WITH Blair’s political reputation destroyed by the Iraq war, and the massive resistance to his attack on the Welfare State, and with the media agog at his spending his winter break setting up his post-parliamentary career, the acting Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday gave the major political interview of the New Year, usually given by the PM.
He used it to spear Blair over the assassination of Saddam Hussein by Blair’s proteges, the ‘democratic’ government of Iraq. He spoke up while Blair still remains silent.
Brown summed up his own attitude to the lynching of Saddam Hussein. ‘A deplorable set of events. . .
It has done nothing to lessen the tensions between the Shia and Sunni communities. . . And of course, even those people unlike me who are in favour of capital punishment found this completely unacceptable and I am pleased that there is now an inquiry into it.’
Brown however remained an unrepentant imperialist.
Speaking abut the lesson of Iraq he said: ‘By military action and policing and by intelligence and security work you can achieve a great deal but you will not win against extreme terrorist activities, particularly propaganda activities unless you have the battle for hearts and minds won.
‘And that makes me think that the same cultural war that had to be fought against communism from the 1940s and 50s onwards is in a sense a model for what we have to do here.’
However, as we all know, Saddam was not a terrorist, and was an arch enemy of Al-Qaeda. The war was not over terrorism, it was about grabbing Iraq’s oil.
The talk about learning the lessons of the war against communism just emphasises the point that Brown is an incorrigible imperialist, and is 100 per cent aboard the US-led struggle to reorder the world to grab oil and gas resources.
His unashamed imperialism was revealed again when he was asked: ‘As you said that Iraq was some kind of hell before, but we have made it into a different kind of hell afterwards. Do you feel as a member of the government any sense of embarrassment, shame, about what happened?’ Earlier he was asked whether the government should apologise.
Brown felt no shame, embarrassment or a need to apologise. He said: ‘I take my full responsibility and I will not shirk it as a member of the government for the decisions that we took. But I do say that there are lessons to be learnt particularly from what happened immediately after Saddam Hussein. We simply got it wrong.’
He said nothing about the destruction of Iraq, that 650,000 people have died – a mountain of corpses caused by the decision to attack Iraq of which he was a part and which his department financed.
When asked whether he would allow himself to be ordered about by Bush, he responded: ‘I look forward to working with the president of the United States, George Bush. . . The British national interest is what me and my colleagues are about. . .’
However, the truth is that when admirals are saying that they will soon be using a fleet of dug-out canoes so bankrupt is the British state, the only place for a British government in relation to the US is in the pocket of the President.
For the rest it was all Blairism plus. ‘Education, Education, Education’ gave way to ‘Excellence, Excellence, Excellence’.
A government should be ‘the servant state’. This is the servant that is going to introduce ID cards, give leave to the police to hold suspects for 90 days without charge, build up a national DNA base, put CCTV cameras everywhere, and introduce no jury trials – some ‘servant state’!
A new ‘style’ of politics is needed to meet the challenges of the next 10 years, with a ‘patriotic vision’ involving ‘responsible, active citizens’ – sounds like Brown’s nation of narks.
Brown remains one of the Blairites. He will not change a thing. It is to be imperialist war abroad and class war at home.
What workers need is socialism. That means a general strike to bring down Labour’s New Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
