George Galloway - Britain

George Galloway

Member of British Parliament

George Galloway vs. US Senate: Transcript of Statement, May 17, 2005

[George Galloway, Respect [British] MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption.]

"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

[Times Online, May 17, 2005 (www.commondreams.org May 23, 2005)]

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George Galloway - British MP - Speech, October 30, 2003

It is a misunderstanding created by circumstances that I am interested only in Middle Eastern affairs - notably, the struggle for self determination of the Palestinian people and against the horrific effects of sanctions and war on the Iraqi people during Saddam's vile dictatorship.

I have been, of course, passionately engaged in these issues but my interest in opposing all forms of imperialism - including the fashionable neo-liberal version of Mr Blair - arises from a deep patriotism about my own islands.

Empire resulted in the cruelty and oppression of millions outside these islands but it also helped to sustain the power of a ruling elite whose basic greed and sometimes malice, where it was not mere indifference and incompetence, oppressed its own people first before it turned its gaze on peoples of different hue and faith.

Caring about the Middle East is merely a reflection of my deep sense of moral responsibility as a Briton for the dabblings in the region by irresponsible, greedy and incompetent officials over many years.

We have opposing us, a surprisingly small national elite that hangs on to power generation after generation by capturing every popular movement of resistance and turning it into a junior club member. In the Middle Ages, Wat Tyler's head was struck off by the King. Today, he would be put in charge of some regulatory Quango.

Empire builders

It is to the credit of Labour that it took nearly a hundred years for its body and soul to be captured so that it could start to expel radicals such as myself, but it is a process that started with the National Government of Ramsey Macdonald and has concluded with that of Tony Blair.

This is the same elite network that once turned its back on Irish Home Rule and thereby split these islands into two, that almost bankrupted the nation to keep high the financial profits of empire-builders and that, when empire proved untenable, sold us, the people, out to a former colony as its aircraft carrier.

These rulers of ours would have been on a plane out of the country or deep in bunkers when the rest of us fried as America's forward base if there had been a misjudgement in the sixty year war on communism. We owe them nothing.

We, in turn, have been complicit in the deaths of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands or millions, of Asians and Africans since 1945 and we have heard not a word of protest from our ruling family, our media proprietors and the profit-takers in the City.

Harold Wilson did his best and kept us out of Vietnam whereas Tony Blair reflected on thirty years of slow absorption into North American culture, society and economics and responded with his slavish political obeisance to the White House.

Homicidal war

The public is unaware, because it is convenient to some that they should not be aware, that I was condemning Saddam Hussein when he was backed by the anti-communist West in his homicidal war against Iran and using chemical weapons supplied by our Allies.

I met Saddam Hussein twice, the same number of times that Donald Rumsfeld met him.

The difference is that Rumsfeld met him to sell his regime guns and gas and to give them the maps necessary to target them while I met him to try and avert suffering sanctions and war.

If I have said words which taken out of context have upset some people, I refuse to forget that context.

If I appeared to flatter a dictator, I was not. My praise was for the courage, strength and indefatigability of the Iraqi people not their dictator - qualities which have had to be demonstrated all too often in the near decade since I made those remarks I could not oust this Dictator so my first duty was to help his people where I could.

Sovereignty

Let's not forget that the real crimes of Saddam Hussein against his people were largely committed during a period when he was a client and ally of the west; and when I was protesting against him. Most of the suffering of Iraqis in the last decade and more has been inflicted by the White House and Number Ten Downing Street.

So what do I believe in?

Well, first of all, I believe that sovereignty lies in the people and that the English Revolution of 1688 lies unfinished.

Second, that the State should be the servant of the people, transparent and accountable.

Third, that the Defence of the Realm should mean Defence of the People of these islands and not defence of the State or the promotion of special interests in hock to foreign powers.

A strong defence force should not be expended on foreign adventures. No British son should die on foreign shores unless the threat is direct and material to these islands or, as a volunteer, he has signed up to humanitarian action under international law.

