Download full hour long show here http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/77381 War in Iraq: Rushanara Ali MP steps down from Labour front bench in protest at military action http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/war-in-iraq-rushanara-ali-mp-steps-down-from-labour-front-bench-in-protest-at-military-action-9758967.html Britain’s involvement in the new Iraq war is a doomed and dangerous gesture http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/25/britain-new-iraq-war-doomed-token-gesture With no proper strategy, the return to conflict will only reinforce the politics of fear that is the grimmest legacy of the Blair era Simon Jenkins The Guardian, Thursday 25 September 2014 This is the moment in any war when peace goes dumb. The cause is just. The enemy is in our sights, and the provocation is extreme. Blood races through tabloid veins. It is white feathers for dissenters. The British government’s evident eagerness to bomb Iraq will be put by David Cameron to the House of Commons on Friday. With an election in the offing, Labour’s Ed Miliband dares not disagree. The prime minister’s case, made to the United Nations on Wednesday, is that the Islamic State (Isis) rebellion is “an evil against which the whole world must unite”. No one would quarrel with that. Unlike Cameron’s abortive bid to bomb Syria last year, legality is covered by an invitation from Iraq’s hapless rulers in Baghdad and a refusal to bomb Syria. Past mistakes in Iraq, says Cameron, should not be an excuse for inaction. “We must not be so frozen with fear that we do not do anything at all.” Nor should we be so intoxicated by war fever as to do the wrong thing. Iraq has been chief bomb target for western electoral machismo since Bill Clinton’s “Monica Lewinsky” air strikes in 1998. They initiated a decade of mendacity. Saddam Hussein’s weapons arsenal was declared eliminated, then it was not. After killing hundreds of civilians, Tony Blair and his cabinet declared that Iraq still posed “an imminent threat to Britain”. The subsequent war was said to have installed freedom and democracy in that country, another untruth. As the Royal United Services Institute concluded in a recent survey, far “from reducing international terrorism … the 2003 invasion [of Iraq] had the effect of promoting it”. Those demanding a resumption of the bombing should explain how things are different this time – or be guilty of willing mission creep. So far they could hardly be less convincing. An indication is their resort to adjectival hysteria, Isis being variously repulsive, genocidal, atrocious, monstrous, unspeakable, satanic. Everyone seems to accept that air strikes “alone” cannot win. Yet everyone also asserts that there is no question of following them with ground attacks, which is the essence of coordinated war. They are merely to “degrade Isis assets”, mostly by demolishing empty buildings at vast expense. They are sending “a message” to someone or other. Cameron’s strategy is apparently to leave local Iraqi forces to deliver victory. That might be reasonable, given that they are the most expensively trained troops on earth. But they have shown themselves useless. They have been given intensive bombing cover by the Americans for seven weeks, and Isis is firmly in place. Meanwhile, Cameron refuses to hold his nose and form a tactically vital alliance with Assad of Syria and with the Iranians. He appears not to want to win................ The return to war will reinforce the politics of fear – which is the grimmest legacy of the Blair era in Britain. It has Cameron popping in and out of his Cobra bunker like a rabbit in a hole. Every government office, every train, every airport welcomes visitors to Britain with terror warnings and alerts. Cameron does this because he knows he can only get Britons to go to war by portraying Isis as a “threat to Britain’s national security”. Some Isis adherents may have criminal intent, but that is a matter for the police. Britain survived a far greater menace from the IRA without crumbling. Its existence is not threatened by jihadism. The claim is ludicrous. Cameron must have no faith in his own country. The contrast between Asia’s eastern and western extremities is now stark, the one booming, the other descending into catastrophic instability and medieval horror. It is impossible not to relate this to two centuries of western imperialism and meddling. It strains belief that further intervention – through the crudest of all forms of aggression – can bring peace and reconciliation. Islam’s wars are not Britain’s business. We owe their human victims all the aid we can to relieve suffering. We do not owe them our incompetence in trying to recast their politics. That is a task for the Arabs and their neighbours, not for Britain’s soldiers and taxpayers.

• published: 27 Sep 2014
• views: 1687