There Are Only 22 Countries in the World That the British Haven’t Invaded. Now the Brits have become an ignoble appendage of the American empire. Some are beginning to chafe under the weight of foreign hegemony.

By David Swanson
Remarks at Independence from America event outside Menwith Hill “RFA” (NSA) base in Yorkshire.
http://warisacrime.org/content/celebrating-independence-america-england

[F]irst of all, thank you to Lindis Percy and everyone else involved in bringing me here, and letting me bring my son Wesley along.

And thank you to the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. I know you share my view that accountability of American bases would lead to elimination of American bases.

And thank you to Lindis for sending me her accounts of refusing to be arrested unless the police disarmed themselves.  In the United States, refusing any sort of direction from a police officer will get you charged with the crime of refusing a lawful order, even when the order is unlawful. In fact, that’s often the only charge levied against people ordered to cease protests and demonstrations that in theory are completely legal.  And, of course, telling a U.S. police officer to disarm could quite easily get you locked up for insanity if it didn’t get you shot.

Can I just say how wonderful it is to be outside of the United States on the Fourth of July?  There are many wonderful and beautiful things in the United States, including my family and friends, including thousands of truly dedicated peace activists, including people bravely going to prison to protest the murders by drone of others they’ve never met in distant lands whose loved ones will probably never hear about the sacrifices protesters are making.  (Did you know the commander of a military base in New York State has court orders of protection to keep specific nonviolent peace activists away from his base to ensure his physical safety — or is it his peace of mind?)  And, of course, millions of Americans who tolerate or celebrate wars or climate destruction are wonderful and even heroic in their families and neighborhoods and towns — and that’s valuable too.

I’ve been cheering during U.S. World Cup games.  But I cheer for neighborhood, city, and regional teams too.  And I don’t talk about the teams as if I’m them.  I don’t say “We scored!” as I sit in a chair opening a beer.  And I don’t say “We won!” when the U.S. military destroys a nation, kills huge numbers of people, poisons the earth, water, and air, creates new enemies, wastes trillions of dollars, and passes its old weapons to the local police who restrict our rights in the name of wars fought in the name of freedom.  I don’t say “We lost!” either. We who resist have a responsibility to resist harder, but not to identify with the killers, and certainly not to imagine that the men, women, children, and infants being murdered by the hundreds of thousands constitute an opposing team wearing a different uniform, a team whose defeat by hellfire missile I should cheer for. 

Identifying with my street or my town or my continent doesn’t lead the same places that identifying with the military-plus-some-minor-side-services that calls itself my national government leads.  And it’s very hard to identify with my street; I have such little control over what my neighbors do.  And I can’t manage to identify with my state because I’ve never even seen most of it.  So, once I start identifying abstractly with people I don’t know, I see no sensible argument for stopping anywhere short of identifying with everybody, rather than leaving out 95% and identifying with the United States, or leaving out 90% and identifying with the so-called “International Community” that cooperates with U.S. wars.  Why not just identify with all humans everywhere? On those rare occasions when we learn the personal stories of distant or disparaged people, we’re supposed to remark, “Wow, that really humanizes them!” Well, I’d like to know, what were they before those details made them humanized?  

In the U.S. there are U.S. flags everywhere all the time now, and there’s a military holiday for every day of the year.  But the Fourth of July is the highest holiday of holy nationalism.  More than any other day, you’re likely to see children being taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, regurgitating a psalm to obedience like little fascist robots.  You’re more likely to hear the U.S. national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner.  Who knows which war the words of that song come from? 

That’s right, the War of Canadian Liberation, in which the United States tried to liberate Canadians (not for the first or last time) who welcomed them much as the Iraqis would later do, and the British burned Washington.  Also known as the War of 1812, the bicentennial was celebrated in the U.S. two years ago.  During that war, which killed thousands of Americans and Brits, mostly through disease, during one pointless bloody battle among others, plenty of people died, but a flag survived.  And so we celebrate the survival of that flag by singing about the land of the free that imprisons more people than anywhere else on earth and the home of the brave that strip-searches airplane passengers and launches wars if three Muslims shout “boo!”