Cavalier attitude

These three beliefs alone have placed me on a collision course with a State where monarchical power, cloaked in Parliamentary democracy, has simply been transferred to a Prime Minister whose monomaniacal vision of global intervention, whose cavalier attitude to international law and whose willingness to make sacrifices of other parent's sons is carried out unquestioningly by a loyal State without moral compass.

Politics today can be boiled down to this issue of the morality and legitimacy of the State.

These beliefs, now shared by many others, have been crystallised by a major grassroots peace movement that covered all shades of opinion on social and economic matters within one grand coalition of dissent.

It was a movement of anger at the pride and arrogance of the State and of the elite behind it, an anger that grew with the contempt shown for its views by Government, with the treatment of Dr David Kelly and with the sleazy contempt for the facts over WMD.

This movement expresses the best of Britain - it is tolerant of difference, it is co-operative, it is enterprising, it is internationalist.

The so-called war on terrorism is indicative of the elite's strategy of creating tension between communities but not in an obvious way. It is to the credit of the Government that it has not and almost certainly will not use the sort of cheap anti-Muslim populism that is common in Europe.

State terrorism

Instead, it seeks to impose authoritarian and deeply suspect laws to control dissent, freedom of movement and the right to free expression - the war is against the thinking political community, whether Muslim, socialist, libertarian, patriotic, radical or liberal.

These controls on liberty which have been put in place in a time of economic plenty can be used to disturbing effect in a time of economic scarcity.

But let me be clear about this, I condemn terrorism as an instrument of policy.

But with this caveat that, for me, terrorism is the use of force, violence and subversion against civilians and political activists by whoever is wielding the weaponry. State terrorism, including illegal war, puts the terrorism of such organised ideological criminals as al-Qaida into context, as two sides of the same evil coin.

I will not condemn the just war of populations of occupied territories when they resist, in any way that they can, uninvited invaders on to their sovereign soil - the moral rights of the Sioux, the heroes of Warsaw and the Russian Partisan were and are inviolate in this respect. It is a right we have not had to invoke on our own soil for some considerable time.

Arrogant war leader

Arguments about bringing progress to benighted savages did not wash in the nineteenth century and they do not wash now.

I am motivated by two other important beliefs not always accentuated because those who joined me in this antiwar, anti-occupation movement against an arrogant War Leader need not have shared my Leftist ideology. However, these two beliefs will always guide my political action:

* that working people create their own society through collective action from below; and

* that exploitation of labour will always exist and needs community action to correct it through active redistribution of wealth and power.

This was at the root of my throwing in my lot with the Labour Party more than thirty years ago and of my distress at its departure from those ideals. I have fought a losing battle to stay a democratic socialist inside Labour and it is on record that it expelled me and I did not leave it.

But I am not going to hang around outside Labour's door waiting to be let in. History will not wait. Times have changed. Bevan and Foot were expelled in serious debates on policy which they could fight again another day.

Bloody revolutionists

I was expelled as a result of a manoeuvre by a faction that had captured the Party in a coup and then fixed the rules so that serious policy debate was impossible unless personal permission came from the Wolf's Lair. I now see that traditional British socialism is not dead but is in danger, being poisoned by stealth.

My socialism is the same socialism that inherited the radical democratic triumphs of the nineteenth century and, working alongside the great Liberal politicians of the turn of the last century, created the welfare state and a national economic infrastructure that was intended to be in the service of the people.

My socialism is not that of " bloody revolutionists " or foreign ideological importations. It is rooted in this land and in its traditions of liberty, dissent, co-operativism and trades union action and it is open to every freeborn British person , every faith, all men and women on equal terms.

Politics is about schools, hospitals, roads and jobs as well as about grand theories of democracy, rights, foreign affairs and free trade.

In the drive for the latter on a global stage, New Labour has lost its bearings on national service provision and has turned a vigorous tradition of national democracy into a pale pink ersatz global version for the consumption of foreign elites. In short, we are in danger of losing our freedoms and rights to help foreign elites join an increasingly exclusive international club.

This is not good enough.

Bloodless war

The national politicisation of the anti-war movement is now a necessary next stage in our own bloodless war of national liberation. The reality of the movement means that what we create must operate at two levels.

The first level requires steps towards a mass unifying movement of grassroots radicals to hobble the State, bring it under popular control and complete an unfinished radical democratic revolution. This level will unite Muslims, Christians and Jews, socialists, liberal and conservatives, men, women and the disadvantaged of all types in one movement of democratic liberation.

This is the movement launched in the Quaker's Friends House in London's Euston Road on October 29th 2003 and which will fight New Labour in the European elections and the elections to the Greater London Assembly next June.

The second tier is where the battle for ideas and souls will take place in a People's Britain.

In that battle, I will remain what I have always been - a radical democratic socialist in the Labour tradition - but until power is decentralised and returned to the people, I will work with anyone who shares those first tier values because we need nothing less than a revolution in our national political life.

[www.aljazeera.net]

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Paying a blood price for a lie
George Galloway's Boston speech, September 13, 2005
International Socialist Review, Nov-Dec 2005

Brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, ladies and gentleman. Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction and that wonderful welcome. And to my fellow speakers this evening, my congratulations on the contribution you have made to this splendid meeting-the first meeting of a tour that will take me up the East Coast of the United States, into Canada and into the Midwest, and then down the West Coast, culminating in the great demonstration for peace in Washington, D.C., on the 24th of September. I was very proud that the first of these meetings should be in Boston, and especially in this historic hall-in this place that has been graced by the finest revolutionaries that the world has ever seen, the freedom fighters who fought to free this country from colonial rule.

My favorite parliamentarian in Britain is a man whose statue is the very first statue that a visitor to parliament comes upon-a man called Charles James Fox, who was expelled twice from the British Parliament. The first time he was expelled for supporting the American Revolution, and the second time for supporting the French Revolution. On that occasion, he tabled a resolution in the house that admittedly was a little provocative, in which he congratulated the people of France on the execution of their king and queen and looked forward to the day when the same fate would befall all the crowned heads of Europe. But every time he was expelled, he was returned to Parliament by the people who supported these great causes.

Now, of course, if poor Mr. Fox were able to see the political class in the United States today, and he was able to see George W. Bush, he may wonder at the use to which the people of the United States of America have put their freedom. But I believe that Fox would conclude that the fate and destiny of the United States of America is for the American people alone, and that the support for freedom, the support for revolution, and the support for the right of an occupied people to be free must be unconditional.

You see, this is a subject to which we shall have to return, and I shall I'm sure be dealing with it in detail tomorrow night when I debate with the apostate Christopher Hitchens. I mention this for two reasons. One, being of Irish background myself, and two, because I'm here in Boston where so many Irish came. When the Irish masses rose up against the British Empire on O'Connell Street in Dublin and seized the general post office and proclaimed the Irish republic, there was much chatter amongst the liberal-progressive classes in Bloomsbury in London that these Irish revolutionaries were priest-ridden, bomb-trotting, Celtic-Gaelic obscurantists, to whom they refused to give a certificate of good character.

But the point, ladies and gentlemen, is not what the chattering classes of Bloomsbury thought of the Irish revolutionaries, but what the Irish people thought of the Irish revolutionaries. That is the point. You see, in such circumstances, we in the occupying countries have only one choice to make. Whether we are with the occupier, or whether we are with the rights of the occupied to struggle to be free of that occupation. That's the only question that should concern us. This is a subject to which I shall return when I talk about the struggle of the Iraqi people to free themselves from the foreign occupation which has been illegally and violently imposed upon them.

But first I want to, at this time of the year, so close to the anniversary of the great crime that was committed in the United States on 9/11 in 2001, I want to deal with this broader question. You see, these airplanes on 9/11 may have appeared to come out of a clear blue sky. But in fact, these monstrous mosquitoes flew out of a swamp of bitterness, and hatred and enmity, which exists against us, throughout the world, but most markedly in the Muslim world. It is a swamp that we have flooded with new grievances on a regular basis. And in that swamp mutates the kind of monsters who can believe that killing thousands of innocent people in the United States of America, or killing innocent people on buses and underground trains in London, is a way to punish the guilty people in America and England.

