AT last President Bush has stammered out a few words about the lynching of President Saddam Hussein, saying that he would have preferred to see his execution conducted in a dignified fashion.
In fact the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, the occupation and destruction of the country, the assassination of its leader, and the way that he was assassinated is entirely his.
US forces are occupying the country, the puppet government belongs to Bush, and the US is in total command. They do not require puppet Maliki’s permission to send between 18,000 and 30,000 extra US troops to Baghdad in the coming days, to take on the insurgents in a Fallujah-style action.
Blair’s position, as Bush’s running dog, is that whatever the price, whatever the cost, the British ruling class is now so weak that it has no option but to do the dirty work for Bush wherever there is such work to be done. And when the spin runs out as the gutters of Baghdad run with blood, you just keep quiet.
Bush and Blair lied their way to war in Iraq, despite the fact that intelligence agencies were insisting that Iraq did not possess wmd.
This was after successive governments bled Iraq white with UN sanctions that killed up to 1.5 million Iraqis, many of them children under five.
It was Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who said that the death of these children was a price worth paying to get rid of Saddam.
Then came Bush and Blair to push that policy forward. There was the shock and awe invasion, then the struggle against the insurgency that followed which saw entire cities like Fallujah destroyed, and then the Abu Ghraib atrocities.
None of these prevented Bush and Blair from discerning that here was an emerging democracy.
Up to two weeks ago they were hailing the situation – where 650,000 Iraqis have been butchered, where the country still has no clean water supply, electricity or power, where the schools and universities are closed, where women’s rights established by the Ba’athists were terminated, where over two million Iraqis have been forced to flee abroad, where their puppet government is based on bands of sectarian gangsters who are killing and torturing thousands of Iraqis every month – as the green shoots of democracy in Iraq.
Saddam’s lynching, orchestrated by a baying mob of puppet government officials and sectarian gangsters, to whom Saddam had been handed by the occupation, made up the mind of the entire world about what has and is happening in Iraq.
This is that the legitimate government was overthrown by imperialist gangsters in March-May 2003, who handed power over to sectarian gangsters, who are destroying and looting the country and enriching themselves under the banner of the purest religious sentiments.
Blair has been reduced to silence, and an attempt is being made to try and relegate Iraq from its former position as his number one crusade, into just another issue that he will comment on next week if he can manage it.
Blair does not know the word shame and the last thing he intends to do is to take responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and the millions of refugees.
He wants to be allowed to get on with doing the same job on the health service and state education, destroying them with privatisation and turning Britain back to the early 20th century.
He will not resign. He values his residences, his salary and expenses and his pension pot too much.
He must be put out of office and put on trial as a war criminal, responsible for untold death and destruction in Iraq, Palestine and the Lebanon.
After the mob lynching of the Iraqi president, Blair must be brought down by the working class in the trade unions.
Workers must assist the Iraqi masses and themselves by taking trade union strike action to bring down the Blair government to go forward to a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies.<
• Second news story
US HANDS £86.4 MILLION TO ABBAS
The US administration is to provide $86.4 million to strengthen security forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, to assist in the ‘dismantling of terrorism’ in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
A US government document revealed yesterday that the US aid will be used to ‘assist the Palestinian Authority presidency in fulfilling its commitments under the roadmap (peace plan) to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza.’
The document said the US security co-ordinator between Israel and the Palestinians, Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, would implement the $86m programme ‘to strengthen and reform elements of the Palestinian security sector controlled by the PA presidency’.
US security officials said the aid will provide Abbas’s presidential guard with training and non-lethal equipment, including vehicles and uniforms, but would not be used to pay the salaries of members of the presidential guard.
Abbas’s presidential guard currently has about 3,700 members.
With aid from the US and its allies, he hopes to expand it to 4,700 members in 12 to 18 months.
Israeli officials have said Washington had already helped organise shipments of guns and ammunition to the presidential guard from Egypt and Jordan, and that the latest shipment was made last week.
The US, the UK and Israel have refused to recognise the Hamas government and have imposed a financial and economic blockade.