Did you know the U.S. flag was recalled? You know how a car will be recalled by the manufacturer if the brakes don’t work? A satirical paper called the Onion reported that the U.S. flag had been recalled after resulting in 143 million deaths.  Better late than never.

There are many wonderful and rapidly improving elements in U.S. culture.  It has become widely and increasingly unacceptable to be bigoted or prejudiced against people, at least nearby people, because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, and other factors.  It still goes on, of course, but it’s frowned upon.  I had a conversation last year with a man sitting in the shadow of a carving of confederate generals on a spot that used to be sacred to the Ku Klux Klan, and I realized that he would never, even if he thought it, say something racist about blacks in the United States to a stranger he’d just met.  And then he told me he’d like to see the entire Middle East wiped out with nuclear bombs. 

We’ve had comedians’ and columnists’ careers ended over racist or sexist remarks, but weapons CEOs joke on the radio about wanting big new occupations of certain countries, and nobody blinks.  We have antiwar groups that push for celebration of the military on  Memorial Day and other days like this one.  We have so-called progressive politicians who describe the military as a jobs program, even though it actually produces fewer jobs per dollar than education or energy or infrastructure or never taxing those dollars at all.  We have peace groups that argue against wars on the grounds that the military needs to be kept ready for other, possibly more important wars.  We have peace groups that oppose military waste, when the alternative of military efficiency is not what’s needed.  We have libertarians who oppose wars because they cost money, exactly as they oppose schools or parks.  We have humanitarian warriors who argue for wars because of their compassion for the people they want bombed.  We have peace groups that side with the libertarians and urge selfishness, arguing for schools at home instead of bombs for Syrians, without explaining that we could give actual aid to Syrians and ourselves for a fraction of the cost of the bombs. 

We have liberal lawyers who say they can’t tell whether blowing children up with drones is legal or not, because President Obama has a secret memo (now only partially secret) in which he legalizes it by making it part of a war, and they haven’t seen the memo, and as a matter of principle they, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, ignore the U.N. Charter, the Kellogg Briand Pact, and the illegality of war.  We have people arguing that bombing Iraq is now a good thing because it finally gets the U.S. and Iran talking to each other.  We have steadfast refusals to mention a half-million to a million-and-a-half Iraqis based on the belief that Americans can only possibly care about 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq.  We have earnest crusades to turn the U.S. military into a force for good, and the inevitable demand of those who begin to turn against war, that the United States must lead the way to peace — when of course the world would be thrilled if it just brought up the rear.

And yet, we also have tremendous progress.  A hundred years ago Americans were listening to snappy tunes about how hunting Huns was a fun game to play, and professors were teaching that war builds national character.  Now war has to be sold as necessary and humanitarian because nobody believes it’s fun or good for you anymore.  Polls in the United States put support for possible new wars below 20 percent and sometimes below 10 percent.  After the House of Commons over here said No to missile strikes on Syria, Congress listened to an enormous public uproar in the U.S. and said No as well.  In February, public pressure led to Congress backing off a new sanctions bill on Iran that became widely understood as a step toward war rather than away from it.  A new war on Iraq is having to be sold and developed slowly in the face of huge public resistance that has even resulted in some prominent advocates of war in 2003 recently recanting. 

This shift in attitude toward wars is largely the result of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the exposure of the lies and horrors involved.  We shouldn’t underestimate this trend or imagine that it’s unique to the question of Syria or Ukraine.  People are turning against war.  For some it may be all about the money.  For others it may be a question of which political party owns the White House.  The Washington Post has a poll showing that almost nobody in the U.S. can find Ukraine on a map, and those who place it furthest from where it really lies are most likely to want a U.S. war there, including those who place it in the United States.  One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Yet the larger trend is this: from geniuses right down to morons, we are, most of us, turning against war.  The Americans who want Ukraine attacked are fewer than those believing in ghosts, U.F.O.s, or the benefits of climate change.

