Did the US and Britain invade Iraq to spread democracy?

Did the US and Britain invade Iraq to spread democracy?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8 March 2023

A little late to the party, I recently watched Once Upon A Time In Iraq, the BBC’s 2020 five-part documentary series about the US-British invasion and occupation of the Middle East nation.

During the episode about the capture of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in December 2003, the narrator noted “Though Iraq was still governed by the [US-led] coalition, the intention was to hold democratic elections as soon as possible.”

This fits with the common understanding of the Iraq War amongst the media, academic and political elites. For example, speaking on the BBC News at 10 in 2005, correspondent Paul Wood stated “The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights.” Likewise, writing in the Guardian in 2013, the esteemed University of Cambridge Professor David Runciman claimed “The wars fought after 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed… to spread the merits of democracy.”

No doubt similarly benign framing of the West’s intentions and actions will be repeated as we approach the twentieth anniversary of the invasion on March 20 2003.

But is it true? As always it is essential to compare the narrative pumped out by corporate and state-affiliated media with the historical record.

We know that soon after US-led forces had taken control of the country Iraqis began holding local elections. However, in June 2003 the Washington Post reported “US military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.”

The report goes on to quote Paul Bremer, the chief US administrator in Iraq: “I’m not opposed to [self-rule], but I want to do it a way that takes care of our concerns… in a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections… it’s often the best-organized who win, and the best-organized right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists.”

On the national level, Professor Toby Dodge, who advised US General David Petraeus in Iraq, notes one of the first decisions Bremer made after he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 “was to delay moves towards delegating responsibility to a leadership council” composed of exiled politicians. Writing in his 2005 book Iraq’s Future, the establishment-friendly British academic goes on to explain “this careful, incremental but largely undemocratic approach was set aside with the arrival of UN special representative for Iraq, Vieira de Mello” who “persuaded Bremer that a governing body of Iraqis should be set up to act as a repository of Iraqi sovereignty.”

Accordingly, on 13 July 2003 the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was set up. Dodge notes the membership “was chosen by Bremer after extended negotiations between the CPA [the US Coalition Provisional Authority], Vieira de Mello and the seven dominant, formerly exiled parties.” The IGC would “establish a constitutional process,” Bremer said at the time.

However, the Americans had a serious problem on their hands. In late June 2003 the most senior Shia religious leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) condemning the US plans as “fundamentally unacceptable.”

“The occupation officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution,” he said. Instead he called for a general election “so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution” which would then be put to a public referendum.

“With no way around the fatwa, and with escalating American casualties creating pressure on President Bush,” the Washington Post reported in November 2003 that Bremer “dumped his original plan in favour of an arrangement that would bestow sovereignty on a provisional government before a constitution is drafted.”

This new plan, known as the November 15 Agreement, was based around a complex process of caucuses. A 2005 briefing from peace group Justice Not Vengeance explained just how anti-democratic the proposal was: “US-appointed politicians would select a committee in each province which would select a group of politically-acceptable local worthies, which in turn would select a representative… to go forward to the national assembly” which would “then by allowed to elect a provisional government.”

In response, Sistani made another public intervention, repeating his demand that direct elections – not a system of regional caucuses – should select a transitional government. After the US refused to concede, the Shia clerical establishment escalated their pro-democracy campaign, organising street demonstrations in January 2004. 100,000 people protested in Baghdad and 30,000 in Basra, with news reports recording crowds chanting “yes, yes to elections, no, no to occupation” and banners with slogans such as “We refuse any constitution that is not elected by the Iraqi people.”

Under pressure the US relented, agreeing in March 2004 to holding national elections in January 2005 to a Transitional National Assembly which was mandated to draft a new constitution.

The campaigning group Voices In The Wilderness UK summarised events in a 2004 briefing: “since the invasion the US has consistently stalled on on-person-one-vote elections” seeking instead to “put democracy on hold until it can be safely managed,” as Salim Lone, director of communications for the UN in Iraq until autumn 2003, wrote in April 2004.

Why? “An elected government that reflected Iraqi popular [opinion] would kick US troops out of the country and is unlikely to be sufficiently amenable to the interests of Western oil companies or take an ‘acceptable’ position on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Voices In The Wilderness UK explained.

