[Peace-discuss] Galloway on the present state of affairs.

[Morton K. Brussel]

George Galloway is pessimistically optimistic, and certainly hasn't  
lost his verve. --mkb

ZNet | Mideast

Popular Resistance from Caracas to Cairo
by George Galloway; September 19, 2006

     09/17/06 "Al-Ahram" -- -- "Look on my works, ye mighty, and  
despair!" reads the eponymous statue's inscription in Percy Bysshe  
Shelley's poem Ozymandias. But it is the boastful tyrant's monument,  
not the self-confidence of his enemies, that lies splintered in the  
sands.

     Five years on from the atrocities of 11 September 2001, George W  
Bush and the neo- conservatives have managed to turn much of  
Afghanistan and Iraq into desolation, full of now lifeless things.

     Amid this carnage lies another, unlamented casualty -- the  
colossal wreck of US and British foreign policy. The authors of that  
wreckage cannot conceivably claim they were not warned of the  
calamities they would unleash.

     Millions of us told them what would happen if they seized on the  
events of five years ago to launch what the Pentagon now calls the  
"long war". Four days after the attacks in New York and Washington I  
spoke in a sitting of the recalled British parliament. I warned that  
if the US and its allies mishandled the response, they would create a  
thousand, ten thousand Bin Ladens.

     FIVE YEARS ON, IS THAT NOT WHAT'S HAPPENED?

     Many tens of thousands of people -- mostly women and children --  
have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the ultimate  
perpetrators of the killings, as they sit behind their mahogany desks  
in the White House and Downing Street, imagine that the rest of us  
have not noticed how they do not deem those Arab and Muslim dead  
worthy of the same grief as attends their own?

     Do they think we have not noticed how they refuse even to count  
the number killed in Iraq? Did they believe that the pornographic  
images of Abu Ghraib would be discounted? Did George Bush and Tony  
Blair delude themselves into thinking they could wet the knife that  
Israel plunged into Lebanon without being seen as accomplices to war  
crimes?

     Blair certainly gave every appearance of having lost all contact  
with reality when he flew to Tel Aviv last weekend. With his own MPs  
plotting to oust him for damaging their re-election prospects, he  
went to occupied Jerusalem and threw his arms around Ehud Olmert,  
whose war in Lebanon the vast majority of people in Britain opposed.

     As for Bush, he has always struggled even to give the impression  
of having a connection with reality. Nevertheless, the reality of the  
last five years stubbornly remains. The world is not a safer place;  
it is more violent, more dangerous.

     There are more, not fewer, jihadists of the Bin Laden stripe.  
The bitterness in the Arab and Muslim world is deeper, broader and  
more incendiary.

     In Afghanistan, Blair, oblivious to his nation's history of  
military catastrophe in that proud country, has hurled his soldiers  
into the most unforgiving terrain, against a ferocious and growing  
military resistance, in a part of the world that even Alexander the  
Great could not occupy.

     In Iraq, the occupiers have spilt enough blood to turn the two  
great rivers red. In order to cling on they foment sectarian and  
confessional strife which, and this may be their parting gift,  
threatens tragically to trisect the country. Can they with a straight  
face claim Iraq is better off now than it was before the invasion?

     REMEMBER WHAT THEY SAID THEIR WAR WOULD ACHIEVE: FREEDOM AND  
DEMOCRACY, RESPECT FOR WOMEN, PROSPERITY AND DIGNITY.

     In truth, it was the freedom of US corporate culture, the  
democracy of the dollar and an Arab world ruled by corrupt kings and  
puppet presidents just as pliant but a little less gauche, able to  
rig an election as the Bush's do in Florida rather than tactlessly  
incarcerating the opposition.

     Even these, their own selfish ambitions, have not been achieved.  
That increasingly stands out as the most salient feature of the  
reality they have created over the last half- decade. Nowhere  
symbolises it more than Lebanon.

     In March of last year the US State Department and British  
Foreign Office were incongruously playing the role of revolutionary  
pamphleteer. The "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon was, we were assured,  
about to usher an irresistible movement for a "New Middle East".

     Fifteen months later and we know what that looks like: the  
Israeli army pledging to bomb Lebanon back two decades and embarking  
on an invasion whose success was predicated on reigniting the flames  
of civil war which the people of Lebanon have done so much to douse.

     LEBANON

     The war this summer was not merely another episode in the bloody  
history of Israel lashing out at bordering states. It was a battle in  
Washington's wider war on terror. It was a front that opened up,  
ironically, precisely because the US is mired and losing on the Iraq  
front. The assault on Lebanon was meant to pave the way to further  
aggression against Syria and Iran.

     That makes the reaction of those Arab leaders who denounced the  
Lebanese resistance all the more emetic. Their spurious claims that  
this was merely a Shia issue or that threats to bomb Iran are a  
Persian problem should be met with nothing but contempt.

     In backing Israel against Hizbullah and the Lebanese resistance,  
they sided with the enemy who is garrotting the Palestinians in Gaza.  
While these leaders humiliated themselves before Washington and Tel  
Aviv, the name Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was on the lips of  
millions from Rabat to Riyadh.

     Israel's defeat at the hands of Hizbullah and the resistance in  
Lebanon is a defeat also for Washington and London. It has opened up  
a new prospect for ending the nightmare of the last five years.

     It is not only in the Arab and Muslim world that confidence is  
surging forward that there is an alternative to domination by the US,  
global corporations and their local junior partners. The same is  
happening in Latin America where President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela  
personifies a new radical generation, one that met its counterparts  
in the Middle East and the older generation of the great Fidel Castro  
at the Non-Aligned Summit this week.

     THIS, I BELIEVE, IS GOING TO BE THE LASTING LEGACY OF THE LAST  
FIVE YEARS:

     a renewed global movement in direct opposition to the Pentagon  
and the multinationals on whose behalf it acts as enforcer. The  
stakes are extraordinarily high. Just as the impasse in Iraq drove  
the US to support the Israeli adventure in Lebanon, so that defeat  
may in turn accelerate preparations for an assault on Iran.

     That would be one of the most costly miscalculations in history.  
They stand warned. But they stood warned over their crazed reaction  
to 11 September, so no one should underestimate their capacity to  
wade deeper into the river of blood.

     The US is not going to tip toe away, despite its losses. To do  
so would mean the American establishment accepting that its power and  
prestige had been thrown back to before 1989, when it faced a rival  
power.

     It is going to take the power of the popular resistance from  
Caracas to Cairo to throw back that behemoth and settle accounts with  
all the quislings who it depends upon but who crucially also depend  
on it.

     George Galloway, is Respect member of the British Parliament for  
the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow.