MPs must vote no to Iraq airstrikes
Left wing political party Left Unity is calling on MPs of all parties to clearly reject airstrikes on Iraq or any other military action in parliament tomorrow.
Salman Shaheen of Left Unity said:
“ISIS are monsters but they are monsters of the West’s own making. Forged in the fires of war, more bombs will only hasten their spread.
“It is clear that ISIS in fact wants Western intervention and our government is falling right into their trap. Not only that, but it is allying itself with states like Saudi Arabia which have spent billions spreading the very same poisonous ideology.
“Many of the young British militants going to fight for ISIS like ‘Jihadi John’ would have been growing up during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Western intervention a decade ago killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and created the terrorists we see today. Let’s not create the next generation of terrorists.”
For more information contact press@leftunity.org.
Notes for editors
1. Left Unity is the new party of the left in Britain. Founded in November 2013, it has around 2,000 members and 50 branches across the country.
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The latest UN report makes very clear that the Assad regime has committed many more atrocities of the same type as ISIL. The West’s choice, led by Obama, to highlight ISIL’s war crimes but not Assad’s and the bombing of ISIL in Syria by the USA inevitably supports Assad’s war on his people.
The difference beywene the two?
ISIL threatens the Versailles Treaty, which divided the former Ottoman Empire into states with borders drawn around the oilfields, to faciliate control of these resources by the powers given a League of Nations Mandate to rule over their peoples – Britain and France. If the border between Iraq and Syria is dissolved into something like a Caliphate, so is easy, continued contol of oil resources.
Assad does not carry the same threat to western interests.
All the rest is hot air – brutality and atrocities have been happening in this part of the world since Britian and France took over.
The House of Commons is endorsing air strikes backed by troops on the ground (the Kurdish Peshmurger & the Iraqi army who have in the past and will again fight each other because the Kurds, like ISIL, want to break the Versailles Treaty to establish Kurdistan, taking territory from Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. What an incoherent strategy!
Nothing new here – The British responded to the rebellion against their mandate in 1920 with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, Britain unleashed the flying dogs of war to “police” them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on mud, stone and reed villages during Britain’s League of Nations’ mandate.
This is but the latest chapter in a century-long attempt by the West to impose its indirect rule over the oil-rich areas of the middle east. Its selective attention to atrocities is deeply hypocritical.
The hypocrisy is much more recent than that – the US and its lackeys invaded Iraq killing hundreds of thousands indiscriminately. The finishing touch to their barbarism was the use of mercenaries – essentially arming and paying the scum of the earth – then allowing these outfits to kill and maim anyone they came across with the promise of no sanction of any kind even in the occasional cases when they were caught on camera etc. ISIL are barbaric and should be wiped out, but the imperialists are even worse!
It is no good simply listing the (undoubted) endless crimes of British and French colonialism in the Middle East , or indeed of the brutal Assad regime, but then to simply ignore the current life and death struggle of the Kurdish people , in Kobane, and across Kurdish Syria and Iraq, against the murderous sectarian clerico-fascists of Islamic State/ISIL. This is itself just a “Left mirror image” of the hypocritical selectivity of which the Western media are being accused.
The Kurdish people , a genuinely oppressed nation, with legitimate national liberation movement if ever there was one, are calling for heavy weapons and air support now from ANY power willing to supply this. The Left should support the demands of the Kurdish People, rather than hiding behind endless listings of the crimes of imperialism.