This mutation is a powerful mutation. It is pregnant with dangers not only for us, but also with real dangers for the people of the Muslim world themselves, for as professor Keach just said to you, the main recruiter of support for this mutation is not bin Laden. It is not any of the Islamist obscurantists who wish to feed upon it. The greatest recruiter, the greatest creator of this hatred, bitterness, and enmity are the leaders of Great Britain and the United States themselves. And you see, the British Parliament was recalled just days after 9/11. I was lucky enough to speak in that debate, and if you'll forgive me quoting myself, this is what I said. "If we handle this crisis the wrong way, we will create 10,000 new bin Ladens." Is there a sentient being left in this land who believes other than that we did handle it the wrong way, and that we created not 10,000 new bin Ladens, but hundreds of thousands of new bin Ladens throughout the Muslim world? This is the problem we must confront.

Instead of draining the swamp of the bitterness and hatred by reversing the policies and the prejudices that watered that swamp, we embarked upon a course of action that deepened, ever-deepened, that swamp. And so we made a bad situation worse. So we made even more people hate us even more intently. What kind of policy is that? How can it be a policy toward terrorism if that policy creates more terrorism? How can it be a policy toward making us safer if it actually puts us in greater danger? How can it be a policy to move forward, when it is a policy that takes us back?

You see, I listened to Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Blair-Mrs. Bush II-I'm coming to Mrs. Bush I later. I listened to them in a synchronized radio broadcast in which they invited us on the first anniversary of 9/11 to remember those heartbreaking messages of love and farewell left from their mobile phones by those American women on those airplanes, on the answering machines of their loved ones. They asked us never to forget those heartbreaking messages-as if we could. But as I said at the time, just because Afghan women don't have mobile telephones, and their families don't have answering machines, it doesn't make their deaths delivered form the sky any less obscene than those American women killed on 9/11.
But when I said it, as I looked around the Parliament at the powerful people to whom I was saying it, I knew that for them that apparently self-evident truth was not a truth at all. We have to face up to this, for the rich and powerful people who rule our countries and our world, the blood of some people is more valuable than the blood of other people. The blood of American and British and Israeli and Western people for them is worth more than the blood of poor, Black, Muslim people from other parts of the world. Nobody counted the dead in Afghanistan.

Nobody is holding a minute silence for the dead people in Fallujah. Nobody's raising money at charity concerts for the massacred in Jenin in Palestine. They don't count the same. This is an undeniable truth, which may yet be ungrasped by most of our own people, but was long ago grasped by the people of the poor world, and most precisely by the people of the Muslim world. The people of the Muslim world know that we care more about Israelis than we care about Palestinians; that we care more about Americans than we do about Afghans; and that we care more about British people than we do about Iraqis. And they are mad as hell about that. They are mad as hell about that.

Now, at the time of 9/11, people asked me. OK, well if not this, what? If not the unleashing of overwhelming deadly force by the richest and most powerful countries in the world against the poorest and most ragged people on the earth, then what? What would drain this swamp? And I said, there are three things in particular that we need to do. First is to stop the unending, bottomless, and unconditional support for General Sharon's Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian people, and its dispersal of the Palestinian people around the world. This is a key question, and in the United States you have to grasp this-and even some people in the antiwar movement have not grasped this. This Palestine question is the flaw at the heart of the West's attitude to the East, of the non-Muslims' attitude to the Muslim world. You see, the double standards that are so brazenly obvious to the Arabs, to the Muslims, and to many others-but not alas to our legislators-are at the core, a cancerous core, of this crisis in relations between East and West.

Iraq was broken on the wheel of economic sanctions because of the need to demonstrate the unacceptability of the acquiring of other people's territory by force. It was broken on the wheel of sanctions, and a million Iraqis died-most of them children. Most of them died before they even knew they were Iraqis-but dying for no other reasons but that they were Iraqis- on the grounds that no regime must be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was broken because of the need to impose the authority of the resolutions of the UN Security Council.

