George Monbiot (Guardian Unlimited): Dreamers and idiots

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday November 11

Dreamers and idiots
Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and Afghanistan
By George Monbiot

Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public imagination. They must convince us that there is no other means of preventing invasion, or conquering terrorism, or even defending human rights. When information is scarce, imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover - until it is too late - how plausible the alternatives may be.
So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies, what would we do, the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the clanking rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were "indulging... in a cosmic whinge". To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama bin Laden's useful idiots".
Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards suggested, this might have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest that, as President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed... al-Qaida". Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of foreigners.
But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to come to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we discovered last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy.

Read more.

[T_i_B]

1. I'm amazed nobody else is replying to this

So I'll run with the comment about Uzbekistan.

Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of foreigners.

You see, Blair's poodling to Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan is something that some on the left have started to wise up to and bash Blair with with some vigour. Here is Monbiot again for starters, in more detail.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1072313,00.html

There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

His crime, like that of many of the country's prisoners, was practising his religion. Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, learned his politics in the Soviet Union. He was appointed under the old system, and its collapse in 1991 did not interrupt his rule. An Islamist terrorist network has been operating there, but Karimov makes no distinction between peaceful Muslims and terrorists: anyone who worships privately, who does not praise the president during his prayers or who joins an organisation which has not been approved by the state can be imprisoned. Political dissidents, human rights activists and homosexuals receive the same treatment. Some of them, like in the old Soviet Union, are sent to psychiatric hospitals.

So what of Tony Blair, the man who claims that human rights are so important that they justify going to war? Well, at the beginning of this year, he granted Uzbekistan an open licence to import whatever weapons from the United Kingdom Mr Karimov fancies. But his support goes far beyond that. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has repeatedly criticised Karimov's crushing of democracy movements and his use of torture to silence his opponents. Like Roger Casement, the foreign office envoy who exposed the atrocities in the Congo a century ago, Murray has been sending home dossiers which could scarcely fail to move anyone who cares about human rights.

Blair has been moved all right: moved to do everything he could to silence our ambassador. Mr Murray has been threatened with the sack, investigated for a series of plainly trumped-up charges and persecuted so relentlessly by his superiors that he had to spend some time, like many of Karimov's critics, in a psychiatric ward, though in this case for sound clinical reasons. This pressure, according to a senior government source, was partly "exercised on the orders of No 10".

Now here is George Galloway

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1073786,00.html

The recall of Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan by the less-than-ethical foreign secretary, Jack Straw, for the crime of complaining that the Uzbek dictator was boiling his critics to death, meanwhile showed the sheer depths of the double standards employed by New Labour towards dictatorships.

Make no mistake, there is a massive double standard being excercised here by Bush & Blair had we should not be afraid to point it out.

[Nancy Waterman]

2. Devastating article by Monbiot

Thanks for posting.