For example, a secret 2005 nationwide poll of Iraqis conducted by the UK Ministry of Defence found 82 per cent “strongly opposed” to the presence of the US-led coalition forces, with 45 per cent of respondents saying they believed attacks against British and American troops were justified.

It is worth pausing briefly to consider two aspects of the struggle for democracy in Iraq. First, the Sistani-led movement in Iraq was, as US dissident Noam Chomsky argued in 2005, “one of the major triumphs of non-violent resistance that I know of.” And second, it was a senior Iraqi Shia cleric who

championed democratic elections in the face of strong opposition from the US – the “heartland of democracy,” according to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf.

It is also worth remembering, as activist group Justice Not Vengeance (JNV) noted in 2005, that Bush’s ultimatum days before the invasion was simply that “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.” This was about “encouraging a last-minute coup more than the Iraqi leader’s departure from Baghdad,” the Financial Times reported at the time. In short, the US-British plan was not free elections via “regime change” but “regime stabilization, leadership change,” JNV argued.

This resonates with the analysis of Middle East expert Jane Kinninmont. Addressing the argument the West invaded Iraq to spread democracy, in a 2013 Chatham House report she argued “This is asserted despite the long history of Anglo-American great-power involvement in the Middle East, which has, for the most part, not involved an effort to democratise the region.” In reality “the general trend has been to either support authoritarian rulers who were already in place, or to participate in the active consolidation of authoritarian rule… as long as these rulers have been seen as supporting Western interests more than popularly elected governments would.”

This thesis is not short of shameful examples – from the West’s enduring support for the Gulf monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, to the strong backing given to Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt before both dictators were overthrown in 2011.

Back to Iraq: though far from perfect, national elections have taken place since 2003. But while the US has been quick to take the credit, the evidence shows any democratic gains won in Iraq in the immediate years after the invasion were made despite, not because of, the US and their British lackey.

Indeed, an October 2003 Gallup poll of Baghdad residents makes instructive reading. Fully one per cent of respondents agreed with the BBC and Runciman that a desire to establish democracy was the main intention of the US invasion. In contrast 43 per cent of respondents said the invasion’s principal objective was Iraq’s oil reserves.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Qatar: what the media isn’t reporting

Qatar: what the media isn’t reporting
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
21 November 2022

‘Qatar Struggles To Shift Focus Away From Workers’ Rights’.

The headline in the Financial Times earlier this month confirms PR-savvy Qatar, hyper aware of the soft power boost hosting the 2022 football World Cup could be expected to create, is having trouble controlling the narrative.

The UK media, and members of the British political elite including Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, have repeatedly drawn attention to the plight of migrant labourers who have built the stadiums in the wealthy Gulf emirate – and also the terrible situation for LGBTQI+ people living there. “Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, attracting punishments of up to seven years in prison,” The Guardian recently reported.

Embarrassing – and important – though these two issues are for Qatar, it is worth taking the time to consider what the UK media, with a few honourable exceptions, isn’t talking about when it comes to the tiny energy-rich state.

For example, one rarely sees a serious exploration of Qatar’s political system which, like many of its neighbours, is an absolute monarchy, according to the CIA World Handbook. The Emir is the Head of State, and he chooses the prime minister, deputy prime minister and council of ministers. 30 of the 45 members of the Advisory Council, or Majlis al-Shura, are elected by popular vote, though legislative drafting authority rests with the Council of Ministers and is only reviewed by the Advisory Council. And it is a deeply repressive monarchy, with Reporters Without Borders noting “Qatari journalists are left little leeway by the oppressive legislative arsenal and draconian system of censorship.” To give one example: in 2012 Qatari poet Rashid al-Ajami was jailed for 15 years – and let out after three years – for reciting a poem, in Cairo, that was “indirectly critical” of the Emir, according to The Guardian.

Second, Qatar’s key role in worsening the climate crisis. As the Guardian explained in May, “the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of ‘carbon bomb’ oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts”. The report cited research by German NGO Urgewald which found state-owned QatarEnergy tops the list of companies with the largest planned expansion of oil and gas in the next seven years, putting it ahead of Gazprom, Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil.