But Israel has occupied other people's territory by force for decade after decade after decade. Israel we know-thanks to the whistle blowing of the brave Israeli hero Mordechai Vannunu, who spent nearly two decades in solitary confinement for telling us-Israel is in possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to land them on any and all Arab capitals. Israel sits on top of a mountain of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Israel has broken more UN Security Council resolutions than all of the other countries in the world put together. Yet Israel is not subject to economic sanction or invasion.

Thanks to the United States of America, Israel is endlessly rewarded with money and weapons and political and diplomatic support, precisely for its breaking of these resolutions. We may not see it that way-indeed, in the United States it seems to me precious few people see it that way. But I can tell you in the Arab world, in the Muslim world-around the world-that double standard is as plain as can be.

The second thing that had to be done to drain this swamp was to end the agony of the Iraqi people. I went to Iraq in 1993 and 1994. I had never been to Iraq before. It was the only Arab country I had not visited. I would not have been welcome there if I had, indeed I would have been arrested as a known and vociferous opponent of the Iraqi dictatorship. I used to be demonstrating outside the Iraq embassy in London when British ministers and businessmen were going in and out selling them guns and gas. I never take any lectures from anybody about the dictatorship in Baghdad. But you see, when I went there in 1993 and 1994-before there was any oil-for-food program, when there was mass starvation in the land, when the suffering was literally unbearable to watch, which is why so few Western politicians went there to see it-I saw mass funerals of little children, who were dying at the rate of one every six minutes of every day and night. I listened at the door of the labor ward in a hospital in Baghdad as a woman gave birth by caesarian section without anesthetic, for there was no anesthetic to be had.

When I went there in 1993 and 1994, I was very clear, as was a brave American politician called David Bonnier, a Democratic Party congressman, once the chief whip on the hill. I haven't heard of him in a long time, I assume he's out of politics now. He described this policy as infanticide masquerading as politics. And that is exactly what it was. I argued after 9/11, that as well as changing course on the issue of Palestine, we had to end this crucifixion of the people of Iraq because we have fallen out with the dictator that we helped into power, we armed, we made strong, we encouraged to attack Iran, and invaded to halt the Islamic revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

And the third thing we would have had to have done, is to stop propping up the puppet presidents and the corrupt kings who rule the Muslim world almost without exception from one end to the other-not one of whom would be in power for five minutes if it were not for the military, political, diplomatic, and financial support of your country and mine. Which is why Muslim people don't know whether to laugh or cry when they hear George Bush and Tony Blair talking about liberty. The masses in Pakistan, for example, who one day had a general who had seized power in their country, who wore a uniform, who was subjected to an arms embargo, who was suspended from the British Commonwealth, who was routinely described, indeed memorably described, by President Bush just before his first election, when he was asked in that wonderful question and answer session about the names of world leaders with whom he'd have to be dealing in a few weeks.

Bush was asked who was the ruler of Pakistan. And he said, "The general." And the interviewer asked, "Do we have a name here? General who?" And Bush answered, "We just call him the general." Well, of course, very soon they stopped calling him the general. He stopped being a military dictator who had seized power illegally, exiling and imprisoning his opponents. He became not General Musharraf, but President Musharraf, a great and wise statesman who must be given all the weapons and all the help he needed to follow Washington's orders all the more precisely. Indeed, he was even allowed to acquire-what?-nuclear weapons, the very pursuit of which (fruitless as it turned out) had led to Iraq being crucified and a million Iraqis slaughtered.

