Iraq

Projections for 250,000 ground troops in Iraq (including 25,000 British). Threats to use nuclear weapons in conflict with any one of a range of countries, even if those countries show no signs of using, or do not have, nuclear weapons themselves. US Secretary of State Colin Powell tries to reassure us - by saying that the USA has no "short-term" preparations for such nuclear attacks. And medium term? Those are the latest war plans leaking out of a Washington puffed up with arrogance and confidence after its easy victory in the third of its "globo-cop" wars in the last eleven years -...

For more than a decade, the US and Britain have devastated Iraq with bombing and sanctions. Hundreds of thousands have died as a result. Many thousands more will die if Bush and Blair succeed in making Iraq the next target in the so-called war on terrorism. The labour movement should mobilise to stop Britain joining the attacks on Iraq which the US are preparing now. We must fight instead for practical support for genuine working-class and democratic opposition to Saddam from within Iraq. A mass anti-war movement can stop Blair joining the new US war, and maybe stop the war before it starts...

According to the Observer last Sunday, the US government has decided plans to attack Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, like the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, was initially helped to power by the USA. The CIA backed a coup in 1963 which brought Saddam's right-wing faction of the Ba'ath party to power. In the later stages of the war between Iran and Iraq which went on from 1980 to 1988, claiming over one million lives, the USA leant towards Iraq, considering any problems that Saddam might cause to be a lesser evil than Iranian victory. Western powers, including Britain, supplied Saddam...

Jeremy Corbyn MP explained why he opposed war at a meeting on 17 February “In the mid-1980s, when I raised the issue of human rights in Iraq in the House of Commons, I was told that I shouldn’t upset that particular applecart as there were big orders on the way, big orders for planes, for guns, for chemical and biological equipment. In 1988 Iraqi biological weapons experts were invited to a trade conference at the same time as the gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja. The hypocrisy of Britain, France, Germany, the United States and all the other arms exporters in arming Saddam and supporting...

Since Iran and Iraq emerged from outright British domination in the 1950s, they have been the biggest powers in the Gulf, a region which holds more than half the world’s oil reserves. In 1973-4 the increasing clout and autonomy of the local powers was shown when they participated in the creation of an effective cartel of oil-exporting states which raised the price of oil from $2 to $12 a barrel, bringing vast revenues to the local ruling classes. In Iraq, the pro-British monarchy had been overthrown by Arab nationalists in 1958. A CIA-backed coup in 1963 put paid to the more radical strands in...

At the end of February, the USA nearly went to war against Iraq. At almost the last minute the threatened bombing raids were called off, or at least postponed. War would certainly have killed many Iraqi civilians, and quite possibly spread much further. No thanks are due to Tony Blair’s New Labour regime; it backed the USA’s war plans more slavishly than any other government in the world. None to the body of Labour MPs; only 23 of them opposed war, fewer than the 38 who objected in 1990 when Saddam Hussein not only had a large arsenal but had just used it to invade Kuwait. None to the trade...

Since the 1991 Gulf war, an estimated half a million Iraqi children have died from starvation and disease as a result of Western economic sanctions. These deaths are also the result of the diversion of Iraq's resources towards manufacturing arms by the regime. But a US-British war in the Gulf will bring no justice for the dead, nor stop Iraq using deadly weapons against other innocents. When Clinton and Blair got together this month to work out a shared commitment to "international peace" they weren't thinking of Iraqi children dying for want of the basic means of life. They do not care about...