Third, Qatar’s underhand roles in escalating the wars in Libya and Syria. In 2011 – with what the New York Times called “the blessing” of the US – Doha supplied arms to the rebels fighting to overthrow Gaddafi. However, as the New York Times went on to report “American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants.” Similarly, Qatar has also been a key player in the Syrian war, with the Financial Times estimating Doha had provided £3 billion in funding to anti-Assad forces. Like in Libya, questions have been raised about the extent of Qatar’s relationship with jihadist elements in the Syrian opposition. “You have to ask who is arming, who is financing ISIS troops. The keyword there is Qatar,” German Development Minister Gerd Mueller said in 2014. The same year US Treasury Department Under Secretary David Cohen singled out Qatar as an especially “permissive jurisdiction” for terrorist financing, including of extremist groups operating in Syria.

Which leads me to the final fact largely ignored by the British media – the UK’s close relationship with Qatar and the other autocracies in the Gulf.

In May then Prime Minister Boris Johnson described Qatar as “a valued partner for the UK”. This enduring friendship meant £384 million worth of UK military export licences to Qatar were granted between 2015 and 2018, with UK fighter jets stationed at Al Udeid Air Base in the Gulf emirate. In 2017 Britain sold Qatar 24 Eurofighter Typhoon jets in a £6bn deal, which included the creation of a new (temporary) UK-based Typhoon joint UK-Qatari squadron, initially based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

As Dr David Wearing notes in his book AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain, the UK, under both Labour and Tory governments, has played an important role “in the promotion and preservation of monarchical rule in the region”.

One reason these inconvenient facts are rarely mentioned, let alone seriously discussed, is the massive effort and resources Qatar has put into burnishing its image on the international stage, especially in the US and UK.

After the start of the blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in 2017, Doha “hired an army of lobbyists and public relations professionals” to target Washington, D.C., Ben Freeman explained in a 2020 Center for International Policy report. This “extraordinary influence operation” included 33 different firms serving as Qatar’s registered foreign agents in the US, with Qatari foreign agents contacting the offices of more than two-thirds of all members of Congress. In the UK “Qatar has spent more money on gifts and trips for British MPs in the past year than any other country,” the Observer reported last month.

Beyond direct lobbying, Qatar projects soft power through various media outlets, including the popular Aljazeera television news channel – and Aljazeera English for Western audiences.

Like its Gulf neighbours, Qatar has also spent considerable money funding prominent Western research institutes and universities. In 2013 it gave $14.8 million to US-based The Brookings Institution thinktank in 2013, while the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development donated £2.4 million to establish a Professorship in Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2007 the UK’s influential Royal United Services Institute ‘defence’ thinktank opened up a branch in Qatar to “conduct research and organise conferences, on specific security questions affecting Qatar, the Gulf and the broader Middle East… as well as strengthening the traditional close links between the United Kingdom and the State of Qatar.”

In addition, a number of Western universities, such as University College London, have campuses in Qatar, and some Western specialists on the Gulf states, including Professor Gerd Nonneman and Dr Marc Owen Jones, work at Qatar-based universities.

What all this means is that many of the researchers and academics who should be the first port of call for independent, critical analysis and expertise on Qatar and the wider Gulf region are often fatally compromised.

“Donors have usually been able to rely on a culture of self-censorship taking root in the recipient institutions,” academic Dr Christopher Davidson explained about Gulf funding in his 2012 book After

The Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies. “It is almost inconceivable… to imagine an academic with no alternative source of income researching and writing a serious critique of a regime that has either paid for his or her salary, scholarship, or the building that houses his or her office”.

To confirm, it’s not a conspiracy, and generally not the result of overt direction. Rather it’s the logical outcome of funding sources, career preservation and conventional human behaviour (“it’s a lot easier to accept and conform than to attack power,” Noam Chomsky pithily noted in a recent interview). And access too – if your academic research relies on visiting one or more of the Gulf states, would you risk this by making public criticisms of the ruling elites in those nations?

It should be noted that Davidson, by publicly drawing attention to this hugely important issue, is a rare voice of honesty amongst Gulf scholars. That many academics working on Qatar and the wider Gulf are steered away from certain topics and conclusions is the great unmentionable in the relatively small Gulf-focussed research community. And journalists, our supposed heroic seekers of truth, are themselves unlikely to draw attention to these squalid compromises, keen to maintain good relations with researchers for quotes and background information, and to visit the Gulf for their own work.

