on uk foreign policy as brown replaces blair:
Virtually every speech for the last ten years has been a reassurance to business that Labour is on its side and a defence of ‘free trade’ and ensuring climates around the world favourable for British foreign investment, along with ongoing commitments to low corporation taxes and cutting business regulation. Brown is the ultimate liberalisation theologist and every one of his policies has pushed in this direction. Brown (and indeed Blair) should be known for their (largely successful) imposition of neo-liberal economics on Africa – instead they are hailed in the mainstream as the champions of Africa. The government’s propaganda campaign on ‘development’ has been if anything deeper than over Iraq, yet the mainstream media have reported it uncritically, with hardly any deviation. In reality, debt relief, aid and trade policy have all been geared to further liberalizing and privatizing economies in Africa and elsewhere, with deepening poverty the (well-documented) result.
(...) I’ve no doubt that Blair will be seen in the mainstream as a ‘liberal interventionist’ who started well (in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan) and then overstepped the mark with Iraq, to the extent that he ‘mislead’ the British public, but who was genuinely committed to the cause of Africa. This view is totally absurd and therefore can be expected to dominate discussions in the mainstream. It doesn’t matter how much evidence emerges as to the reality of Kosovo in 1999 and the bombing of Yugoslavia to counter the mainstream view that Kosovo was all about defending human rights; I dealt with more plausible explanations in Web of Deceit and there are various other analyses.
(...) we are dealing here with a very primitive mainstream political culture: it doesn’t and cannot recognize obvious policies such as the extraordinary British support provided to the brutal regime in Colombia, the total backing of Russia bloody onslaught against Chechnya (including the flattening of its capital city in 1999/2000) and of support for Indonesia’s attacks on Aceh and West Papua (with British arms), to name but some, while it remains incapable of recognizing British support under Blair (fairly unequivocal, actually) for Israel. One day, you never know, the BBC might mention Britain’s extraordinary abuse of the legal system to prevent the Chagos islanders returning to even the outlying islands in the archipelago, let alone Diego Garcia – but this is admittedly very unlikely. Or perhaps mention might be made that while Blair and Brown profess their support for ‘democracy’ in the Middle East, their closest ally is Oman – whose despot was installed in a British coup 37 years ago! The official theology has it that Zimbabwe is the only repressive regime in Africa – since it is an official enemy, it is the subject of endless media articles while Mugabe is (correctly) seen as a total despot. Nigeria, on the other hand, is a key ally and oil-rich state which our companies benefit from – therefore it wouldn’t be right to mention obvious facts such as that the military in Nigeria is complicit in far more deaths in recent years than even Zimbabwe’s.
(...) Blair should be remembered as a war criminal who has made the world a more dangerous place. I can think of no other British prime minister who has been so contemptuous of human rights as Blair, the one possible exception being Harold Wilson’s government of 1964-70, which covertly supported the bloodbath in Indonesia in 1965, removed the Chagos islanders, provided a mountain of weaponry to the Nigerian government to wipe out three million people in Biafra, armed Baghdad as began major operations against the Kurds and offered significant private support to the US attack on Vietnam.
(...) For example, it would be entirely rational for Iran to develop nuclear weapons – it has been repeatedly threatened with invasion. Indeed, there is a much stronger rational case for Iran to have these weapons than Britain. The UK faces no conceivable military threat and is not surrounded by enemies. It is simply a rational insurance policy for any regime to have nuclear weapons these days since you might end up on the receiving end of a cruise missile attack or carpet bombing on some flimsy pretext or other from the wackos in the White House and Number 10.
(...) One should also not underestimate the extent of British arms exports around the world under Blair – arming (modernizing) key states such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Israel – heaven knows how these might be used in the future. I’ve just done some research on UK arms exports – at least £45 billion worth has been sold by Britain over the past 10 years, an incredible legacy. In all this light, if it is possible to think of some positive features of foreign policy under Blair – they pale in comparison with the big picture.
(...) I am presuming that the British elite is opposed to, and extremely worried, by the prospect of a US attack on Iran. For one thing, the military is totally opposed – they already want to pull out of Iraq without getting bogged down against a much more powerful opponent. For another, the incoming Gordon Brown would barely survive politically a UK role in a US attack on Iran given that the British public is likely to be overwhelmingly opposed.
(...) No doubt, the UK and US are using all their available assets to covertly incite unrest within Iran, as some reports suggest. This of course was a feature of the 1953 overthrow and is entirely to be expected now. UK planners must be extremely worried about the prospect of rising Iranian influence in southern Iraq, a majority Shia area, together with perennial ongoing concerns about the majority Shias areas in the other major oil state, Saudi Arabia.
(...) I think the 2003 invasion was intended to ensure that at least one of the three major oil producers – Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia – was made a pure Western bastion and ‘stable’, given an enemy government in Iran and ongoing major uncertainty in Saudi Arabia. The government’s concerns about ‘energy security’ were clearly outlined in a February 2003 document, released just weeks before the invasion, which stated that the UK would soon become dependent on imported oil and gas and that key relations needed to be developed with the world’s leading energy suppliers.
(...) If even a weak state with a reluctant army and hated dictator (Iraq) cannot be controlled, and neither can a failed state with no formal army (Afghanistan), what hope does the Anglo-American alliance have of continuing to shape the world in its interests? I think there is a lot at stake here for the UK/US elite, especially at a time of a rising China threatening the established world order and with energy resources far from under the full control of the US/UK alliance.