Iraq Follow

TONY BLAIR sought yet again to justify the conquest of Iraq in a recent speech. He harked back to what he plainly regards as an earlier triumph, NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Blair cited this as a precedent for the Anglo-American attack on Iraq. Even "before September 11", he explained, "the world's view of the justification of military action had been changing. The only clear case in international relations for armed intervention had been self defence... But the notion of intervening on humanitarian grounds had been gaining currency."

A mass of anti-war protesters packed the streets of London last Saturday. Exactly one year after the invasion of Iraq, 100,000 people had come to tell Tony Blair that the movement is here to stay. They stretched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square chanting "No justice, no peace" and "Blair out".

THE WARS in Iraq and Afghanistan were built on many lies, but the terrible massacre on Madrid's railways highlights one of the biggest-the world is not a safer place. As RMT members on London Underground we are only too aware of the vulnerability of the tube network. The same newspapers that supported the war regularly run stories with lurid headlines telling us how the bombers are out to get the Underground.

THE CONTINUING nightmare of the occupation of Iraq is making US soldiers rebel against their leaders' plans. Some 600 US soldiers have gone absent without leave from the war. US staff sergeant Camilo Mejia last week refused to carry on fighting in Iraq. The 28 year old soldier says, "I am saying no to war. It is a war for oil, based on lies. "I went to Iraq and was an instrument of violence, and now I have decided to become an instrument of peace. "The Iraqis don't want us there. We don't want to be there. We're getting killed there.

THE WORLD will be a safer place," foreign secretary Jack Straw told parliament two days before the war on Iraq. "Iraq", Tony Blair said in the same debate, "will be the test of whether we take the threat of terrorism seriously." A year later at least 15,000 Iraqis have lost their lives in this "test", each one dying as horribly as the 200 people blown to pieces in Madrid last week.

"AN OPINION poll carried out in Iraq will make good reading for US president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair." So claimed the BBC on Tuesday morning. The Hutton report has obviously bent the BBC's judgement. The kindest thing you can say is that the BBC has "sexed up" the results of the poll that it commissioned.

'NO WAR! No war!" the crowd chanted as the Socialist Party leader, Zapatero, made his acceptance speech in Madrid on Sunday. They did so as a shock election result in Spain removed from office the Tory Popular Party of Aznar. Aznar was the one of the key European leaders who most backed the war against Iraq, and a year ago posed with Bush and Blair in the Azores as they launched that war.

WARMONGERS IN the West rushed to express horror at the death toll in last week's bomb attacks in Madrid. Yet they continue to carry out massacres of their own in Iraq on a regular basis. A year of occupation has led to the deaths of over 10,000 Iraqi civilians.

ACROSS THE world this Saturday people are marching against Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq and "war on terror". An appeal to march on this day came out of the 50,000-strong European Social Forum in Paris last November, and the 100,000-strong World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, in January.

THE ANNUAL women's TUC conference last week showed that trade unionists have not forgotten the Iraq war or swallowed Labour's domestic agenda. Some 400 delegates gathered in Eastbourne. Flashes of anger against the war on Iraq and the treatment of asylum seekers brought the conference to life. One motion asked for coalition forces in Iraq to ensure women's rights were enforced.

12 months on, the carnage in Iraq continues

ANTI-WAR campaigners across the world are preparing to demonstrate on 20 March against the carnage that Bush and Blair have brought to Iraq. The call for protests was raised at the 50,000-strong European Social Forum in Paris last November. The 100,000 who gathered at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, in January backed that call.