Class War And David Cameron, Keep our Country Safe Military
Action against ISIS”
British Prime
Minister David Cameron has said it is time for Britain to join air strikes
against Islamic State in Syria (ISIS). After the killing of 130 people in
Paris, he feels the tide has now turned in favour of military action against
ISIS. Cameron has told the British public that such action is vital to protect
Britain from similar attacks.
Although in 2013
Cameron lost a vote in parliament on air strikes against Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad’s forces (based on the lie that government forces had used chemical
weapons), he is now arguing that Britain does not have the luxury of being able
to wait any longer to launch attacks on Syrian territory, this time supposedly
on ISIS. Some anticipate that Cameron might push for a vote on the
matter in parliament within the coming week.
However, any talk
about attacking Syria to make Britain ‘safer’ is based on hollow rhetoric,
as Graham Vanbergen writes:
“In the 12 years preceding
the Invasion of Iraq, 65 people in Europe were killed by various ‘terrorist’
attacks, mainly in France, Italy and Greece. In the 12 years since that fateful
invasion, the terrorists kill rate has increased by nearly 600%. Far
from making its citizens safer, politicians have achieved the opposite.”
For all Cameron’s
seemingly high-minded utterances about protecting Britain by attacking the
territory of a sovereign state thousands of miles away, it is worth reflecting
on Felicity Arbuthnot’s observation that what he is
advocating is wholly illegal:
“David Cameron is morphing in to his
pal, alleged war criminal Tony Blair and is attempting to persuade Parliament
that Britain must join those illegally in Syrian air space and equally
illegally drop its own bombs with no UN mandate for such action. The Cameron
backing media is beating the war drums along with America’s partisan hacks…”
Like Blair before him, Cameron is
using a good old dose of fear mongering and a grab for the moral high ground in
an attempt to disguise the illegal nature of what he is advocating. The
hypocrisy is palpable.
Earlier this year, in response to
Syrian refugees arriving in Europe, Cameron said that he felt deeply moved by
the image of a Syrian boy dead on a Turkish beach. As pressure mounted on
Britain to take in more of those fleeing to Europe, he added that the country
would fulfil its moral responsibilities.
Anyone who had been
following the Syrian conflict at that point could not have failed to detect the
hypocrisy. Former French foreign minister Roland Dumas has
stated that Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009. He
told French TV:
“I was in England two years before
the violence in Syria on other business… I met with top British officials, who
confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in
Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”
Writing in The
Guardian in 2013, Nafeez Ahmed discussed leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes
from a meeting with Pentagon officials, that confirmed US-UK
training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse”
of Assad’s regime “from within.”
According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the
Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed
plans to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,”
starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and
Iran.” Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of
the region’s vast oil and gas resources.
In 2009, Syrian
President Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that
would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field through
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European
markets in direct competition with Russia and in the hope of further
undermining and helping to break the energy-dependent Russian economy. Russian
ally Assad refused to sign and instead pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran crossing
Iraq and into Syria that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to
Europe. Thus Assad had to go.
Last year, Cameron told the United
Nations that Britain was ready to play its part in confronting “an evil
against which the whole world must unite.” He also said that that “we” must not
be so “frozen with fear” of repeating the mistakes of the 2003 Iraq
invasion. He was attempting to drum up support for wider Anglo-US direct
military action against the Syria under the pretext of attacking ISIS.
A year on, it’s the same story with
added impetus due to the attacks in Paris. Cameron is again trying his hand
again at pushing Britain into war: one that it is already covertly involved up
to its neck in and one that Britain has already ‘subcontracted’ out to a bunch
of anti-Assad terror groups, the foot soldiers of US-led imperialism in the
region.
Cameron’s call for
an urgent military response by Britain comes on the back of the events in
Paris, which occurred at a highly convenient time as Russia’s (wholly legal and
UN-backed) actions in Syria were severely undermining the anti-Assad militias –
trained, funded and supported by the West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others (see
the forthcoming book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’ by Tim Anderson). Russian intervention has turned the tide
against the West’s proxy forces in the region, including ISIS.
David Cameron is
manipulating a war-fatigued public into getting behind yet another military
intervention disguised as yet another component of the bogus ‘war on terror’.
Whether it involves rhetoric about ‘Russian aggression’ or it involves a
US-backed coup in Ukraine, the destruction of Libya or NATO-Saudi-backed terror
in Syria, these components are not for one minute to be regarded by
the public as the planned machinations of empire with the aim of destroying or at least severely weakening Russia. The public
must be kept confused and most of all fearful of the designated bogeyman of
Washington’s choice.
If Cameron is
serious about defeating ISIS, he would do better to join with Russia and help
sever the logistics that enable ISIS to function as a fighting force in
Syria. All roads lead to Turkey (quite literally) and Saudi
Arabia. But Cameron’s role is to dance to the neocon’s tune in Washington, to
deceive the public, to lie to it and to push the world ever closer to a major
conflict with Russia.
His sidekick,
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon is also on cue. Speaking on Britain’s Radio 5, he stated the need
“to spend less on some things like
the welfare system and to spend more on things that really matter to keep our
country safe.”
With a £12 billion
saving on cuts to the welfare budget, Fallon was attempting to justify a £12
billion increase to the military budget to help pay for eight BAE
warships, nine Boeing maritime patrol crafts, surveillance drones and Lockheed
Martin jets.
Add on the cost replacing
the Trident nuclear programme put at around £31 billion, with another £10
billion being set aside for contingencies, and it is clear where Britain’s
priorities lie: not with ordinary people whose jobs have been sold to the
lowest bidder abroad and who now see their liberties and welfare state being
dismantled under the lies of ‘austerity’ (a manifestation of ‘class war’, as
Noam Chomsky correctly states) and tackling terrorism but with arms companies
and militarism.
Cuts to welfare, increases in
military spending and events in Syria form part of an ongoing war on working
people. That’s because militarism is but one arm of a neoliberal agenda that
seeks to bend all working people and regional elites – whether Assad, Putin,
Saddam or Gaddafi – to the will of Western capital. It is ordinary working
people who ultimately pay the price, whether refugees fleeing from conflict,
civilian deaths in war zones or those subject to the types of structural
violence that ‘austerity’ or other forms of economic warfare brings courtesy of
the IMF, World Bank, WTO or trade agreements like NAFTA, TPA and
TTIP. And, ultimately, it is the Lockhead Martins, the Blackwaters (XE
Services) and the BAEs, the Chevrons and Occidental Petroleums, the
Halliburtons and Monsantos and the financial interests on Wall Street and in
the City of London that benefit.
As the media get ready to cheer lead
Cameron into war with the unstated aim of removing Assad from power, this
fact should not be lost on anyone, not least the British public.
The original source
of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Colin Todhunter, Global Research, 2015
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