The following two cases are important both locally and nationally. The first because the London School of Economics has been influential in developing Blair's the Third Way and the Express & Star is an important regional paper which, until the day before war started opposed the war, and then became one of the most hysterical, virulent and jingoistic of all newspapers.
To David Aaronovitch and the Editor W'ton Express & Star
Dear Warmongers
IRAQ WAR - IMMORAL, ILLEGAL & COWARDLY
So, the phoney excuse for the war, that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, has not been proved and every day that passes makes it more unlikely that it ever will. Bush and Blair were determined to have a war and they got it.
Hugo Young in the Guardian (15 April) foretells the sad fate of Tony Blair as a result of this absolutely unforgivable lapse into Tory imperial policy - `So begins Blair's descent into powerless mediocrity', he states. Blair must either adhere to the exigencies of the Rumsfeld programme and support further wars, or he must creep back into the peace camp where he will find his influence has almost entirely evaporated.
I have foretold the fate of David Aaronovitch for deserting his Marxist roots in the radical London School of Economics circles - his influence will decline catastrophically, siren voices will offer him most handsome rewards to make the complete transition to Tory imperialist values and he will end up like that apostate from Communism who we expelled from the LSE Comsoc in 1948 as Val Sherman but who ended life as Sir Alfred Sherman close advisor to Margaret Thatcher and head of her Centre for Policy Studies.
But in this letter I wish to concentrate on the cowardice of those who supported the war of the strong against the weak. I quote from Andrew Boyd, a radical freelance journalist in Northern Ireland who also writes for the George Barnsby Working Class Library (set up as a multicultural, broad left project for Wolverhampton and the Black Country). Boyd tells of Bertrand Russell the celebrated philosopher, and later leader of CND, who in 1945 when only the USA possessed the atom bomb saw the United States as the only hope of the world. Russell urged the USA to establish a form of world government and compel the Soviet Union, by threat of atomic destruction to submit to this new universal power. This was exactly what right-wing US politicians were advocating when the Soviet Union was at its very weakest having `torn the guts out of the German army' and suffered almost total devastation. This was Cowardice indeed. Fortunately the peace forces were strong enough to prevent it.
Russell later changed his mind, was totally ashamed of his views of 1945, and wrote in 1965 '...in every part of the world the source of war and suffering lies at the door of US imperialism. Wherever there is hunger, wherever there is exploitative tyranny, wherever people are tortured and the masses left to rot under the weight of disease and starvation, the force which holds the people down stems from Washington.'
The irony of this article by Andrew Boyd headed `US: Land of hope and vision or an Empire of Evil?' is that it was written not in 2003 but appeared in the Irish News of 21 Feb. 1985. Saddam may have been a tyrant for 30 or so years, but US imperialism has been supporting and creating tyrannies ever since the 1880s and most of us can recognise a tyranny when we see one, but not it seems Aaronovitch or the Editor of the Express & Star.