Of course, the British government is more than happy for its close, supportive relationship with Qatar to remain out of sight. As a UK “senior official” was quoted as saying in a 1997 book published by the establishment thinktank Chatham House: “Much of our foreign policy is conducted on the sly for fear that it would raise hackles at home if people knew what we were pushing for.”

In contrast, the job of activists and concerned citizens is to bring the UK’s reprehensible dealings with Gulf elites to the public’s attention.

And the World Cup provides a golden opportunity to push the debate beyond migrant and LGBTQI+ rights, and raise awareness about the UK’s decades-long support for the authoritarian monarchy in Doha at the expense of the democratic aspirations of the general population in Qatar and the rest of the Gulf.

Book review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins

Book review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
February-March 2003

At 875 pages, including a 50-page bibliography and 90 pages of references, this is a huge tome, and a serious investment of time. Those looking for a much shorter primer covering much of the same ground may want to check out John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (Bookmarks, 2006) instead.

However, those who persist will discover a hugely impressive tour de force, providing a deep dive into the massive violence that ‘was endemic to the structures and systems’ of the British Empire.

‘Repression was about much more than re-establishing British authority,’ writes Caroline Elkins, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. ‘Violence enacted on bodies, minds, souls, cultures, landscapes, communities, and histories was intimately connected to the civilising mission’s developmentalist dogma’. In other words she argues violence was ‘inherent’ to the ideology of liberal imperialism that underpinned the British Empire.

She is particularly interested in ‘legalized lawlessness’ – how the British state, in an attempt to maintain control, ‘often rendered their lawless behaviour legal by amending old regulations and creating new ones’.

Focussing on India, the Irish independence struggle, the Arab Revolt in 1930s Palestine, Malaya and Kenya, she maps how key colonial officials, along with their repressive tactics and methods, moved between uprisings. By the time a state of emergency was declared in 1950s Kenya, the agents of empire had honed a horrifying array of torture techniques, including electric shocks, use of fire and hot coals, inserting snakes, vermin, broken bottles and hot eggs into men’s rectums and women’s vaginas, crushing bones and teeth, slicing off fingers and castrating men.

Much of the book was a real education for me, from the burning of Cork in 1920 and the 50,000 home raids and that occurred in Ireland, to the destruction of villages and use of humans as mine sweepers in Palestine. In response to the nationalist insurgency in Malaya the colonial authorities ‘launched the British Empire’s largest forced migration since the era of trade in enslaved people’, relocating over 573,000 people in ‘resettlement areas’. Surrounded by barbed wire, and with guards strictly controlling the inhabitants’ movements, one refugee described it as ‘like a concentration camp’.

There was, of course, significant resistance to Britain’s terror. Though the focus tends to be on violent opposition, there is a fascinating section on Black intellectuals from the colonies, such as George Padmore, C. L. R James and Jomo Kenyatta, working with left-wing activists in 1930s London to publish a huge amount of anti-colonial writings. And the quote from the War Office’s Manual of Military Law – ‘the existence of an armed insurrection would justify the use of any degree of force necessary effectually to meet and cope with the insurrection’ – suggests nonviolent resistance, when it was used on a large scale, may have caused the most problems for the British.

Speaking to the Guardian in August about a Channel 4 documentary looking at the colonial repression in Kenya, historian Niels Boender noted there was a disconnect between the current public debate and the expert research and discussion ‘You find that the [public] debate is sort of stuck… 50 years in the past,’ he notes. ‘In the public level, the debate is “Was the empire good?” Whereas we’re debating how bad was it and in what ways was it bad.’

No doubt the British policy of incinerating documents that ‘might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government’ or ‘members of the Police, military forces, public servants or others’ – 3.5 tons of paperwork in Kenya, apparently – has played a role in this mass ignorance. Legacy of Violence might not gain a large readership but hopefully those activists and concerned citizens who work their way through it can use it as a tool and resource to inform the general public moving forward.

Legacy of Violence is published by The Bodley Head, priced £30.

Unkillable myths: Corbyn’s Labour Party and antisemitism

Unkillable myths: Corbyn’s Labour Party and antisemitism
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
9 February 2023

“I’m afraid Jeremy only has himself to blame for the situation he’s in because of his failure to apologise for what happened in the Labour Party, when he was leader, on antisemitism,” Labour MP Liz Kendall said, speaking alongside Jeremy Corbyn MP, on ITV’s Peston earlier this month.