Now, the question is whether we can shake off the idea that after hundreds of bad wars there just might be a good one around the corner.  To do that we have to recognize that wars and militaries make us less safe, not safer.  We have to understand that Iraqis aren’t ungrateful because they’re stupid but because the U.S. and allies destroyed their home. 

We can pile even more weight on the argument for ending the institution of war.  These U.S. spy bases are used for targeting missiles but also for spying on governments and companies and activists.  And what justifies the secrecy?  What allows treating everyone as an enemy?  Well, one necessary component is the concept of an enemy.  Without wars nations lose enemies.  Without enemies, nations lose excuses to abuse people.  Britain was the first enemy manufactured by the would-be rulers of the United States on July 4, 1776.  And yet King George’s abuses don’t measure up to the abuses our governments now engage in, justified by their traditions of war making and enabled by the sort of technologies housed here.

War is our worst destroyer of the natural environment, the worst generator of human rights abuses, a leading cause of death and creator of refugee crises.  It swallows some $2 trillion a year globally, while tens of billions could alleviate incredible suffering, and hundreds of billions could pay for a massive shift to renewable energies that might help protect us from an actual danger. 

What we need now is a movement of education and lobbying and nonviolent resistance that doesn’t try to civilize war but to take steps in the direction of abolishing it — which begins by realizing that we can abolish it.  If we can stop missiles into Syria, there’s no magical force that prevents our stopping missiles into every other country.  War is not a primal urge of nations that must burst out a little later if once suppressed.  Nations aren’t real like that.  War is a decision made by people, and one that we can make utterly unacceptable.

People in dozens of countries are now working on a campaign for the elimination of all war called World Beyond War.  Please check out WorldBeyondWar.org or talk to me about getting involved.  Our goal is to bring many more people and organizations into a movement not aimed at a specific war proposal from a specific government, but at the entire institution of war everywhere.  We’ll have to work globally to do this.  We’ll have to throw our support behind the work being done by groups like the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases and the Movement for the Abolition of War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Veterans For Peace and so many more.

Some friends of ours in Afghanistan, the Afghan Peace Volunteers, have proposed that everyone living under the same blue sky who wants to move the world beyond war wear a sky blue scarf.  You can make your own or find them at TheBlueScarf.org.  I hope by wearing this to communicate my sense of connection to those back in the United States working for actual freedom and bravery, and my same sense of connection to those in the rest of the world who have had enough of war. Happy Fourth of July!

[F]or more than two years, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been a de facto political prisoner, confined to the grounds of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Back in August 2010, a Swedish press exclusive with the emotionally charged word “rape,” in connection with Julian Assange’s name, spread rapidly across the world like a viral infection. Since then, it has been difficult to change any public misconception that he has been guilty of forcibly having sex with two women, on separate occasions, within the span of a week. This itself should ring alarm bells: two accusations, days apart. Sweden, against all other advanced legal systems, has its own interpretation of what constitutes rape, and this appears to be anything from consensual sexual relations to forced penetration, and judging from the high-profile Assange farce, it is not a country to which single men would be advised to travel.

There are yet more misconceptions in the public domain. To begin with, Assange has not been charged with any crime regarding sexual misconduct. He is only wanted for questioning to see if there is a case to answer. Proof that this is a political issue comes from the overlooked detail that Assange has already answered questions from a former prosecution team and been cleared to leave Sweden, which he did. Only when Claes Borgström, a man close to both Sweden and the United States, got involved, was the prosecution case re-opened and a European arrest warrant issued as though Assange was a common criminal. Assange, though, has always been prepared to answer any allegations. He just does not want to be extradited to the US, which is what would most likely happen if he were to step foot again on Swedish soil.

