WITHOUT any vote in the House of Commons hundreds of British troops are to be sent to Iraq, which is already being bombed by British jets and where the SAS has been reported to be engaged in armed actions against ISIS forces.
This decision comes just after the UK has agreed to establish a major naval base in Bahrain, capable of catering for the largest aircraft carriers, and situated just across the straits from Iran, to defend the Bahraini feudal monarchy whose police forces are already being directed by British officials.
The Bahraini feudal regime has been violently engaged against pro-democracy forces for a number of years with large numbers of people being jailed and tortured for demanding democratic rights.
The UK is now standing shoulder to shoulder with the Gulf feudalists. In fact British officials have made it clear that the US requested the establishment of the base since it wants to concentrate on China and the Pacific. Britain has been handed the role of a gendarme in the Gulf.
The new army deployment to Iraq we are told will be in the ‘very low hundreds’ but will ‘include a small protection force of combat-ready soldiers’.
The Ministry of Defence said the move had not yet been formally approved, but since the matter is not going to be debated and decided on by parliament, it is taken as a matter of course that the move is on.
Britain has already carried out a number of air raids in Iraq, ‘second only to the United States, and five times as many as France’, Defence Secretary Fallon revealed yesterday.
He added that British troops will be able to pass on the ‘lessons we have learnt from Afghanistan’ – that is before they were forced to quit that country.
Fallon added that ISIS forces, after the allied air strikes, were now rooted in towns and villages. ‘That means they have got to be rooted out by ground troops. This has to be done by an home-grown army, not by western groups.’ he said.
However, after stating that British troops would not be doing the fighting Fallon added that the soldiers ‘will not be expected to fight a war but will be there to defend the British personnel if necessary’.
The lessons of all ‘limited’ imperialist interventions from Vietnam onwards is that the sending of trainers is always the preliminary for the sending of much larger forces when the trainers ‘fail’.
To make sure that the matter is not raised and discussed and voted on in the House of Commons shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker has already volunteered that Labour supports the steps taken to ‘assist Iraq’s government in responding to IS’.
As a face-saver he added: ‘The government should provide clarity about the scale, scope and timeframe of the deployment of these further trainers.
‘The defence secretary should clearly outline the numbers of military trainers involved and the work that they will be doing, so that there can be no misunderstanding about the role of British troops in Iraq.’
His use of the word ‘should’ and not ‘must’ betrays Labour’s real position, that it supports the beginning of another major imperialist war in Mesopotamia.
In fact the imperialist powers are getting ready to carve up Mesopotamia amongst themselves and their Gulf feudal allies.
They already boast that their main enemy is Assad of Syria and that the Baathist regime in Syria must be overthrown as was the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003.
The US is already supporting Kurdish moves to establish an independent Kurdish state in the north.
Iran backs the Shia regime in Baghdad whose writ runs through southern Iraq. Meanwhile, the Saudis, and Qataris who have been aiding and financing ISIS want to get their hands on northern and western Iraq.
The US and UK are sending in their forces to make sure that they do not lose out in this scramble to re-divide this major oil producing area.
In the way of this project stands the Syrian government and people and large masses of the Iraqi people both Sunni and Shia. The way forward is through the revolutionary unity of all of the anti-imperialist forces in the region to both smash the ISIS movement and drive the imperialists out of Mesopotamia.
Then the people of the region will unite it through establishing a Middle Eastern Federation of Socialist States, in which Palestine will have pride of place.
