Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror
By Tariq Ali
Verso, 2005
104 pages
Order at <http://www.versobooks.com/>
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
On July 7, 2005, four young British Muslims blew themselves up on the London transport system, claiming the lives of 56 people and injuring more than 100. On July 21, another four young men unsuccessfully attempted another suicide bombing in the British capital. The next day the British security services followed and gunned down at point-blank range a young Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, who turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with any terrorist organisation.
Written in the immediate aftermath of these events, Tariq Ali's latest book pins the blame for the carnage in London fairly and squarely on the policies of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the New Labour government he has headed since May 1997. Ali points out that the key to Blair's foreign policy is extremely simple: "It was revealed in words of one syllable to Christopher Meyer, Blair's new ambassador to Washington in 1997, by Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's chief of staff. On his appointment, Meyer explained to Blair's biographer, Powell gave him the following advice: 'Your job is to get up the arse of the White House and stay there'."
Since 1997, Blair's government has done just that. In an appendix Ali provides the full text of a leaked Downing Street memorandum from July 2002 that proves beyond doubt that Bush had decided to invade Iraq no matter what, and that, in the words of the memorandum itself "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
Ali continues: "Blair's main concern was how to fix the situation so the White House could get what it wanted. His government would 'work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action'. But the key issue was to have 'the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work'".
To that end, the lies about Iraq's arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction" were concocted and peddled to the British people via a compliant print media dominated by Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere, Richard Desmond and the Barclay twins: nearly all of the mainstream newspapers were in favour of the war, and the few that weren't swung behind the government after the invasion of Iraq had begun.
Despite this, only a small minority of the British public swallowed the lies, with a million-and-a-half taking to the streets in London in protest against Blair and Bush on February 15, 2003.
Ali documents the way that the print media ignored and marginalised the anti-war majority, and tells how Blair forced the resignation of Greg Dyke, the director general of the BBC, because BBC News was at that time refusing simply to parrot the lies of the Bush-Blair coalition.
David Kelly, a government scientist who specialised in chemical weapons, was found dead near his home on July 18, 2003. Off the record, Kelly had provided comments to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan that led Gilligan to claim on BBC Radio that the government had deliberately "sexed-up" evidence it had used to justify the war. The official inquiry into Kelly's death was headed by Lord Hutton, an establishment judge who had represented the British Army in the notorious Widgery inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972.
The Widgery inquiry, now known to be a complete whitewash, exonerated the British Army from blame for the civilian deaths on Bloody Sunday, and the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly delivered the expected result, exonerating Blair and laying the blame squarely at the feet of the BBC. Despite protests from BBC journalists, heads rolled, and the director general of the BBC was forced to resign. So, despite lying about Iraq's WMD, Blair survived, and the BBC was forced into compliant mode via the appointment as senior managers of a set of Blairite yes-men.
Perhaps most astonishing of all is Blair's denial of any link between the British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and the terrorist attacks in London. Ali quotes a statement Blair made on July 26: "We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that."
So, having invaded a Muslim country on the basis of a pack of lies, and participating in the brutal occupation of that country, Blair describes as "nonsense" the claim that there is a connection between this and the conversion of a group of Muslim youths in Britain into suicide bombers. No doubt British colonial repression in Ireland had nothing to do with the Easter 1916 uprising or the emergence of the IRA!
Recently, in the wake of the United Nations call for the closing of the US camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, leading Blairites have been attempting to exempt Britain from blame for the well-documented human rights abuses that are occurring there. On the BBC Question Time program on February 16, the Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain, under pressure from the program chair, reluctantly admitted that he would prefer to see the camp closed down.
On the following day, Blair echoed Hain's comments, and was reported in the February 18 British Guardian as describing the camp as an "anomaly". The Blair government has also been complicit in the CIA practice of "extraordinary rendition", whereby prisoners are sent to countries like Egypt, where they are then tortured. And the British government's involvement in these practices is far from an anomaly.
Ali exposes the dishonesty and hypocrisy of this posture by detailing how MI5 and the British security services have been involved in torturing British residents in Guantanamo Bay and in Belmarsh Prison in south-east London. Ali reproduces in full a statement published by Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams in which — speaking on the basis of personal experience — he lays bare the myth that torture such as that witnessed in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is an aberration rather than systematic military policy: such treatment of political prisoners was commonplace in Northern Ireland in the '70s and '80s. Ali describes how Blair is using the "war on terror" as a pretext for an assault on civil liberties in Britain, in comparison with which British repression in Northern Ireland pales into insignificance.
The book also describes, in passing, the reactionary social and economic policies Blair has pursued on the domestic front: "Eight years after the landslide that first swept New Labour into office, Margaret Thatcher's neo-conservative project is more firmly in place than ever. A 'model' neo-liberal economy — the primacy of consumption, speculation as the hub of economic activity, the entry of private capital into hitherto inviolate domains of collective provision — reigns supreme."
But doesn't Blair have a mandate for all of this, having won three consecutive general elections? Ali explains why Blair has no such mandate: due to the undemocratic "first past the post" electoral system, New Labour was able to secure a parliamentary majority in the 2005 election with only 9.5 million votes, "a mere 21.8% of the overall electorate, the lowest level of support for a government in the European Union". Despite Blair's claim that "We are a young country", the majority of people aged 18-25 years abstained from voting in the 2001 and 2005 elections.
Ali concludes: "Blair once boasted that, in order to defeat Saddam Hussein, a 'blood price would have to be paid'. It has been paid, by tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and now by dozens of Londoners. There will be no peace as long as he remains Prime Minister."
Blair is a liar and a reactionary every bit as bad as John Howard. Australian activists preparing for Blair's forthcoming visit to Australia would do well to read Tariq Ali's short, eloquent and robust denunciation of the scoundrel that currently occupies 10 Downing Street.
From Green Left Weekly, March 15, 2006.
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