Iraq Follow

ISRAEL IS heavily involved in Bush and Blair's war on Iraq. Top White House hawks like Richard Perle identify strongly with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and his hard right Likud Party. Perle and other White House hawks want to reshape the Middle East to fit Israel's interests.

GEORGE BUSH and the gang who run the White House are waging a second war - at home on the majority of ordinary Americans. The names of those behind that war are the same as those ordering the bombers to pound Iraq. They include US government figures like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, right wing thinkers like William Kristol, and wealthy, corporate-backed groups they are linked to like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

THE INVASION of Iraq is the third time in only six years that Tony Blair has sent British armed forces to war alongside the United States. Before Iraq were the wars in Afghanistan and the Balkans. And before those many can remember two more wars in which British forces have fought - the 1991 Gulf War and the 1982 Falklands War.

MEDIA REPORTS have repeated phrases from the US and British governments designed to con us into thinking this is a "humanitarian" war. But they don't want to admit the murky origins of some of those phrases. Obliterating Iraq is really about "fighting the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqi people", we are told. Both the British and the US are well used to saying this about their dirty wars of occupation.

PAY BATTLES and the mass movement against the war on Iraq shone through the NUJ journalists' union conference held in Llandudno, North Wales, last week. The conference was the largest the union has held for years. Strikes against low pay at around 20 local and national newspapers over the last year and scores of union recognition victories resulted in more branches electing delegates.

THE WAR against Iraq is about brutal occupation, not liberation. And every honest commentator admits it's going to get worse. More death, more destruction. Yet the government and its friends in the media say that having started this war, we have to finish it.

TENS OF thousands of people took to the streets of Britain last Saturday as part of the Stop the War Coalition's day of action. "Over 15,000 marched in Edinburgh," says Mick Napier. "The mood was determined. Speaker after speaker called for the immediate end to the invasion. Susan Karim, an Iraqi, used information from her relatives inside Iraq to describe the horrors being visited on the heads of ordinary Iraqis by the invading American and British forces."

THE US and Britain claim they are fighting in Iraq to liberate people like the Kurds. The leaders of the two factions that rule the Kurdish area in northern Iraq are cooperating with the US. But the whole history of the Middle East is one of great powers promising the Kurds liberation, and then betraying them.

THE LAND that is today Iraq is home to some of the greatest achievements of human civilisation. The south of modern Iraq is littered with magnificent ruins of the first real cities in human history - places like Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Kish and Ur (from which the biblical Abraham supposedly came).

LAST YEAR some 15,000 people from Iraq fled to Britain and applied for asylum. At last count, only 700 had received refugee status. In early March the Home Office deported to Spain an Iraqi family that had come to this country in 1999.

GEORGE BUSH, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld - and their media cheerleaders - said it was a "war crime" when captured US soldiers were shown on Iraqi TV. They talked of the Geneva convention. Bush and Blair are hypocrites. The US has held prisoners of war (PoWs) captured in Afghanistan for more than a year with no rights whatever. They have been held in cages, and subject to torture, at Camp X-Ray - the US base on Cuba.

THE SCOTTISH Labour Party conference revolted against the war last week. The rebellion was remarkable coming just weeks before the Scottish Parliament elections. The Scottish Labour Party's top officials had tried desperately to prevent a debate on Iraq.