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Demonstration March 15 - World Against War |
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 Five years after the invasion, demonstrations for troops out were held on Saturday 15 March 2008 across the world. Solidarity members joined thousands of others in Glasgow to protest against the continuing occupation and to demand
Troops Out of Iraq and Afghanistan Now. End the Blockade of Gaza. www.stopwar.org.uk
Now the main regional power in the region, thanks to the disaster of the US/British invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iran has increasingly been portrayed by US propagandists over the past year as the driving force behind ‘terrorism’ in Baghdad and elsewhere.
In reality, not only was al-Qaeda linked ‘terrorism’ not a problem in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion but much of what Bush describes as terrorism involves legitimate resistance by ordinary Iraqis to the American and British occupation.
Despite this, Condoleeza Rice has gone so far as to describe the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as ‘a terrorist organisation’, the first time part of the military of a sovereign state has been treated in this way. And for anyone who hoped that the new British Prime Minister would be any less grovelling in his support for US foreign policy than his predecessor was, Gordon Brown has gone out of his way to emphasise his support for Bush’s tough stance on Iran, arguing that no one should mistake ‘the seriousness of our purpose’.
Iran report
Now, however, Bush, Cheney and Brown’s plans have suffered a setback. In early December, the National Security Estimate, which co-ordinates the work of 16 US intelligence agencies published a report disclosing for the
first time that, contrary to what the US neo-cons have argued, Iran has not been pursuing a nuclear weapons development programme for the last four years.
The publication of the report is a major embarrassment to Bush and Cheney and in the short term, will make it more difficult for them to push ahead with plans for an attack on Iran. It would be wrong, however, to assume that such plans have now been dropped. Bush’s immediate reaction to the report was to claim that ‘nothing had changed’ and "What's to say they (the Iranians) couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons programme?" As if to prove the point, in the second week of 2008, US warships in the Persian Gulf claimed to have been harassed by Iranian gun ships, a claim that looked suspiciously like the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident more than 40 years ago which provided the pretext for the US bombing of North Vietnam. In that situation, keeping up the pressure on the warmongers not to attack Iran remains a priority for socialists and anti-war campaigners.
March 15th demo
The national demonstrations in London and Glasgow on March 15th, part of a worldwide week of action called by the 1200- strong World Against War Conference in London on December 1st, provides an excellent opportunity for doing that. |
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