Workers' Weekly Reports on Entering the Year 2003

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Workers' Weekly Reports on Entering the Year 2003

"Words Mean What They Say": Who Is Threatening War and the Use of Force?

Britain Out of NATO! For an Independent and Peaceful Foreign Policy!

"Ushering in the Year of the 4th Congress of RCPB(ML)" is the lead article in Workers' Weekly dated January 25, which is the first issue of Volume 33 of RCPB(ML)'s newspaper. The article reports on the Party's 7th National Consultative Conference, held on this theme, which took place on December 29, 2002, together with the launch of the Party's Millennium Press. At this critical time, the newspaper reports, the activists and sympathisers of the Party gathered to mark the forging of its weapons of battle-readiness and to prepare for the battles ahead to bring the alternative into being.

Subscriptions to Workers' Weekly can be taken out by contacting RCPB(ML). Details and subscription rates are given above.

"I’m sorry to say that this is not just a matter of history, this is a matter of here and now for the future because words mean what they say," said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in a Channel Four News interview on Thursday, January 23.

Jack Straw was actually responding to the issue that, according to the interviewer, there is a split in the five Permanent Members of the Security Council with Britain and the US on one side and Russia, China and France on the other. He was trying to convince anyone who would listen that the UN Resolution of November 8 puts the onus of proof on Saddam Hussein.

One of the issues that public opinion is objecting to is that Britain and the US are declaring that they will not be bound by UN Resolutions, let alone Saddam Hussein. This is the import of Jack Straw's saying that the objections to Britain and the US going to war against Iraq are not just a matter of history. In the "here and now", Britain and the US are pursuing a criminal course based on force and the threat of force, as Jack Straw and the government are only too happy to emphasise.

This is truly the medieval politics of "might makes right". Just as the government want to "tip the balance" in favour of the "victim" in the British judicial system by overturning the assumption that an accused is innocent until proved otherwise, so with Saddam Hussein. The "onus of proof" is on Saddam Hussein to produce "evidence" that Iraq does not have "weapons of mass destruction". What would that proof be? On the other hand, there is no "onus of proof" for anything on Tony Blair and George Bush. They are amassing a vast array of not only weapons of mass destruction but hundreds of thousands of troops, warships, tanks, fighters, helicopters, not to mention their whole propaganda machine and the capitalist press. All to make sure that if Saddam Hussein does not take his "one last chance", they will destroy Iraq and its regime.

This is very much the "here and now" of the matter if Jack Straw only paused to think. The evidence does not need a team of weapons inspectors under the control of the US superpower to unearth. It does not need any "smoking gun". It is naked dictate by US imperialism and the British government, that they are the ones threatening war and destruction. And why? What is the future for which the here and now is preparing? It is the dominance of the strategic, political and economic interests of Anglo-US imperialism. To this monster, no other interests matter. To make it more criminal, it is done under the signboard of the "civilising mission" of "Western democracy". In other words, the methods and ethos of colonial conquest and genocide, which are a matter of historical record, are being utilised in the here and now to bring about not so much a future for US and Britain as the destruction of a future for humanity.

Jack Straw and the British government have a twisted pride in affirming that their policy is based on the "credible use of force". Their words on this score mean what they say and must be utterly condemned. It is the logic of gangsters. Submit to us or else. The choice of avoiding your destruction is entirely up to you. This is the "international order" to which Bush and Blair are dedicated.

It is first of all the US and Britain which must disarm for the future, and it is the duty of the working class and all the anti-war forces to build the movement to bring this about, to bring into being a government which is implacably opposed to the conduct of international affairs based on the threat of war and the use of military force.

At a City Forum Seminar on the Future of NATO on January 24 in London, a Foreign Office representative put forward the government's position on the "European dimension" of the NATO military alliance, particularly the "strategic relationship" between the EU and NATO.

Mike O'Brien, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, South East Asia and the former Soviet Union, spoke of the decisions at the Copenhagen European Council and in the North Atlantic Council just before Christmas. These agreements, he said, will allow the EU to start conducting military operations with support from NATO and will lead to a strengthening of European capabilities, which will reinforce NATO.

The US vision of NATO, of course, is to dominate, as George W Bush declared last year, "from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea". The Prague summit was held in the context of NATO's enlargement to the east, by which the US aims to further dominate Europe and neutralise Russia, in its strategy for complete global hegemony.

US imperialism, backed by the British government has its programme for what it calls "modernising" NATO. This "modernising" is subservient to the global strategy of US imperialism, particularly in its strategy since September 11, 2001, of organising to impose its dictate over the entire world, beginning with the Middle East, imposing its will in Europe and to drive eastwards.

It is in this context that Mike O'Brien asserted that NATO, though necessary, is not sufficient for all aspects of "European security". In other words, the European powers must act as a proxy for the US superpower, and its so-called "Common Foreign and Security Policy" must be an arm of and take up the responsibility for US global policy in terms of its military operations through the "European Security and Defence Policy" (ESDP).

Mike O'Brien said that Britain "conceived and has developed ESDP to meet three main objectives: to strengthen the European contribution to NATO by enabling European forces to take a fairer share of the European Security burden in circumstances where NATO as an Alliance was not involved; to set a target for European nations to make their military forces more rapidly deployable, effective and sustainable – this will also be highly relevant to the modernisation of NATO's force structures agreed at Prague; to enable the European Union to play its full role on the international stage, recognising its uniquely wide range of external policy tools, from political dialogue, trade and aid to JHA co-operation and now civilian and military crisis management operations".

To Britain, any conception of the ESDP as a "dagger at the heart of NATO" must be destroyed, i.e. Europe as a military superpower in its own right must not be allowed to proceed.

With the US having led the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and planted itself at the heart of Europe, seeing off Russia in the process, the US must get the European powers to do its dirty work while ensuring that the big European powers do not threaten its interests.

One of the things which is so condemnable is that the British government is acting as the chief ideological spokesman and tool of the US in its military strategy in Europe. This has been developed further in today's retrogressive conditions by New Labour with former Labour Defence Minister George Robertson as NATO Secretary General.

The military capabilities of European countries under this scenario are put at the service of NATO, and hence US, strategy and tactics. At the Prague summit, as Mike O'Brien pointed out, specific undertakings "to improve the ability" of the European powers' armed forces "to deal with new threats" were agreed, "informed by EU and NATO requirements". The concept of the NATO Rapid Response Force, he said, is at the heart of the "security challenges of the 21st century".

The British government's conception is to simultaneously strengthen both NATO and the EU militarily to operate together in the interests of the US.

The NATO-EU "strategic relationship" is being geared to furthering US hegemony and is a further factor in bringing nearer a cataclysmic third world war. It represents an escalation of the threat to the independence and democracy of peoples. The working class and people must vigorously oppose the NATO-EU "strategic relationship". The demand must be raised that Britain should get out of NATO, this aggressive military alliance in the service of US imperialism. All British troops must be withdrawn from foreign soil, and the democratic forces must fight for a government which implements a foreign policy which is both independent and peaceful.