[Peace-discuss] Scottish play

[C. G. Estabrook]

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In the hands of the three witches

There will be only one winner of an Iraqi war - Osama bin Laden

George Galloway

Tuesday November 26 2002

The Guardian

Picture if you will a bearded gentleman on a recruiting poster, finger
pointing imploringly. "I need you," it would say. No, it's not the
ubiquitous Lord Kitchener appeal, but "the emir", Osama bin Laden, and he
needs you to invade Iraq. If there is one man who wants an Anglo-American
invasion and occupation of an Arab country more than the chief of the US
defence board, Richard Perle, it's surely the elusive and pious pimpernel
of the Tora Bora.

Perle told a meeting in parliament last week that the US will launch the
war whether the arms inspectors find anything or not - and Bin Laden hopes
he's right. And that's the flaw at the heart of our government's fudge
motion in parliament this week, passed with 87 against and over 100 MPs
voting with their feet in abstention: the status quo means whatever you
want it to mean.

For Jack Straw, making his most conciliatory speech yet, the arms
inspectors route is a "pathway to peace", and even sanctions can be lifted
if the process is completed successfully. But for the opposition, Michael
Ancram, backing the same text, supported Straw like a rope supporting a
hanging man. For him the UN security council resolution is a runway to
war. A microcosm, in other words, of the council itself, where France,
Russia, China and Syria all protest that they voted for a different
resolution than the one its authors wrote.

Straw went so far as to say Britain had a "preference" for a new security
council resolution before war could be declared - indeed that we would
like to move it. And that a "nil return" on the weapons inventory to be
submitted by Iraq on December 8 would not in itself be a "material
breach". He even maintained an eloquent silence on whether the shooting
down of an Anglo-American patrol over the no-fly zones would be such a
breach.

But after some "inspiration" from the box of mandarins who flank the
Commons chamber on such occasions, once word of a different spin arrived
from the prime minister's press conference, even he had to make it clear
that there would be no such resolution if there was a chance that any of
the permanent five might veto it. In other words, we will put it to the
vote if the vote is safely rigged in advance. At least he had the grace to
look embarrassed.

So we are back where we have always been. Relying on the intentions of the
most rightwing and warlike Republican administration Washington has ever
seen.

Gerald Kaufman identified the "three witches" of the Bush forest: Cheney
and Rumsfeld and Rice. Like Macbeth's witches, "toil and trouble" is what
they're boiling for, he said. While nursing their wrath about the
Powell-Blair axis of multilateralism they, along with Perle, seem
remarkably confident that the president's heart and mind is with them. And
we know now what Mr Blair didn't tell the TUC and Labour conferences: that
if the witches' coven prevails we'll be on the back of the broomstick
bound for Baghdad.

The "coalition of the willing" could have a security council endorsement
if the threats and bribes are sufficient. More plausibly, Britain and a
ragbag of post-Soviet supplicants for Nato and EU membership will be all
there is. Then, as Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary-general, put it,
we "will have opened the gates of hell".

Sixty days and nights of bombing Iraq, with a thousand raids each day,
according to the leaked Pentagon plan, followed by an invasion and what
will surely be a prolonged occupation. The puppet government brought from
Knightsbridge will get to work privatising the oil industry, ditching
Iraq's current trading partners for new ones - we know who'll make off
with the top prizes - and joining a Jordanian-style "normalisation",
finally bowing Baghdad's knee to Israel.

And in the age of Arab-Sat, every burning building, every scorched corpse,
every broken family dragged out of the Iraqi ruins will be viewed in
Technicolor from the Atlantic to the Gulf. A taste of what the hell will
be like is evident, or would be but for the total curfew, in Ma'an in
Jordan, where the king's airforce has been bombing his own people to
suppress a mini Islamist revolt. In Saudi Arabia, huge sweeps of
oppositionists are a harbinger of turmoil to come. Around the world, anger
is exploding, literally, and if the prime minster is right, our own
capital may be next. For Bin Laden and his ilk, Britain is now in the
front ranks of the hated.

Many have praised Tony Blair for nudging Bush into the thicket of the UN.
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If the pathway leads to
peace, as was no doubt his good intention, he will be a hero. If it turns
out that he has merely paved the way to hell, Burnham Wood will have come
to Dunsinane - and the Blair project will be at an end.

[George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and a columnist for
the Scottish Mail on Sunday - gallowayg at parliament.uk]

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

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  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
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