The Sham Democracy
“Almost every new democracy has gone through a period of challenge and confusion, Democratic change and free elections are exhilarating events. Yet we know from experience that they can be followed by moments of uncertainty.” George Bush speaking during his recent visit to Europe.
We certainly do know from experience that ‘democratic’ change can be followed by ‘moments of uncertainty’; the two elections that Bush ‘won’ for example, or realising here in the UK that Tony Blair had been re-elected by less than 20% of the voters. Democracy seems to have noticeably failed the UK and the US recently, but this is not a modern phenomenon, the UK and US are not new democracies, instead they are archaic systems lurching between elite parties for executive control over a system that ostensibly never changes. The clearest indication that people realise the futility of democracy in the UK and US is the sheer number of people that do not vote; and voter apathy is easy to understand and justify.
After his re-election Tony Blair very humbly stated that he would take on board the message of the electorate and admitted ‘We have got to listen to the people and respond wisely and sensibly’. Very gracious of Tony to consider that as Prime Minister he should perhaps take on board the desires of the electorate, he must be commended on understanding this in just 8 years and 3 elections. Perhaps the reduced majority was a message that was clearly received by Tony Blair, as he seemed not to notice the largest anti-war march in history caused by his decision to invade Iraq. Tony Blair was not alone in his moment of enlightenment, Gordon Brown, his natural successor: ‘I promise that we will listen and we will learn so that we can serve our country and our communities even better in the years to come’ – presumably by ousting Blair at the first opportunity. However, do we not hear this after every election? The same formulaic speech, a thank you to the electorate, a show of humility with a hint of servitude, polite smiling, wave to the crowd, before disappearing – grinning - back into the unaccountability of 10 Downing Street for another four years before repeating the process.
To add insult to injury Tony Blair not only endorses the system in the UK, he is so chuffed with it he wants the entire world to experience this sham dictatorship. He’s not alone either; Mr Bush, who had kindly guided Tony into Iraq, is now trying to make Tony realise that Iran is in need of a change, in need of the holy grail of flawed democracy. Those of you in doubt of Bush’s intention to enforce democracy upon nations should take heed of the lessons that he is learning in Iraq. Bush has admitted that Iraqi’s are experiencing ‘a period of challenge and confusion’ along with ‘moments of uncertainty’, a rather quaint way of referring to the 400 violent deaths in Iraq since the new Iraqi government was named late last month. Subsequently in a speech to the International Republican Institute Bush attributed the problems in Iraq to a lack of US Government Civilians being ready for deployment into newly conquered lands. So to remedy this problem in future Bush is going to create a corps of trained civilians who could be deployed on short notice to help in crises caused by war or revolution. Do I understand this correctly? Bush has made remarks to the International Republican Institute - a body that has been created to ‘promote democracy’ worldwide – stating that for future invasions he will have a special civilian force ready to parachute in and takeover the running of the country?
Lessons should have been learnt by both the US and the UK during the Iraq war, but not lessons about how they can conduct future wars of ‘democracy’ with more efficiency. Blair and Bush through the leaked memo in the Independent should be brought before the international courts and tried for war crimes. Even without the memo they still took their countries to war without UN authorisation, without a solid legal base, with extremely limited intelligence – which appears more than ever to have been invented to justify an unjustifiable invasion. Since the invasion no weapons of mass destruction have been found, which destroys any remnants of a flawed legal argument for invasion; over a 100,000 Iraqi’s have been killed, the same people the invasion was supposedly designed to save from the hands of Saddam Hussain, thus any moral justification has been lost. All of these realities are ignored by the political systems in the UK and the US, and for good reason, for they cannot hold themselves accountable without having to face demand for a complete restructuring of the whole political system – something that those in power cannot allow to happen. The ignorance is well documented, but not well known, or well believed, the truth is available but is often almost politely ignored by individuals as to question the legitimacy of government is to call into question their whole basis of life as a citizen of that country. With Iraq it is known that the UK and US installed Saddam Hussain into power, gave him military supplies, gave him the technology to create chemical weapons, gave him the licence to use these weapons on his own population without international outcry. All this was designed to aid the stability of the Middle East – stability not in the sense of making the Middle East a safe place to live, but the stability of keeping Iraq oil firmly under the control of the US/UK. Only when Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait – threatening other oil supplies – did the US/UK reluctantly go after Saddam as a naughty school child who had disobeyed his masters.
After this conflict Iraq was subject to horrific sanctions, sanctions which succeeded in killing over 500,000 Iraqi children between the end of the first Iraq war and the start of the second. That’s over 497,000 more people than died in 9/11. So how can we as individuals know that Saddam Hussain was a creation of the UK/US, know that his weapons capabilities came from the UK/US, know that his worst atrocities – used by Blair and Bush as justifying the Iraq war – came as a direct result of the UK/US support for Saddam, know all this yet we did not laugh Tony Blair out of office as soon as he tried to build the moral argument for war in Iraq? How long can this level of ignorance exist in the United Kingdom? How long can we live each day with this knowledge before we rise up and hold our government to account – not just for the Iraq war, not just for the support for Saddam in the 1980’s, but for all the deaths that the UK has been complicit in over the last 50 years due to our horrific foreign policy. The US and UK are on a crusade to spread democracy, when as nations their democracy is fundamentally flawed. The US and UK are on a crusade to liberate and spread peace, when they are the top two arms exporters in the world. The US and UK leaders talk about morality as if they alone were the inventors of, and now sole purveyors of it, when in fact they are the two largest terrorist organisations operating (without morals) in the world today.
It is a crime against humanity that the Governments in the United Kingdom and the United States of America are allowed to pursue this insane moral crusade against the rest of the world. That they claim to be doing so out of a moral obligation to the greater good is laughable, that the majority of the public in both countries accept the moral arguments is a chilling indictment of the largely servile press that exists. Bush has made it clear that he expects to act again in a similar manner to the Iraq invasion, this cannot be allowed to happen. He must be brought, along with the rest of the government, and his loyal assistant Tony Blair, to account for his actions before it is too late. Truth has become a teardrop in a thunderstorm of propaganda, and unless we act soon, the thunderstorm will drown us all.