“What apology – because maybe he’ll do it now – what apology would you want from Jeremy?” presenter Robert Peston asked. “A full and frank apology, which has never happened,” Kendall replied.

The idea Corbyn has never apologised for antisemitism in the Labour Party is widespread in the media and Westminster. Discussing the topic last year, James Ball, who is, incredibly, Global Editor at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tweeted “Saying sorry for doing something immensely shitty shouldn’t be all that difficult, it’s just that Corbyn literally never apologised for anything.” And in their 2021 book Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire state “Starmer’s first act as leader was to do what Corbyn never could” – apologise for antisemitism.

Back in the real world, if you type “Corbyn apology antisemitism” into Google the second result that comes up is a December 2019 Guardian report titled Corbyn Apologises For Antisemitism In Labour Party. The third result is a March 2018 PoliticsHome report titled Jeremy Corbyn Issues Apology For “Pockets” Of Anti-Semitism In Labour Party. Corbyn also did a video in August 2018 saying “I’m sorry for the hurt that’s been caused to many Jewish people”.

The “Corbyn has never apologised” line is one of many myths that has refused to die about antisemitism and Corbyn’s Labour Party, irrespective of the historical record.

On Peston, Corbyn said he had apologised repeatedly, before arguing “evil as antisemitism is, the scale of it within the party was grossly exaggerated”, which Kendall visibly took exception to.

With this in mind, it’s worth considering some of the claims made at the time. A July 2018 front page editorial jointly published by the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish Telegraph newspapers warned a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life” in Britain. A month later Marie van der Zyl, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told an Israeli TV news show that Corbyn had “declared war on the Jews”. Writing in the Express in 2017 Stephen Pollard argued “Labour is now the party of bigots and thugs, where Jew haters are cheered”, while Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer, appearing on LBC radio in 2019, said Corbyn “wanted to re-open Auschwitz”.

The same year Margaret Hodge MP told the media she had obtained “over 200 examples [of antisemitism], some vile, where evidence suggested they came from Labour.” However, according to the Guardian, the Labour Party General Secretary later confirmed “investigations had found those complaints referred to 111 reported individuals, of whom only 20 were members.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2019 Survation poll, commissioned by Professor Greg Philo for his co-authored book Bad News For Labour, found of the respondents who had heard about the topic “on average people believed that a third of Labour Party members have been reported for anti-semitism” when “the actual figure was far less than one per cent.”

As with many issues, the Fourth Estate played a crucial role in the so-called ‘antisemitism crisis’. Philo and his co-author Dr Mike Berry noted the results of four focus groups they held showed “the media and the extensive coverage that the story has received feature very prominently in the reasons that were given” for higher estimates of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Furthermore, a 2018 analysis of British media coverage of antisemitism published by the Media Reform Coalition “identified myriad inaccuracies and distortions in online and television news including marked skews in sourcing, omission of essential context or right of reply, misquotation, and false assertions made either by journalists themselves or sources whose contentious claims were neither challenged nor countered.”

“Overall, our findings were consistent with a disinformation paradigm,” the authors concluded.

Looking at the coverage of the debate on whether Labour should adopt the contentious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the authors highlighted how there was a high number of inaccurate reports from the Guardian and BBC.

For example, in July 2018 Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland referred to the “near universally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism”. In contrast, a quick look at the IHRA’s own website shows that by July 2018 their definition had been adopted and endorsed by just nine countries.

In July 2019 BBC Panorama broadcast Is Labour Antisemitic?, which had a big impact on the debate. The programme related how Ben Westerman, a member of the party’s Disputes Team, was sent to investigate reports of antisemitism in the Wallasey Labour Party in 2016. According to Westerman, at the end an the interview with a party member he was asked “Where are you from?” and “Are you from Israel?”, both of which he refused to answer. However, Al Jazeera Investigations undertook the journalism that the BBC should have done, and broadcast the audio of the interview in their 2022 The Labour Files documentary (which, naturally, has been ignored by the mainstream media). It turns out the interviewee, unfamiliar with the interview process, asked Westerman “What branch are you in?”, which he refused to answer.

It should be noted Corbyn is not alone in thinking the incidence of antisemitism in the Labour Party was overstated for political reasons. Geoffrey Bindman KC, Jewish Voice For Labour, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, public figures such as Mariam Margolyes and Alexi Sayle, and three-quarters of Labour members in a March 2018 Times/YouGov poll are among those who agree with Corbyn’s analysis.