The arguments revolve around whether or not a condom was used in one case, that claimed by one of the accusers, and if a condom was used whether or not it was torn in the second case, that claimed by the other accuser. In most countries, including Sweden, such accusations would never normally make it to court, but only in Sweden would they be labeled as rape. To request Assange’s extradition on such flimsy pretexts can only be described as being politically motivated. It would be simple for the prosecution team to go to London and interview Assange about the allegations. Swedish prosecutors and police have done so before on much more serious allegations. As previously speculated, if representatives of the prosecution team were to go to London to question Assange, they know full well that they would come back empty-handed because they, more than any, know there is no case to answer.

Most reasonable people, and this includes a number of Swedish lawyers, think the prosecution team should interview Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. In a speech in Adelaide, Australia, in April 2013 Supreme Court Justice Stefan Lindskog called the whole affair a “mess” and said he has no idea why the prosecutor has not gone to London to interview Assange.  Rolf Hillegren, a former Swedish prosecutor has said virtually the same thing, as we noted in an earlier article. Hillegren believes that this injustice has brought shame on the Swedish judicial system, and the prosecution team have backed themselves into a corner. The only reason they are prolonging the affair now is “prestige,” he suggests. Others might argue that it is to get Assange extradited, to serve the interests of Sweden’s masters across the Atlantic.

In a televised debate on Swedish television in early February 2014, on the Agenda program, the prosecution team made themselves look rather foolish. It is bad enough that all these people, who appear to belong to the same political party and have connections with the very highest pinnacles of the Swedish government, are setting their stall on entrapping Assange a second time, because he revealed through Wikileaks the atrocities of US military actions in Iraq and elsewhere. Anne Ramberg, secretary general of the Swedish Bar Association, was another legal representative on the program who could not understand what was wrong with interviewing Assange in London. She called the previous 18 months a “circus.” Elisabeth Massi Fritz, the legal representative of one of Assange’s accusers and whose contacts in the Swedish government go right to the prime minister, was quick to respond to this debate with an interview to please Sweden’s US masters. While Massi Fritz is keen to get publicity, this must be on her own terms. I wrote to her twice but failed to elicit a response. That, of course, is her prerogative. It seems to be the way the prosecution team treats everybody who tries to push this issue to a conclusion.

Eva Joly is a French Green Party MEP and former investigating magistrate for over 25 years at the High Court of Paris. Having dual citizenship from her native Norway, she is ideally placed to understand Scandinavian legal issues which, coupled with her legal expertise and human rights’ campaigns, makes her a formidable international force. One would expect that at least one member of the Swedish prosecution team would be prepared to meet and discuss with her a possible solution to the Assange impasse. Joly’s concern is not only for Assange but also for his accusers. She has made inquiries to speak with Justice Minister Beatrice Ask, overall prosecutor in the case Marianne Ny, and the chief prosecutor Anders Perklev. All have refused her request for an audience.

Together with three colleagues, Rafik Saley, Okoth Osewe, and Dr. Selim Y. Gool, I have reported Ms Fritz to the Swedish Bar Association for bad legal practice in publishing on her law-firm’s web site an inaccurate article to the detriment of Assange and also issuing conflicting statements on the originally-released testimony of her client. We argued that when people are misrepresented, this affects everybody: an argument Eva Joly has used in her petitioning. Because none of us is directly involved in the case, our report to the Bar Association was rejected.

The cost of this affair has been immense to Swedish and British taxpayers. For example, the Assange case is costing the UK taxpayer nearly £10,000 per day, meaning that more than £7 million have already been wasted on this flippancy. Now that there is so much egg on the face of the prosecution team, not only do they choose not to meet with those who might be able to provide a solution, but also they prolong the case indefinitely at taxpayers expense. Of course, these lawyers are being paid all the time, so the longer they can protract the case, the more lucrative it is for them. The solution has always been a trip to London. There was never any need to seek a European arrest warrant — a warrant reserved for the most heinous criminals — for a case that should be handled in a magistrate or police court. Since the prosecution’s case is flimsy, they believe it is in their best interests to please the US authorities by either delivering Assange to them via Sweden, or keeping him in isolation at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

It is unclear how much more taxpayer money will be spent on this case. Like Sweden, the UK is well disposed towards the US, and nowadays US policy becomes its allies’ policy too. Ultimately, this political intrigue will conclude, as it must, and everyone will wonder why it went on for so long. As Swedish Supreme Court Judge Stefan Lindskog said: “At the end of the day, many years from now, I think Assange will not, even in Sweden, be associated with his efforts to escape the laws of Sweden. He will be thought of as the person who made public some pieces of classified information to the benefit of mankind.”

