepared so far to raise the prospect of using the power of government, which the bankers turned to when it came to bailing them out, to force this investment, and therefore economic growth, to take place. They refuse to impinge on the wealth monopoly of big business to invest in the interests of all.

On the contrary, to preserve the system that is failing, they are prepared to restrict our democratic rights in the interests of the 1 percent. We no longer have an elected prime minister in Greece, which was under dictatorship as late as 1974. We have a former central banker who has never been elected to anything. Soon, it seems, we may have a former European Union Commissioner as prime minister of Italy. The Italian president has just appointed Mario Monti a Life Senator (like a Lord without the ermine) so he can take the position. Nero, Caligula and an earlier phase of Roman history spring to mind.

What qualification do these "technocrats" have? They are architects of the very order that is collapsing, priests of the god that failed. They are wedded to the nostrums of austerity economics. In the eyes of the IMF/European Central Bank/European Union, they are as Thatcher used to say, people like us. Of course they have no democratic mandate at all. And that's another bonus. They are not electorally responsive to the people (though the parties that they choose their ministers from are - a problem in the wings).

For the very last thing that the 1 percenters want is for the 99 percent to have a say over the policies that are ruining the lives of most of them. That's why outgoing social democrat prime minister George Papandreou came under excoriating pressure for mooting the idea of a referendum on the austerity measures. He buckled. If ever there was an example of dotage as a second childishness, but without everything, it is the leader of Pasok, a shadow of the party's founder and his father, Andreas. Or as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observed, historical personages appear twice, first as tragic giants, second as farcical dwarves - first the father, then the son.

The suspension of democratic norms we have become accustomed to should ring alarm bells. It is social resistance, or the fear of it, that created the political impasse in Greece and Italy. In that situation, the high priests of globalised capitalism have chosen the most undemocratic of a range of options. They and others will do so again, unless that resistance can alter the calculus.

They can get away with these manoeuvres, if only temporarily, in part due to the paucity and pusillanimity of traditional social democratic/Labour parties, which have spurned the idea of a big, comprehensive alternative to capitalism red in tooth and claw.

How else to explain how in Spain next weekend, the sons of Franco in the Tory People's Party are likely to win an election against the outgoing social democrats? I don't believe it's because the people in Spain want more of the failing capitalist policies. Most may not see an alternative, but why should they if one is not credibly presented or argued for by those they have historically looked to?

I believe that people are crying out for a big idea, a real one, not bunkum like Cameron's big society. That's why the sympathy for the Occupy movement, which goes way beyond the numbers taking part so far, is so great. It is a sign of people grappling for themselves towards a truly democratic and progressive alternative.

And it is the lack of a radical alternative equal to the scale of the crisis that hobbles everything Labour says and does.

Just one example: BBC's Question Time this week. On issue after issue Labour's Rachel Reeves failed even to make contact with the ball, let alone put it in the net against a panel that while absurdly right field in its composition was hardly fleet of foot, viz the flabby Stephen Pollard in goal.

Forget radicalism, she couldn't even come up with basic social democratic arguments about how private health care is parasitic on the NHS, cherry-picking profitable medical procedures while refusing insurance to the kind of former industrial workers who were doubtless in the Newcastle audience.

The apparent certainties of the age ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher are melting into air. The left, if we want to have any solidity, has no option but to voice the big alternative and bend every effort to organising around it in new ways and old.

We have resources and traditions to draw on. As I write, news is breaking of a massive battle at the University of California in Berkeley between occupying students and riot police. It is a resounding echo of the 1960s movements that were the well-spring of so much that is progressive: a historical event appearing twice, but this time with all the vigour of its infancy.

It's time again to be realistic and to demand what they tell us is impossible.

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Mission: Invade Iran
George Galloway
8 January 2012
morningstaronline.co.uk

It is 12 months since the heroic shabab of Tunisia overthrew EU favourite Ben Ali and set in motion the Arab masses across the region. Now we see clearly the response of the ailing Western powers which were thrown off kilter as their system of client states creaked, cracked and began to fall apart. It is war - actual and threatened.

The drumbeats for war with Iran are getting louder, and the escalating provocations by Western capitals are developing a logic of their own. It admits of no alternative and points in only one direction - towards military conflict. Or, to put it more accurately, towards open military conflict. The head of Britain's MI6 has already called for covert military operations in Iran which are, of course, an act of war - and they have been taking place. So are the drone overflights, which are also legally an act of aggression.

Are there great difficulties facing any such venture? There most certainly are. Huge ones, which would make it a disaster of world historic proportions. But it is a false, if comforting, logic which says that on account of such catastrophic consequences war with Iran is unthinkable.

Many will recall that "unthinkable" was the then foreign secretary Jack Straw's response to the proposition a few years ago. We now know, thanks to the Guardian, that that is no longer the position of the mandarins of the British state. It is, in fact, to sign up our country to a war in advance.

And now we have the British government taking Iran's English language Press TV station off the Sky platform. The justification will bring a smile even to those who are most inured to the catalogue of double standards applied by the West to the Middle East. There was a mistake, you see, in the original application for a broadcasting licence. It should not have been granted because Press TV is not headquartered in Britain and therefore could not pass the tests for editorial accountability required by the regulator. All fair, impartial and very British is the reasoning. Nothing to do with our bellicose foreign policy.

Except there is the rather glaring inconsistency that CNN, Fox News, etc are also not headquartered in Britain, yet were not only given broadcasting licences but still have them and face no prospect of this impartial rule being applied to them. I don't know which of David Cameron's Eton/Oxford-trained chums came up with this wheeze imagining that it would convince anyone, but their parents and the taxpayer have wasted their money on his education. We already knew, thanks to Wikiileaks, that the British government was assuring its allies in the Middle East and elsewhere that it was investigating all avenues to get Press TV off Sky. One of those allies is, of course, the bloated House of Saud.

With the fall of Mubarak, it has been elevated to the role of gendarme of reaction within the region, invading Bahrain - an act reported seriously only by Press TV - leading interference across the region by the Gulf Co-operation Council, which represents monarchical states including the distinctly non-Gulf Jordan and Morocco, under the shameless guise of promoting "democracy," and fomenting murderous sectarian division aimed at weakening Iran and anyone who supports its independence.

This is the same House of Saud which received $30 billion of war lanes the other week from a US which is busy telling us it is for the people against the military in, for example, Syria. And it is a US where the grotesques in the Republican primaries are outbidding each other over who would be first to pull the trigger in the Gulf and who is more in thrall to Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu.

The rapid turn of events is alarming even some Establishment figures, from foreign policy wonks in Washington to former heads of Israel's internal and external spy agencies. We can be sure that tortured deliberating is going on at the highest levels.

But it would be light-minded in the extreme to imagine that the existence of those making plausible and rational arguments against unleashing what would turn out to be a major war - much bigger than the one-sided assault on beggared Iraq - means that they will either prevail or necessarily act as a brake on the slide down the bloody slope.

If this was about rationality and plausibility, we would never have gone to war with Iraq. Cast your mind back exactly 10 years ago. We had gone to war in Afghanistan. Indeed, we were told by Tony Blair and George Bush that it was all but over and there would be a swift move to democracy, development and stability. We know now that there had been a sharp debate in the White House immediately following the events of September 11 2011 over whether to attack Iraq first or invade Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Both countries, of course, had nothing to do with with September 11 - not a single one of their citizens was involved. The attackers were overwhelmingly Saudi. But throughout 2002, as the Stop the War movement rolled into towns and cities across the country, we were told by wise heads in the op ed columns that so great were the risks and so unfeasible the aims of war on Iraq that sense would prevail and it would not take place. And their arguments against the war were cogent. Some of them were a reflection of the some of the arguments we made - that there would be resistance, that the war would lead to further wars, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that there was no al-Qaida in Iraq but that there would be as a result of invasion, and, as anyone who knew anything about the region could see, that toppling Saddam Hussein would massively increase the power and influence of Iran within Iraq and throughout the region.

The Establishment divisions grew and the argument escalated internationally. It was not a prelude to an outbreak of sanity, however. It was a precursor to war, the decision for which had already been made. In the same way the sanctions and UN resolutions were not an alternative to war, but a prelude to it.

Ten years on, we face an eerily similar situation, but with an Iran which, as predicted, is stronger. It would be folly to hope against all the evidence to the contrary that our leaders this time will bow to rational argument if left to their own devices. They have their own warped rationality, summed up by one national security insider in Washington who said: "You think war with Iran would be tough now? You're right. But it will be even tougher if we leave it five years."

Even in their own terms, their attempts to defend their hegemony in the Middle East lead to incendiary contradictions as the plates shift afloat a magma of boiling popular anger. So we have a US administration which is desperate to establish some relationship with - and shackles on - whatever government arises in Egypt as an alternative to military rule. Yet at the same time Obama wields an extremely expensive veto at the UN security council at the end of last year yet again blocking condemnation of Israel's settlement-building.

Obama's approval rating in Egypt stands at 3 per cent, lower even than George Bush's and less than a 15th of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Or we have a French government which knows full well that encouraging a pro-Western policy by Nato member Turkey is crucial to attempts to turn the strife in Syria into the imposition of a friendly government that will abandon any notion of resistance to imperialism and Israel. Then the same French government picks a fight with the whole of the Turkish political class by supporting a law that would make denial of the Armenian genocide illegal. As for the systematic murder by French imperialism of the Algerians, Vietnamese and many others - well, you can justify that all you want.

