I don't know if anyone has seen this little book... NOT ONE MORE DEATH [ISBN 10184467116X] (around US$6) as it's only just been released here.. it's tiny, with a tiny price tag but packs some powerful and important essays by Brian Eno; Harold Pinter; John Le Carre; Richard Dawkins; Micehl Faber and Haifa Zangana.... about the West's (our) involvement in the war in Iraq War.

Here is an excerpt from one of the essays from the book... it's not new news but it's in all our interests to stop and think. Go fix yourself a coffee or pot of tea...

This essay is about BRITAIN's views/role in Iraq...

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The Missionary Position
Brian Eno

The defining event of the last 10 years was the fraudulent election of George Bush as President of the United States in 2000. It was the fruition an an anti-liberal reaction that had been working its way through the American social fabric for the previous 30 years...... we are now in the anti-sixties.

. . . . .

With America terrified after 9/11, and the media in a frenzy of paranoia, it was a foregone consclusion that a "tough" and "no-nonsence" leader like Bush would look right to the American people. The cabal that Bush fronted - toegther with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle - had been manoeving itself into positon throught the nineties, and its members had made their intentions clear in the texts of "The Project for a New Ameircan Century (PNAC) and eslewhere.

They now looked forward to carte blance, secure in the knowledge that anyone questioning their full-frontal assault on liberal deomcracy could be labelled as either naive, or treacherous, and duly marginalized.

They believed in "full spectrum dominance," they believed in pre-emptive military action, but most of all they believed in the historical destiny of the United States and its right to assert and secure its hegemony.

At root they thought that American had triumphed in the world not because it was powerful, but because it was fundamentally right, and history had so judged.
From there it was a short step to thinking that America had a divine duty to help the rest of the world emulate it, and to exclude or even punish those who wouldn't. This is the Missionary position.

Whatever had been achieved or aimed for in the 1960's was what this new revoltuion now had in its sights, and was set to dismantle.

....

Such were the preconditions for a war: the need for a sharply drawn world picture that includes a clear and evil enemy (the Soviet Union have stepped out of the picture); the unstoppable hunger of agressive capitalism; a simplistic cause-and-effect idealism; and a lot of firepower.

That moves the project on from Missionary to Crusader.

But it leaves two unanswered questions: what did Tony Blair have to do with all this, and how did he and Bush end up in Iraq of all places? Wasn't it al-Qaeda we were supposed to be after?

At the time, the kind explanation regarding the Blair/Bush bethrothal was that Blair would rein in the worst impulses of the Bushmen - although this explanation faded as they ignored him whenever it suited them, and anyway, it became clearer that he shared many of their millenarian impulses. Another theory held that Blair, an evangelical Christian like Bush, discovered a "kinship" with him in that they both understood what Good and Evil meant and were prepared to act without the dithering qualms and nuances that liberals or judges or teachers or civil servants or military officers (or indeed anyone with actual experience of life outside politics) might be inclined to show.

Perhaps the explanation is simpler. Blair is a man who admires charism and power, and who wants to be around those who have them. He is, in short, a fan.
He was bedazzled by the glamour of the Bush court, and by his own sudden debut on the world stage next to the President. It was his chance to be sidekick to the most powerful man on the planet, and for the two of them to preside triumphantly over the birth of a brave new world order, starting with Iraq. It was a vanity project. As time passes and the insiders begin to talk, it seems increasingly likely that simple male ego might have been the reason thsese two men started a war in a foreign country. It isn't the first time.

If these were the motives that impelled Bush and Blair, what drove the more covert forces behind them?
It's clear now - and was then actually - that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, which was after all the target. But in the end a war in Iraq suited a lot of poepl, who were happy to actively promote it, or at least approve of it or, if nothing else, not disapprove.

It suited the Bushmen, with their certainty that the American way was the right way... It suited sections of the military, anxious to road-test new weponry and tactics. It suited arms dealers and weons companies. It suited the oilmen, because it offered control over the tap, and weakened OPEC and the Saudis correspondingly. It suited the Israel RIght, so disproportionately represented in the White House, to have a potential enemy neutralized, and at the same time to send the strongest of signals to other "rogue states" in the region.

It suited the Evangelical Christians, who saw this war as a step on the road to Rapture. It suited the Evangelical Democratizers, who thought that free-market capitalist democracy could be planted anywhere, anytime, and that things would certainly be better if it were. It suited the oil-hungry American economy, which saw the chance of global hegemony and wanted a big army in the Middle East, from there to keep an eye on things.

It suited the idealists - and there were many - who regarded Saddam as a monster who had to be removed (but unfortunately didn't ask the question "And then what?") And it suited Tony Blair, perhaps for some of the obvious reasons, but perhaps mostly because he wanted to be leading from the front with his hero-pal, two crusaders for freedom. And it suited the hollow men and straw men - the apparatchiks of Blair's government - because, beyond anything else, they are people weak in mind and spirit who just want to be on the team that's winning.

. . . . . .

...So in the end you can't help thinking that Iraq was invaded not because it was dangerous, as we calimed, but because it was the least threatening country in the region, and therefore the best place from which to begin a conqust of the Middle East. As Neo-Con and PNAC-man Ken Adelman predicted so confidently, and so wrongly, it would be a "cakewalk" - over in a few weeks.

The war wasn't over in a few weeks, and, in terms of any of its orginally stated goals, has so far been a shattering failure. If it was meant to improve the lives of the Iraqi people, it failed.
If it was menat to stem the tide of terrorism, it failed. If it was meant to make the world safer for the rest of us, it failed.
If it was intended to stablize the price of oil, it failed. If it was meant to be a "beacon of democracy" for the rest of the Arab world, it failed.
For the truth is that - along with their allies Berlusconi in Italy and Howard in Australia - Bush and Blair seem quite indifferent to actual deomcracy. It's a useful banner to fly above their ambitions - as though it's fine to destroy a country and several thousand of its people if, at the end of it, you can paste the label 'DEMOCRACY' over the mess you've left.

.....

As long as we stay [in Iraq], we tell the rest of the world that we endorse this unnecessary and loathsome war, that we support this corrupt administration and its colonialist project. And we tell the world, that, with all our economic and scientific and cultural power, this is what we choose to do - to tyrannize and maim an already suffering country, in order, we say retrospectively, to free it from tyranny.

.....

There are real problems in this world, problems that will need enormous vision and ingenuity and generosity for their solution. The war in Iraq represents the lack of any of these, and the abject squandering of our potential as a civilization. We should be ashamed: not only for what we've done in Iraqy, but for everything else we've thus failed to do.

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