Jeremy Corbyn

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March against this madness

JEREMY CORBYN marks the sorry anniversary of Tony Blair's greatest crime.
NEXT Tuesday March 18 marks the fifth anniversary of the momentous parliamentary debate, the first ever in British history, which voted to take this country to war.
Tony Blair declared that we would go to Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein and dismissed all suggestions that this was a dangerous folly based on misinformation.
He raised himself to a cacophony of spleen in asserting that the world would be made a safer place for the defeat of the Ba'athist regime and that the danger of expanded wars in other countries would be removed by this single decision.
He also didn't see any danger of Turkey invading Iraq as a result of the uprising of Kurdish people.
This weekend, there will be massive demonstrations in London and Glasgow to call for the withdrawal of British troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan and to point out the follies and dangers of this war.
The debate itself was, in a sense, a three-stage show. On the first stage, in the House of Commons, Blair proclaimed that the war would be for the good of civilisation, despite strong principled arguments against it and those who said that realpolitik dictated that we should work with Europe to prevent the war, rather than defy the UN.
The second stage was the enormous day-long protest of tens of thousands of ordinary people who, buoyed by the million-plus demonstration one month before, were ensconced in Parliament Square pleading with MPs for peace.
The music and noise from this demonstration was in eerie contrast to much of the silence around the Palace of Westminster itself, as MPs, for the first time ever, faced the reality of making a personal decision to take this country to war.
The third stage was the arcane and dark arts of parliamentary whipping and lobbying. Intelligence from both the anti-war camp and the government whips indicated that there were potentially 200 Labour MPs prepared to defy the prime minister and oppose the war.
Those MPs who were marked down as potential "waverers" were invited to meet the premier one by one throughout the day, who, with his steely clear blue eyes, demanded their loyalty.
Many of them crumbled under this pressure, as well as the more normal "pork barrel" hints that were made to MPs who were looking for a project for their constituency or support for their local party in some way.
At the end of the day, 139 Labour MPs voted against war. Poor Dennis Skinner would have been the 140th but was in hospital having surgery at that time and should be counted as one of the strong anti-war MPs. Two days later, British troops embarked on an unprovoked and illegal invasion of the sovereign country.
Since then, nearly a million deaths later, with two million Iraqis forced into exile and a further two million displaced in their own country, the human cost is obviously enormous.
As the defence select committee report which was published on Monday indicates, the financial cost is also enormous, with last year's bill totalling £1.6 billion. The total cost of invading and occupying Afghanistan now rises to around £9 billion, enough to provide a very good health service for the whole region, make a huge dent in the Aids pandemic around the world and improve housing and social services in our own country.
While questioning the details of the Bill, the committee did not really question the policy behind it. Conservative defence spokesman Liam Fox seemed to want even more expenditure.
Under the cover of the media discussion about the costs of the war, the MoD quietly said that it was not planning to reduce troop numbers any further. Thus, Brown is backtracking on one of the more important statements that he made since becoming Prime Minister only eight months ago.
In a debate last Saturday with a US neocon about the costs of war, I pointed out that the image of the US was tarnished by wars and military expenditure and the inability of such a great power to even deal with the consequences of Hurricane Katrina or the fact that 40 million US citizens have no access to health care.
In true neocon form, he informed me that the US was not a socialist country and that health care, housing and education had nothing to do with central government.
Its function was to defend the country and he propelled himself into a stratospheric description of the apocalypse to come if the US did not prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The debate in a London TV studio felt like an evening out on Planet Zog.
Winning the unwinnable
WHEN Hillary Clinton won the Ohio primary last Tuesday, her rather over-the-top victory speech managed in one breathless sentence to say: "We will end the war in Iraq and win the war in Afghanistan."
She then went on to claim the virtue of prescient foresight as being a necessity for a future president. Barack Obama, in more measured tones, said more or less the same, as, increasingly, do Liberal Democrats and others in this country.
The reality is that the war in Afghanistan preceded the war in Iraq by one-and-a-half years and, by all estimations, is scheduled to be an occupation for at least the next 30 years.
The death toll in Afghanistan is rising and its cost in the last year amounted to £1.649 billion, 122 per cent up on the previous year, accompanied by a tragically increasing death rate among coalition forces.
Not surprising, then, that the armchair generals who sit on the NATO council are becoming increasingly concerned at the refusal of many NATO member states to commit any more troops to this conflict.
Those of us who are opposed to the Afghan war are neither supporters nor apologists for the Taliban social or legal policies. No rational person can defend the attacks and discrimination against women, the denial of education for girls or the most extreme aspects of sharia law that are practiced by them.
However, it is also readily understandable that civilian populations in Helmand province living in desperate poverty turn to the growing of opium crops and see the well-fed and well-equipped Western forces as yet another occupying army in their country.
Last year, Defence Secretary Des Browne conceded that any political solution in Afghanistan had to involve discussion with the Taliban, which is something that the US, on the face of it, cannot agree to.
However, from a lull in the fighting after the initial invasion, the situation has got worse both in Helmand and across the border in the north-west frontier province of Pakistan. Increasingly, it is looking like a pincer movement of NATO forces from Afghanistan and the Pakistani army against the Pashtun people, whose community straddles the border.
The demonstrations this weekend will be calling emphatically for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Stop the War movement sees no fundamental difference between the two conflicts.
Nearly eight years on, with hundreds of thousands dead and billions spent on the arms industry, the only beneficiaries of the wars appear to be the arms manufacturers, oil companies, warlords and drug dealers. The losers are the poor souls who perished, those who have been displaced and those whose lives have been wrecked by tragedy and injury.
It's not that the anti-war movement launched itself in 2001 to defend Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. It was all about peaceful change to achieve justice and human rights, rather than flattering the vanity and ego of George Bush.
Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk