Straight-shootin' George Galloway

We need guys like Galloway who'll stand up and take a few hardy swings at the scoundrels in power. His words put a little steel in everyone's spine; and we're going to need it, too. There's plenty of bad road ahead.

"I am utterly against the punishing of innocent people for the crimes of the guilty, whether it is done on the underground of London or the streets of Falluja by George Bush's air force". George Galloway MP

George Galloway is quite a guy.

His trip to the Middle East is causing a ruckus back in London, where his criticism of Bush and Blair is appearing like a spread-sheet on the front-page of the tabloids.

Congrats, George; those two deserve a good lambasting.

Yesterday he fired-off another barrage, landing a direct hit on Prime Minister Milquetoast and his Texas-twin. He said, "There's far more blood on the hands of George Bush and Tony Blair than there is on the hands of the murderers who killed those people in London."

Ka-boom! Right on target.

Galloway was stellar; praising the Iraqi resistance as "martyrs" and telling them that they "are not just defending Iraq, but defending the whole world against American hegemony."

Bulls-eye.

Galloway's comments drew attention to the young men who are swarming to Iraq to fight what he calls the "foreign invaders". They're normally disparaged by the pro-war crowd in the press like Tom Friedman who calls them a "jihadist death-cult"

What rubbish. Friedman should skip the name-calling and try to figure out who these guys really are. Men don't simply throw away their lives for no reason. It is the injustice of the American occupation that has the swollen the ranks of the Iraqi resistance.

Galloway knows that and so does Friedman when he's not shoveling manure into the "paper of record".

Imagine, for a moment, that the US was invaded by an army from Saudi Arabia for the transparent purpose of securing America's great natural wealth. And, imagine that tens of thousands of American people were killed in that invasion, entire cities were leveled as reprisal for resisting, and scores of Americans were tortured and humiliated in the most despicable manner.

What type of man would risk his own life to travel to the United States to fight for the liberation of the American people from Saudi oppression?

A terrorist or a martyr?

Forget the media hype about suicide bombers targeting innocent Iraqis. Communiqués from the resistance have repeatedly refuted those claims saying they do not attack Iraqi civilians, only the occupiers and their collaborators in the Iraqi security services.

Who're we going to believe; the Pentagon?

Galloway nailed it when he said, "These poor Iraqis, ragged people with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest most basic weapons-are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with
145 military operations every day which has made the country ungovernable." Game; Set; Match.

Galloway can expect to be roundly throttled for his remarks, but the truth is out and can't be undone. The Iraqi resistance is the frontlines in the war against American global domination. They're doing the fighting in the trenches while Americans continue to stumble around in their perpetual state of amnesia.

Can't Americans see their civil liberties being methodically savaged by Bush's rubber-stamp Congress? Will it take a decree of martial law to wake them up to this "gathering threat" emerging from the Bush White House? We should applaud Galloway's willingness to state the obvious; that the men who have taken up arms in Iraq are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against a neo-liberal cancer that is menacing the entire world.

Those who doubt what I say should consider Blair's news conference yesterday, where he rattled-off a whole new list of repressive measures to be directed at Muslims. Mimicking his Crawford mentor, Blair has decided that he has the right to unilaterally make law from his perch at 10 Downing St. without the consent of Parliament. The fatuous PM now claims the power to close down mosques, deport, clerics and shut down web sites where the views don't meet the dubious standards of the state. Additionally, Israeli trained police-units have been deployed on London's streets with orders to "shoot to kill" terror suspects (or fleeing Brazilians) if there is a perceived risk to public safety.

Who gave this unctuous, lying politician the right to declare martial law on Muslims?

Who gave this foppish phony the license to issue Nazi-type edicts that eviscerate basic civil liberties?

The British people would be foolish to let the wildly-unpopular Blair get away with this monumental power-grab.

85% of the British people already agree that the London bombings were the direct result of Blair's involvement in Iraq. Similarly, every terrorist-expert on the planet; including analysts at M15, the CIA, and the Israeli Mossad, have supported that very same conclusion. So, why should the victims of Blair's bungled aggression be the same one's who are collectively punished?

It's Blair who should be manacled and led away to the stocks, not the Muslims who already are suffering the blowback from his apocryphal war on terror.

No one in their right mind believes that Blair conjured up these new restrictions. His job is to simply recite his lines for the teleprompter and make sure his eye-shadow and silk-shirt are in order.

It's the big-money elites behind Blair that have their sights on personal liberty, just as they do in America and Australia. (Australia's Howard is trying to enact similar legislation right now) These are the 3 stooges of the international corporate-banking cabal; the tawdry courtesans of the global parasite-class.

Just listen to Zbigniew Brzezinski, founder of the Trilateral Commission, former board-member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Co-Chair of the Bush National Security Task Force, and all-around foot-soldier for American elites. Brzezinski is comfortably lodged at the very center of an elite cadre of nutcases who have been pushing for the New World Order (One world government) for over 20 years. His comments reflect the prevailing views of the main actors in the Bush-Blair-Howard governments.

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." ("The Grand Chessboard; p.35)

"Too democratic"? "Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."? Brzezinski hates democracy every bit as much as the men who back Blair. They've concluded that they can pretty well dispose of personal liberty in a few years by taking advantage terrorist attacks, exploiting public hysteria, and crafting a media narrative that supports the crushing of individual freedom. That's why we should take these new anti-Islam laws for what they really are; a forerunner to the repressive measures that will be applied to everyone without discrimination in the very near future.

Can anyone seriously doubt this after seeing the pattern of the last 5 years?

That's why we need guys like Galloway who'll stand up and take a few hardy swings at the scoundrels in power. His words put a little steel in everyone's spine; and we're going to need it, too. There's plenty of bad road ahead.

Mike Whitney
08/06/05 "ICH"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9687.htm

Robin Cook's Conscience

Words such as "conscience" and "honor" have pretty much disappeared from the American political lexicon in this age of Bush Administration lies and leaks. But when the histories of this time are written, it will be remembered that those precious characteristics were not wholly absent.

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair was maneuvering Britain into Bush's Iraq War coalition, one of the most prominent leaders of his Labour Party--a former foreign minister who then served as the party's leader in the House of Commons--resigned from the government and took a place on the back benches to deliver a blistering condemnation of the irrational arguments that Bush and Blair were making for an unwise and unnecessary war.

Robin Cook, who made international headlines with that act of conscience, died Saturday at age 59. To his last days, he remained an ardent foe of the war. Britain's Observer newspaper called him "the most incisively potent of the war's opponents."

Cook's resignation speech remains one of the most noted parliamentary addresses of the contemporary age. And rightly so, as Cook's words have proven to have been remarkably prescient.

Here is a portion of what he said on March 17, 2003, shortly after he left Blair's government to cast a historic vote against the invasion and occupation of Iraq:

I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.

The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour Party in my lifetime. I applaud the heroic efforts that the Prime Minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution [at the United Nations]. I do not think that anybody could have done better than the Foreign Secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council.

But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed. Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.

The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner--not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.

Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.

Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules. Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: The European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate. Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired.

I have heard some parallels between military action in these circumstances and the military action that we took in Kosovo. There was no doubt about the multilateral support that we had for the action that we took in Kosovo. It was supported by NATO; it was supported by the European Union; it was supported by every single one of the seven neighbors in the region. France and Germany were our active allies. It is precisely because we have none of that support in this case that it was all the more important to get agreement in the Security Council as the last hope of demonstrating international agreement.

Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.

None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands.

For four years as Foreign Secretary I was partly responsible for the Western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf War, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program and halted Saddam's medium- and long-range missiles programs.

Iraq's military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf War. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralized and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term--namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for twenty years, and which we helped to create?

It has been a favorite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics.

Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support.

I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.

John Nichols
Sun Aug 7, 9:41 PM ET
The Nation