Indeed, the Forde Report, which was commissioned by Keir Starmer, noted “some anti-Corbyn elements of the party seized on antisemitism as a way to attack Jeremy Corbyn… thus weaponising the issue” (Forde says Corbyn supporters did this too).

Moreover, the polling evidence seems to contradict the “antisemitism crisis” narrative.

“Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party” an October 2016 Home Affairs Committee report on antisemitism found “there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.”

A 2017 YouGov/Campaign Against Antisemitism poll found “Labour party supporters are less likely to be antisemitic than other voters”, such as Tory and UKIP supporters. Similarly, a 2017 report from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (IJPR), which analysed polling data, concluded “the political left, captured by voting intention or actual voting for Labour, appears in these surveys as a more Jewish-friendly, or neutral, segment of the population.”

To be clear, there was a problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. At the same time the evidence strongly suggests the level of antisemitism in the party was overstated for political purposes. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

In short, the evidence points to Corbyn being the victim of one of the most successful smear campaigns in British political history.

This personal onslaught significantly weakened him and the broader Labour Party, delegitimised him as a political figure, and sapped energy and support from the wider Corbyn movement.

It wasn’t a conspiracy; rather undermining Corbyn’s leadership was the shared agenda of the centre, right-wing and much of the bureaucracy of the Labour Party itself, the Tories and nearly all of the British press. Also, it’s likely the MP for Islington North’s pro-Palestinian politics didn’t endear him to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the apartheid-implementing Israeli government both organisations supported.

Frustratingly, some prominent voices on the left caved in to the pressure. Asked in 2018 why antisemitism was “endemic in the Labour Party” by the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani didn’t question whether it really was “endemic” but answered “I think there are a few explanations”.

And after Corbyn stepped down as leader, at the 2020 Jewish Labour Movement’s Labour Party leadership hustings the chair asked “Do you regard it as antisemitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact?” To which, shamefully, the Corbynite candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey MP, immediately replied “Yes”.

Of course, in many ways Corbyn was merely the vulnerable figurehead. It was the hundreds of thousands of Corbyn-supporting Labour members, and the millions of people who voted Labour in 2017 hoping for a more equal and just society, who were the real threat that needed to be stamped out.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

The Second Superpower: 15 February 2003

The Second Superpower: 15 February 2003
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
15 February 2023

In two key respects, there is a broad consensus about the 15 February 2003 anti-Iraq War march.

First, it’s understood to be the largest political demonstration in British history, with over one million people marching in London. Second, it is generally considered a total failure, something many on the left also believe. For example, in 2011 Ellie Mae O’Hagan, currently the Director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies think-tank, asserted it was “monumental” but “did absolutely nothing.”

While the first point is correct, what about the latter? To get a handle on the importance and influence of that historic Saturday we need to head back over 20 years.

According to CBS News, within hours of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling aides to come up with plans to strike Iraq. Following the US-UK invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the drumbeats for war on Iraq grew louder, with US President George Bush stating in his 2002 State of the Union address that Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, was a member of the “axis of evil”, which “by seeking weapons of mass destruction… pose a grave and growing danger.”

In the UK the anti-war movement grew quickly, with the Stop the War Coalition, set up in September 2001, joining forces with the Muslim Association of Britain and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Around 400,000 attended a September 2002 demonstration.

With tensions building, Tony Blair’s Labour government made extraordinary efforts to persuade the public to support military action in what British historian Mark Curtis has called “a government propaganda campaign of perhaps unprecedented heights in the post-war world”. Dodgy dossiers were published, and there were a number of well-publicised terrorism scares in late 2002/early 2003, including stationing tanks at Heathrow to supposedly counter a plot to attack the airport.

Much of the media was supportive of war, including the Observer. Speaking to me in 2009, Tony Benn explained “the Guardian was a bit wobbly” while “the Morning Star was the only paper that gave systematic say-to-day coverage” of the anti-war movement. Under intense pressure, the BBC often echoed the government line, and had little interest in anti-war activism. “Since we, rightly or wrongly, see ourselves as public policy journalists then necessarily we look at what is happening in public policy i.e. politicians and officials” rather than “those who were not in a positon to make decisions, like the anti-war movement,” Kevin Marsh, the Editor of the BBC Today Programme in 2003, told me.

