Iraq/Afghanistan: Brown spins untruths

Yesterday I tried to leave a letter re Iraq and Afghanistan on the Citizen website - see it here - I don't know whether it is censorship or not but their website repeatedly fails to accept my comments - I have complained in past and had a comment restored to site - it looks like I'll have to try that again.

Photo: Randwick woods last week (and I'm using as a screen saver at the moment!)

I have to say I have just read that Gordon Brown says the British withdrawal from Basra is part of a successful strategic plan to hand over control of the city to Iraqi forces. What????!!! This goes beyond spin - the truth is, a few thousand British troops never had any control of Basra – a city of two million people – and the attempted occupation was resisted by the Iraqi people
from the start. The British withdrawal to a single base on Basra airport is a retreat from a city which is too dangerous for the occupying forces.

The Independent calls it: "one of the most futile campaigns ever fought by the British army." It wasn't so futile to George Bush, who needed the political cover of a British presence to justify his illegal war. Gordon Brown seems intent on maintaining that presence to help a president a whose popularity ratings are amongst the lowest ever recorded.

Afghanistan is in a similar situation - Tony Blair said in 2001, "We will not walk away from Afghanistan." He promised prosperity and liberation for the Afghan people. What they got was the slaughter of thousands, displacement of many thousands more and the total destruction of the infrastructure. Even the puppet president Karzai has been protesting against the NATO bombardments, which have killed hundreds of innocent civilians this year, making a growing number of people join the active opposition to the occupation. The more observant commentators say Afghanistan has the potential to become "Britain’s Vietnam", yet Gordon Brown is likely to use his October statement to confirm an escalation of British deployment in Afghanistan and prove once again to George Bush that the British government will remain subservient to US foreign policy.

PM Brown is due to make a statement to the Commons in early October. As Greens called recently in the press - see letter Citizen did print here - we would urge people to write to him and call for the complete withdrawal of British troops from Iraq (an apology to the Iraqi people and a promise of reparation payments is too much to hope for) and a complete ceding of British troop command to the United Nations in Afghanistan.

Stop the War has called a demonstration outside the House of Commons on Monday 8 October, the day Parliament reassembles, to represent the anger felt by the antiwar majority in this country over Britain’s continuing participation in one of the worst war crimes in recent history – an anger which MPs have refused to reflect in parliament. In the words of Andrew Murray, national chair of Stop the War, writing in The Guardian: "Overwhelming that gap between popular outrage and parliamentary apathy is the key to ensuring the full and final withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, where they serve no purpose beyond covering George Bush's imperial nudity. That is why we are organising a demonstration in London on October 8, the day Parliament reassembles, to demand troop withdrawal from Iraq." (Read the full
article here: http://tinyurl.com/yqn53k).

This post adapted from Stop the War Coalition info - Green MEP Caroline Lucas is a Vice President of the group. See more on their website.