Then there is the British government. As well as its own inanities, it also follows the US and French in theirs, from Israel to what is increasingly recognised to be the bloody blunder of Libya.

Finally, there is the false counsel that the deepening economic crisis means that they simply don't have the money for war, especially one that would make the previous oil shocks look merely like an irritating case of gazumping.

It is true that the Pentagon now faces financial constraint - and the US accounts for 75 per cent of Nato military spending. Obama has officially announced what has long been known to be the new military doctrine — to draw down as many forces as possible in Europe and the Middle East and to redeploy into a more aggressive posture encircling China.

Hence the withdrawal from Iraq and the doomed attempt to exert influence there from an absurdly named “embassy” of 16,000 people including 5,000 mercenaries, which means that the private sector picks up the bill for their pensions, missing body parts and so on. This is precisely the point. For decade after decade the US state could provide guns as well as butter in the form of rising living standards and economic growth. Now it can provide no butter. But it has every intention of providing guns. According to its own warped logic it has no alternative.

Facing a growing China and shifting balance in the world economy, the one thing that US capitalists have is a super-abundance of guns which can be used to extract other people’s butter. So don’t imagine that financial strictures and the strains of shifting the military balance to the Pacific mean that there is more likelihood of the US, with its allies, accepting Iran as a major, independent regional power in the Gulf — the most important oil-producing area on the planet.

The opposite is the case. It is more likely to lead them to calculate that it is better to “take down” Iran now, which is why they are concerned about Syria, in order not to leave a gigantic problem as they are forced to refocus elsewhere.

It’s more likely to leave them more dependent on arming bellicose and volatile allies in the region to hold the fort during and after — Saudi Arabia and Israel. And if you think the dysfunctional US political system has a tendency to produce crazies, it is nothing compared to Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

Does this mean that war is inevitable? Far from it. The mobilisation of mass opinion can shift the calculus, allied as it now can be with the revolutionary developments in Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere. We need to raise the alarm in order to agitate that mass. We also need to stand foursquare against all the softening-up arguments that are being deployed to send us to sleep — from new dodgy dossiers to fanciful suggestions that perhaps just a little bit of military action in Libya, or Syria, will be welcome and an alternative to wider suffering and conflagration. It is not. It is what it always has been — stepping stones to greater slaughter.

The Stop the War Coalition national steering committee meets next Saturday. I urge you to follow its deliberations and calls to action.

[faceless]

[faceless]

Galloway has done a new article for The Morning Star, but I'm not going to post it here as it's full of bullshit about 'poor wee soldiers'.

Are they so fucking stupid that they don't know what being in the military means? No, they choose that job - they choose to be paid to bring violence.

Bollocks to sentimentalising them in any other way.

[andrblac]

Think thats a bit harsh mate, its the PBI that get it. Most come from places where there are no oppertunities for school leavers. I didnt join the forces out of loyality, patriotism or because I am a warmonger and I wanted paid for bringing violence, but simply because there was naff all else for me.

[faceless]

I don't know what PBI means. I had no opportunities as such, but went to college and got a decent enough education that set me up to be able to do other things. There were many times when I had nothing but a tin of beans in the cupboard - and I'd still choose that.

You had a choice as much as I did.

[andrblac]

PBI = poor bloody infantry

[SuBSynK]

Totally agree with you on this Face.
I get so sick of people talking about the poor soldiers being manipulated by the politicians etc.
What else did they think was going to happen when they signed up and began training to kill, especially in this climate of illegal wars and aggressive foreign policy....
Until we make being a mercenary socially unacceptable we will have people signing up, slaughtering people and then being treated as heroes or for PTSD...makes me sick.

[andrblac]

Totaly unfare, both. for many 10s of thousands there are NO opertunities, and the military is the only way out of sink estates etc.
ALSO, any country needs a properly equiped, paid, looked after armed forces. Its the governments who send them on needless forays for there own bloodlust and imperialism who are to blame, not the working class guys in the forces

[faceless]

You had as much of a choice as I did, so you'll get no sympathy or concern from me.

Governments might order wars, but it's the soldiers who pull the triggers. Working class guys killing poor people in other countries is sickening.

[andrblac]

Well, as far as I am concerned you are anti working class for having such views

[faceless]

What do you think you've done that helps the working class? You've been hired to protect corporate interests and you knew exactly what joining the military meant.

If you, or any other British soldier, in the last 60 years had fought a just cause, you might have some solid ground.