Editor’s Notes: Photographs two and nine by Djandy. Photographs five and seven by Mark Burban. Photograph three by Marshall. Photograph four by Riq. Photograph six by Threthny and photograph eight by Pamela Drew.

By Judy Bello

[E]arlier this month, I traveled with seven other westerners to Syria where we joined with thirty plus activists, journalists and politicians from Asia, Africa and South America to observe the Syria Presidential election.       Bashar. Assad won 88% of the vote.    Though some people in opposition areas boycotted the election, and others could not get to a polling station, 73% of the entire population of Syria eligible to vote did vote.  The 73% turnout was more significant than the votes for Assad.   I had heard a detailed report back from the electoral commission, and spent voting day touring voting sites, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by this outcome.

Looking at the election as a referendum on the current government, the result was an expression of unity across Syrian society, the unity of a people who came forward to support the sovereignty and independence of their country.    When Bashar Assad was declared the winner of the Syrian election, people celebrated in the streets late into the night. in central Damascus, and other cities around Syria.   Even in Homs, people danced all night in celebration.  The slogan of the President was ‘Unity’ and that is what the people wanted to hear.

There were those who gushed in their affection and support of the President.  And I have at least one recorded on video.  However there were many more people who are tired of war and suffering and hoping to begin rebuilding under a government that could support their basic needs.  And there were those who were ready to cut their losses and return to a life that wasn’t so bad.  Whatever softness there was in the connection between the very well thought out process and the villagers who loosely followed it, there is no doubt that the majority of Syrians want Assad to continue to govern. 

U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry dismissed the Syrian election as a fraud several days before it took place, and many Western countries, including the US, Canada and members of  the EU joined Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Monarchies in denying Syrian expat voters the opportunity to participate in the election at a local Embassy.      The Western press largely dismissed the election, though a massive outpouring of Syrian voters in Lebanon surprised everyone including, we later learned, the Syrian Election Board.

However, it seems clear, as the current events in Iraq unfold, that somebody took the results of the Syrian election along with the successes of the Syrian Arab Army in liberating the towns along the Lebanese border, and throughout most of the populated areas of the country (except for Aleppo) quite seriously.   Suddenly, a week after the election, the most militant, brutal fighting force in Syria moved much of its forces to Iraq where, with the support of a well organize Sunni defection, they brazenly swarmed across the north west area of the country taking over one city after another.   Iraq is seriously shaken.   It has already been through a terrible bloodbath within this decade and the healing has not seriously begun.  Now a new sectarian war has appeared to be on the horizon.

ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), a violent, fanatical organization of religious extremists,  supposedly a breakaway from al-Qaeda, is not new to Iraq.  It was born there during the US occupation.  The man who currently leads ISIS spent several years in the US prison camp at Bucca.  After spending another year in an Iraqi prison, he was released, and shortly after that he took charge of ISIS.   Wealthy Saudis have consistently  funded ISIS, while Turkey has facilitated delivery of arms and other supplies to ISIS across their border.    ISIS has been dismantling the factories in Aleppo, transporting them across the Turkish border and then setting them up for business there.   This could not be done without the tolerance of the Turkish government.  Members of ISIS were trained by US Special Ops forces in Jordan last year.   When ISIS took over the oil well at Raqqa in Syria, the EU dropped its sanctions against Syrian oil production so that they could provide parts to repair the old broken down wells so ISIS could start pumping the oil, which I assume European countries are now buying.