15 February 2003 itself was bitingly cold, with hundreds of coaches from across the UK transporting protesters to London. Having already decided he would probably set his next book (2005’s Saturday) on the day, author Ian McEwan was out with his notebook recording his impressions. “Every bit of civil society was there,” he told me. “It was unaccountably merry given the issue.” With the march starting from two locations (Embankment and Gower Street) because the numbers were so big, “essentially the whole of London was moving from the east to the west”, Stop the War Coalition’s Chris Nineham commented.

The demonstration culminated in Hyde Park, with a long rally of speeches from public figures, including trade union leaders, Jeremy Corbyn, the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas, Salma Yaqoob, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, Mo Mowlam, George Galloway, London Mayor Ken Livingstone and, finally, US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. The playwright Harold Pinter memorably proclaimed “The United States is a monster out of control… the country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Tony Blair a hired Christian thug.”

Of course, it wasn’t just London. Opposition to the war was global, with the Guardian reporting up to 30 million people demonstrated against the war in more than 600 cities across the world. One million people marched in both Barcelona and Madrid, over 500,000 in Berlin, likely over a million in Rome, 150,000 in Melbourne, and there was even a small protest in Antarctica. The 400,000-strong protest in New York is commemorated in the Bright Eyes song Old Soul Song (for the New World Order).

Despite this enormous demonstration of public feeling, just over a month later the US and UK invaded Iraq. With Bush and Blair failing to get United Nations Security Council backing, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted “it was not in conformity with the UN charter” – i.e. it was illegal. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Deputy Legal Advisor at the Foreign Office, agreed, writing in her resignation letter that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression.”

The initial assault and subsequent occupation caused the deaths of perhaps 500,000 Iraqis, displacing over 4.2 million people by 2007 according to the UN Refugee Agency. 179 UK soldiers and over 4,400 US soldiers died, with many more wounded. In addition, the war significantly increased the terror threat in the West, with the 7/7 suicide bombers explicitly stating they were motivated by the Iraq war.

But while it didn’t stop the war, there is considerable evidence the march and the wider anti-war movement, by informing and mobilising British public opinion, has had many important short and long-term impacts.

First, it’s likely the growing anti-war sentiment inside and outside the Labour Party forced Blair to hold a parliamentary vote on the war, which hadn’t happened since the Korean War (this set a precedent for the Syria vote – see below). And it’s likely the march itself increased the importance of the UK and US getting Security Council approval, something UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirmed to US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a 16 February 2003 memo.

Furthermore, while it remains unknown to many, Peace News editor Milan Rai has highlighted how the anti-war movement actually came very close to stopping British involvement in the war. According to the Sunday Telegraph, on ‘Wobbly Tuesday’ – 11 March 2003 – the Ministry of Defence “was frantically preparing contingency plans to ‘disconnect’ British troops entirely from the military invasion… demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.” Speaking to Rumsfeld the same day UK Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon “stressed the political problems the government was having both with MPs and the public,” the Sunday Mirror reported.

The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article Major General (Ret) Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.” The consequence of this was the British had “insufficient troops to be effective in the post-conflict phase in Iraq”, forcing “commanders in-theatre to react to events, and not to be able to shape them.”

As a politician Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37% of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion. Peter Oborne has argued that without the public opposition to the war – and also what happened in Iraq itself – “there would not have been for an [official] inquiry and the Chilcot report would never have been written.”

And in 2016 Blair’s spin doctor Alistair Campbell admitted the “widespread opposition to the war… played a big role in Corbyn’s rise.”

More broadly, the controversy over the decision to go to war also seems to have shifted British public opinion, with 52 per cent of respondents opposing British military interventions overseas in a 2019 YouGov survey.

A good example of this new reality came in August 2013 when MPs voted down the UK government’s motion to attack Syria – the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782. According to the Guardian “The spectre of the 2003 Iraq War hung over the Commons” during the debate.

This defeat generated significant alarm within the British establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, the UK’s Chief of Defence Staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.”

So beyond failing to stop the war, there have been some very important wins. And by remembering these victories concerned citizens will hopefully remember the power they have to effect change.

As the New York Times noted at the time: “The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”

Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press. Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.