Tariq Ali: `Punish the politicians with blood on their hands!'

Norm 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.
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