Home > Tariq Ali: ’Punish the politicians with blood on their hands!’
Tariq Ali: ’Punish the politicians with blood on their hands!’
by Open-Publishing - Sunday 28 March 2004Norm Dixon, Sydney
US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and Australian PM John Howard - ’politicians with
blood on their hands’ - should be ’punished’ at the
ballot box for invading and occupying Iraq, renowned
political writer and activist Tariq Ali told the 950
people who filled the University of NSW’s Clancy
Auditorium on March 14. The meeting was organised by
Green Left Weekly.
Pakistan-born, British-based Ali is a veteran of the
far-left movement in Pakistan and Europe and the author
of many books, the most recent being Bush in Babylon (on
the Iraq war) and The Clash of Fundamentalisms (on
political Islam and US imperialism). He is on the
editorial committee of the influential London-based New
Left Review and appears occasionally as a political
commentator of the ABC’s Lateline program.
His words proved prophetic, as while he was speaking,
Spanish voters delivered a crushing defeat to their
warmongering government.
According to Ali, this was well deserved punishment for
supporting a war based on lies. ’There were no weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq’, he pointed out, ’because
if there had been [the US and its allies] would not have
invaded’. He added that Hussein had no links with the
9/11 attacks or with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.
Ali noted that Ron Suskind’s recent book, The Price of
Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the
Education of Paul O’Neill, had revealed that one week
into Bush’s presidency, many months before 9/11, the US
National Security Council discussed how to invade Iraq
for its oil.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq has two main goals, said Ali: to
provide a display of imperial power and to capture
Iraq’s oil reserves, which would allow the US to
’determine the economies’ of its present and future
economic competitors, in particular China, Japan and the
Korean peninsula. Ali explained that while the US today
is politically and militarily strong, it is economically
’not so strong’ and in debt to Japan and China.
Real intel failure Ali stated that Washington’s real
’intelligence failure’ in Iraq was to believe that
Iraqis would ’love to be occupied’ and there would be no
resistance. Washington’s ’house Arabs’ - exiled pro-US
Iraqis - had assured Bush that the US invaders would be
’welcomed with sweets and flowers’. However, this was
not case. Even in anti-Hussein strongholds, US troops
were not welcomed as ’liberators’, which amazed Western
journalists, Ali said.
’But why were they amazed?’, Ali asked. Iraqis of all
religions and ethnic identification fought the British
for more than 30 years to drive them and their puppets
out, before they succeeded in 1958, he explained. ’We
are on the verge of seeing a similar development’, Ali
predicted.
The US occupation is brutal, something the Western media
ignores, Ali said. US-led forces are behaving like
brutal ’colonial occupiers’, knocking down people’s
houses and questioning women and children at gunpoint in
order to crush the resistance. However, ’the result is
more and more people want [the occupiers] out of there’.
More than 8000 Iraqi civilians have died so far, Ali
noted.
The resistance of the Iraqi people has already had a
positive impact, Ali said. It has given ’the US
Democrats their tongues back’ and helped create an
’official’ opposition to the war in the US. More
importantly, ’it has made future US military adventures
in Syria and Iran virtually impossible’.
There are ’two violent occupations in the heart of the
Arab world ... as long as Iraq and Palestine remain
occupied, there will be no peace in that region or the
rest of the world’, Ali declared to loud and prolonged
applause. He voiced support for a democratic, secular
’Palestine-Israel’ in which all had full and equal
political and social rights.
Ali described the idea that al Qaeda - ’a pathetic
organisation of 2000-3000 people’ - is a genuine threat
to ’Western civilisation and the American empire’ as ’a
joke’. The only way to stop the resort to terrorism, Ali
said, is by finding political solutions to political
problems, whether in Palestine or the Basque Country.
However, Washington’s ’shoot first, ask questions later’
approach in Afghanistan and Iraq will only prolong
terrorism.
Defeat Ali said he would ’be delighted’ to see Bush
defeated in November’s presidential election. He added
that he did not have illusions in the US Democratic
Party’s John Kerry, ’who at best would put some clothes
on the empire’, but Bush’s defeat ’would be seen
globally as a slap in the face for invading Iraq. I
would be delighted to see Tony Blair defeated in Britain
for the same reason.’
What is needed now is ’genuine oppositional movements,
dissident currents from below’ to be built, Ali said.
The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world in
February 2003 were cause for optimism, Ali argued.
Millions came out for the first time in the genuine
belief that the invasion of Iraq could be stopped, and
while their seeming lack of impact may have demoralised
many for a period, the fact that they came out once,
means that they will come out again. ’Political
consciousness develops unevenly. People only learn from
their own experiences and every time the West intervenes
a new situation is created’, Ali explained.
Ali pointed to the experience during the Vietnam War, in
which the Vietnamese people’s resistance, combined with
mass opposition in the US, resulted in mounting
opposition inside the US armed forces. This developed to
such an extent that the continuation of the war was
politically possible.
Ali concluded his address by saying that large
demonstrations on March 20 against the US-led occupation
of Iraq will contribute to repeating that process today.
From Green Left Weekly, March 24, 2004. Visit the Green
Left Weekly home page.