Or we could look elsewhere. We could look next door to Palestine, to the great state of Egypt. Mr. Hitchens and Co. tell us that one of the fruits of the attack on Iraq is that there's now democracy in countries like Egypt. Where last week, the president, who has ruled for twenty-four years, was reelected with 88.6 percent of the vote, in a rigged election where he chose who was allowed to oppose him, where he controlled all of the media, and where he even imprisoned his main opponent just a few months before the election. As a matter of fact, President Hosni Mubarak got more votes in this democratic election than he got in what he admitted was a rigged election six years ago. He got 84.6 percent of the vote in the rigged election, and 88.6 percent of the vote in the free and fair election, just to encourage the other rulers to go down that route.

But of course, we didn't do any of these things. We didn't stop rewarding Sharon, we stepped up the rewards to Sharon. We didn't stop killing Iraqis. We killed even more of them. We didn't stop propping up the dictators in the Muslim world, we enhanced and increased our support for those dictators. Indeed, let me give you the surprising news: The security forces of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi are now being trained at Sandhurst, Great Britain's West Point. His army officers are being trained at Sandhurst, and his intelligence officers are being trained-god help them-by the British intelligence services, MI5 and MI6-so Qadhafi's done for. Now, did Qadhafi become less of a dictator after the attack on Iraq? Who are these security forces being employed against? Is Qadhafi's army to defend him against an external aggressor, or is it for use against his own people to keep Qadhafi in power, and likewise his intelligence services. We know the answer very clearly to these questions. So what do you think the Libyan people think when they hear Tony Blair talking about liberty and freedom, when they know that Qadhafi's forces are being trained by Tony Blair's military and intelligence apparatus?

So we did all the wrong things, and we made the world an even more dangerous place than it already was.

And that brings us to Iraq. You know, if democracy means anything, it must mean the holding to account of political leaders for mistakes-let's be charitable and call them mistakes-as big as this one. Everything that George Bush, Norm Coleman, and the American and British political class told us turned out to be a lie. And everything the antiwar movement told us turned out to be right. They told us that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda. It turned out to be a lie. But it's certainly true today.

Every al-Qaeda supporter in the world is descending like spores on the open wounds we've created in Iraq. And just like in Afghanistan, later to travel around the world and practice what they've learned in Iraq. They told us that hundreds of thousands of foreign soldiers invading and occupying an Arab Muslim country would reduce Islamist fundamentalism. I said at the time, you know, if you believe that, you really need medical help. Is there anybody outside the Oval Office or 10 Downing Street who believes now that Islamist extremism is less as a result of what we've done?

They told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I'm not even going to waste your time by developing that point. Because the worst lie that they told is the one I want to focus on. They told us that the Iraqi people would welcome these foreign invaders with flowers and with rice. But instead the Iraqi people have welcomed the foreign invaders with something much hotter and much more sharp. That's where Cindy Sheehan and the other military families in the U.S. and in Britain come in. Because you see it's their sons who are paying the blood price for that lie. And it wasn't that they weren't warned. The antiwar movement warned them repeatedly that if you invade Iraq you will be opening the gates of hell. The Iraqi people will fight you with their teeth if necessary, to repel your invasion.

And to think otherwise is to be guilty of a racist fantasy. That alone of all the people on the earth, the Iraqis would welcome foreign armies to invade their country, occupy it, and begin to loot and steal their things. What kind of people would welcome such a thing? Is there a people on the earth who would welcome such a thing? If, god forbid, somebody landed in my country, some foreign army invaded my country, occupied it, installed a puppet government there, and proceeded to steal its things, every self-respecting person in Britain would fight that occupation to the best of their ability, and that's what's happening in Iraq, exactly what's happening in Iraq.

And that's why we have to be clear about this question. I'm coming to an end now, making an appeal to you for clarity on this question. It's what I said right at the beginning of this speech. It's not our duty to design the Iraqi resistance, or to design whatever political settlement will emerge when the foreign occupiers leave-as they will have to leave. We have only one choice to make as citizens of the U.S. and of Great Britain. It's one that George Bush coined for us when he said, "You're either with us or against us." Well, you're either with your country going around the world, invading other people's countries, occupying them and stealing their things, or you're against it. And if you're against it, you must be there on the 24th of September in Washington, D.C., to tell the world that you are all against it. Thank you very much indeed.

Heroes

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