Calling all rational people: join Stop the War Coalition in Trafalgar Square on March 15

Saturday 4^th December’s wonderfully well-attended international StopWar conference in Westminster – the first since 2005 – was both encouraging and chastening, as a critical period looms in which the sheer gall and inhumanity of the US/UK regime threatens to swell to proportions both unprecedented and unthinkable. Which is saying something.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

The remorselessly excellent Stop the War Coalition has now joined with CND and the British Muslim Initiative in calling a demonstration to mark the fifth anniversary of the reprehensible Iraq invasion in London on Saturday March 15. The demo – which will demand that our troops leave Iraq and Afghanistan, and call for an end to the inexcusably scripted aggression towards Iran – will coincide with World Against War marches around the globe.

I’ll say it clearly. Be there.

It is not enough to muse that the noises emanating from the genocidal Bush adminstration about Iran ‘do not look promising.’ Flagrantly threatening, illegally occupying and committing mass murder in yet another sovereign territory in the Persian Gulf – yet again under the flimsiest of pretences: aiding ‘insurrectionists’ in Iraq; desiring nuclear weapons – simply cannot be swallowed and watched passively on television screens once again, unthinkingly, as if those families and hands and bones were mere gnats and dust.

As former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq Hans von Sponeck said in December, you do not have to agree with the every action and policy of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in order to oppose the violent and illegal burning of its citizens by the West’s military.

Be absolutely clear: if the US launches an illegal attack on Iran (or any other innocent citizenry), with the backing of our government, we will be guilty for all eternity if we do not coordinate and mobilise a fundamental physical resistance in the UK and beyond. Given what each and every one of us now knows beyond all doubt about our murderous, cowardly leaders, passive disdain is perhaps the most pernicious of public crimes.

More than a million marching on London was not enough to prevent Blair perpetrating the unspeakable war crime of Iraq; democracy thus demands – in the genuine sense of that word – that we raise the bar.

We need to start preparing now.

March 15 :: 12 noon :: Trafalgar Square :: London

The truth-reversal of the Bush regime reached such epic proportions so long ago now that we should avoid getting bogged down in the detail. Quite simply what we are witnessing is larceny and murder on a genocidal scale – the brazen annexing of sovereign lands for both their immediate resources and the geopolitical leverage their scorched, broken earth will provide Western governments.

The US military can quite simply be called, to coin Michael Klare’s memorable phrase, an ‘oil police force’ – carrying out policies whose genesis stretches back to WW2 and beyond and which have been sustained and exacerbated by every successive US president. Namely: aggressively militarising the world’s primary energy zones (Persian Gulf, Caspian Basin) at any human cost in order to guarantee an unwavering flow of oil and thereby maintain US world dominance. What we are seeing – yet, indeed, failing to actually grasp – is the simple continuation of this violent geopolitical rape.

Nancy Romer of US Labour Against the War gave one of the most rapturously-received deliveries on December 4th. “What is occurring,” she explained with searing clarity, “is essentially a policy of wealth transference” – the transposition of resources from an increasingly taxed US working class and their conscripted children (currently dying and laying waste to the Middle East), via the rebuilding contracts subsequently offered to Western corporations, and finally back to the coffers of elite multinational shareholders. A trail of dollars and blood that stretches halfway around the world and back.

Our government, who have been quick to ensure that British firms get their due slice of the rebuilding pie, are utterly complicit in this deception, murderous exploitation and mass slaughter.

Iran has every right to pursue nuclear technology. It is as simple as that. The only responsibility the US and UK have in the Middle East, under international law, is to leave.

Even leaving aside such self-evident truths, we might reflect on the fact that the only country to aggressively detonate nuclear warheads in history is the United States of America. And furthermore, the only despots to actually perpetrate “mass destruction”, using weapons, in the Middle East in the past decade, are Bush, Blair and and their willing cohorts.

Our goverments are liars and murderers.

It is no longer enough to condemn them from afar.