During the last year Syria had, with the help of Iran and Hebollah, begun to beat back the insurgency and recover the territories lost to war.   It is true that thousands of Syrian refugees are in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, but many times more are in refugee camps in the government held areas of Syria where they are supplied with food and shelter, and basic medical care,  and schools for the children.   The Syrian Arab Army is mostly Sunni.  It reflects the population demographics of the country as does the government bureaucracy.    Iraq does not have the resources, the political integrity or the stable social structures to fight a war like this.   It is already fractured in all directions.   There are no resources left for refugees in Iraq.    A sectarian war is a real possibility.

Iraqi President al Maliki has requested the United States to provide assistance.  US President Obama has sent a few Special Ops forces and promised more.   There is a lot of talk about  whether the US should put ‘boots on the ground’; whether the US should use air strikes against ISIS in Iraq.   While the American people stood fast against bombing or sending troops to Syria, they are wavering on Iraq.   Once there are boots on the ground in Iraq, there will be boots crossing the border into Syria.   If drones strike Iraq, they will soon be striking Syria.   It will be open season on Iraq and Syria.

There is talk of dividing the country.  I’m hearing the “We broke it – now we own it” line again.   This is a serious distortion of reality.  We aren’t talking about accidentally knocking a pot off the shelf in a department store.  We didn’t ‘break Iraq’.  We deliberately invaded the country and smashed it.    We had another 7 or 8 years after that to try to ‘fix it’, but instead we presided over the destruction of what remained of the society.  We should not be given control over any process that might affect the integrity of Iraq or Syria.   Who  governs these countries is not our business and we have no right to choose for them.    Creating mayhem with fanatical militias capable of obscene acts of violence is not the way to ‘free’ people.   Dividing people and power according to ethnic and religious affiliations destroys the fabric of ancient societies and benefits only foreign overlords who find it easier to control a weak and unempowered society.

No matter how bad it looks for Iraq, we must not forget that it is most likely that US officals at some level, at least the CIA, had something to do with the redeployment of ISIS to Iraq.   Therefore the last thing they need is ‘help’ from us.   Let us send them our prayers.  Let us send food and medical aid for refugees.  Let us respect their elections be they ever so fragile and flawed.   Let us respect their sovereignty and their right ot solve their own problems.  AND, let us pressure our government to stay out of the fray and to demand that our allies cease to support and facilitate blood thirsty fanatical militant forces in this region.

Let the Iraqis and the Syrians have a chance to restore their countries and their lives.     We don’t own them.  We haven’t earned even the privilege to call ourselves their friends.   Let us give them the freedom to make their own choices and solve their own problems. Cede to them their right to self determination.   That is what we really owe them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

By Michael Faulkner
LETTER FROM LONDON

The term “war criminal” is bandied about often but in few cases it fits the bill as well as in this instance. These two men belong in a dungeon, for high crimes against peace and the death of at least one million people.

[I]t is now more than eleven years since the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by the USA and Britain. Because those who planned and prosecuted that invasion, and those who supported them, continue to defend what they did with contorted and specious arguments, it is worth recalling the attempted justifications for it that were made at the time.

Former prime minister Tony Blair who has escaped prosecution as a war criminal, astonishingly still emerges from time to time, apparently oblivious to the widespread contempt in which he is held, to argue that he did the right thing and that Iraq and the wider world are far better for being rid of Saddam Hussein.  Although he and those who supported the war, including most of the British media at the time, now conveniently avoid mentioning it, the invasion of Iraq was supposedly to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction. It was not to effect regime change. Shortly before the invasion Blair himself pointedly stated that the planned invasion would be called off and Saddam could remain in power if he agreed to destroy his stockpile of WMD. The public was assured that he possessed such weapons despite the absence of any credible evidence that he did and despite convincing testimony from very reliable sources that they had all been destroyed shortly after the first Gulf war. In spite of all this and against mass popular opposition to the war manifested in the largest demonstrations in British history, the U.K. parliament, including crucially the majority of Labour MPs and almost all the Tories, voted in favour of the invasion. Had the majority of Labour MPs voted with the Liberal Democrats and the minority of Tory opponents, Britain could not have joined Bush in the invasion and Blair would have had to resign. It is to their everlasting shame that instead they voted for a war which, at the time and since, the great majority of international lawyers regarded as illegal. The events of the past week or so in Iraq are the entirely foreseeable consequence of that disastrous, criminal invasion in 2003.

At the time of writing (20.June) the situation in Iraq is almost as bad as it can get. Almost, because it can – and by the time this is published – probably will become even worse. At the moment Isis (the Islamic state of Iraq and al-Sham) has control of Iraq’s third largest city, Mosul, and Tal Afar in the north. It has taken Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s birthplace) and also controls a string of smaller towns on or close to the oil pipelines from Basra to Haditha and Tal Afar to Baghdad. This includes the refinery at Baiji. Another refinery at Samarra is also under threat.  In the Kurdish north-west the refinery at Irbil is now effectively in the hands of the large and well-trained Kurdish military force, the peshmerga. The venal Iraqi army, trained and armed by the U.S., and hyped as the best military force in the Arab world, melted away in the north as Isis forces advanced. The corrupt, sectarian, Shia-dominated  government of Nouri al-Maliki, backed until now by the U.S., stands impotently transfixed by the crisis. Maliki can do nothing but beg his paymasters and mentors in Washington and London for air-cover and drones as the jihadists draw ever closer to Baghdad. He has been upstaged by the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistrani, who, with considerable success, has called upon his followers to take up arms against the Sunni jihadists.

The country faces almost certain collapse in one way or another. Either Isis takes Baghdad and proclaims the first stage of a new-born trans-national Caliphate stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gulf, or Iraq disintegrates into three warring regions – a Sunni-Jihadist north-west dominated by Isis; a north-eastern Kurdistan and a Shia dominated south. Whatever may happen, the whole country is likely to undergo a further and more intense period of sectarian-religious conflict. This will occur whether or not Britain and the U.S. intervene. U.S. drone strikes and/or aerial bombardment, should they be attempted, are likely to inflame sectarian passions even more. Such intervention will certainly not bring an end to the crisis provoked by the invasion of 2003. It will simply prolong and intensify the crisis. A mark of British/U.S. desperation may be seen in the overtures at present being made to Iran, only yesterday the dominant actor in G.W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”. Where do things go from here? Can we look forward to the rehabilitation of Assad or a working alliance with Hezbollah? Where does it leave the close relationship with Saudi-Arabia, sworn enemy of Iran and armourer of the Sunni jihadists? And all this hardly begins to address the crucial question of Iraq’s oil reserves and the western stake in the industry. Who will control oil production and export in the tumultuous times ahead? Apparently Opec was predicting earlier this year that 60% of its future production would come from Iraq.

It is a sad reflection on the fate of the “Arab Spring” about which there were such high hopes after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, that in almost every case the outcome has been, not the democratic transformation expected by the revolutionaries, but the ascendancy of reactionary Islamism and, in Egypt, as a counter-blast against it, the restoration of a military regime hardly better than Mubarak’s dictatorship. It is depressing to admit that in Syria after the agonies of the last three years, the choice has turned out to be between a brutish secular dictatorship and an Islamist barbarism redolent of the dark ages. The enlightened forces of the Arab revolution have turned out to be feeble or chimerical. Though true, it doesn’t help much to point out that the emergence and growth of fanatical Islamism in its “modern” manifestation can be traced at least to the arming and funding of the Afghan Mujahedeen by the U.S. against the Soviets in the 1980s, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime and ultimately in the castration, butchery and dismemberment of its leader, Mohammad Najibullah, by the victorious western-backed jihadists in Kabul in1996: a foretaste of things to come.

It is inconvenient for the dwindling band of apologists for the 2003 invasion and supporters of the “War on Terror” to be reminded that before the war to “liberate” the country from Saddam’s tyranny there was no al Qaeda in Iraq. They do not want to be told that the frenzied sectarian bloodletting which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since 2003 was a direct consequence of that illegal invasion and the murderous occupation that succeeded it. Tony Blair continues to deny that there is any causal connection between the war he launched and the catastrophe that is now engulfing Iraq. It beggars belief that the British news media still defer to this man and, as has been remarked recently, it is beyond parody that he is still in post as peace envoy for the Middle East.

But what might one expect a left wing assessment of the present situation to be? Here it is more important than ever to distinguish between wishfulness and reality. In the early years after the Bolshevik revolution when the first revolutionary phase had passed elsewhere, Lenin criticised those who refused to recognize this for believing in fairy tales. In light of the rise to prominence and dominance throughout much of the Arab and wider Muslim world of particularly violent and reactionary brands of Islamism, it makes little sense to continue talking about the Arab revolution as though it was a living reality in any progressive sense.. In 1979 the “Islamic revolution” in Iran marked the beginning of a relatively new phenomenon – the fusion of a mass social revolutionary movement and a predominantly reactionary theocratic ideology (Shia Islamism) containing elements of populist anti-imperialism.  Nowhere in the (Sunni) Arab world and the wider Sunni world have secular revolutionary forces been able to withstand the rise of militant Islamism.  The U.S. and its allies must bear a large part of the responsibility for this. During the cold war their opposition to more progressive secular Arab nationalist movements such as Nasserism and the Algerian FLN which leant towards the Soviet Union, helped bring about the decline of progressive nationalism and paved the way for more pliant reactionary secular regimes, and ultimately for the rise of Islamist jihadists. The most extreme of these are now running rampant in Iraq and Syria.

It is a sad reflection on the present state of affairs that a significant minority of young Muslim men in Britain and elsewhere in Europe have in recent years reacted to western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and to their own often marginalised and economically precarious status in society, by identifying with these jihadist movements. Several thousands from European countries have enlisted to fight in Syria and Iraq. Some commentators have suggested that these jihadists can be compared to the anti-fascists of the 1930s who joined the international brigades to fight for the Spanish republic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain were clear-sighted socialists, motivated by the highest humanist principles, prepared to fight and die for a noble cause – the struggle to defend democracy from the onslaught of a barbaric militarist rebellion. Those who enlist in the ranks of Isis are surrendering themselves to a benighted, intolerant, misogynistic movement that aims to drag the societies it conquers back into the dark ages.

Further western intervention in Iraq and Syria needs to be vigorously opposed. It is by no means certain that the Isis territorial gains in Iraq can be held. It is likely that the internal forces in Iraq will force Nouri al-Maliki to resign and his passing will be most welcome.  But it seems highly unlikely that Iraq will escape an intensified Shia-Sunni-Kurdish conflict. It is likely that the Shia forces will be actively supported by Iran and their proxies, Hezbollah. The outcome, at least in the short-run, could be the break-up of Iraq into three regions. Facing hard and unpalatable reality it is clear that any idea of a progressive secular revolution succeeding in the foreseeable future is to believe in a fairy story. The best that can be realistically hoped for at the moment is that western intervention is blocked and that the advance of Isis is halted and reversed. If that is to be accomplished in Iraq it is likely to be done by predominantly Shia forces, hopefully supported by anti-Isis Sunnis and the Kurdish peshmerga. It is also to be hoped that the back of Isis and similar jihadists in Syria is broken too. If this can only be achieved by the armed forces of the Assad regime backed by Hezbollah, so be it. Not a particularly encouraging outcome. However, the choice is not between differing favourable solutions but between the lesser of evils.

Senior Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column,  Letter from the UK, for TPJ Magazine since 2008, and Letter from London for TGP since 2014. Over the years his articles have appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United Sates where he has friends and family in New York City.