Editorial

Tony Blair and the New "White Man's Burden"

In his July 18, 2003 speech to the U.S. Congress, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that even if it is found that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, the Anglo-American invasion of that country was justified because it brought "liberty" to the Iraqi people. He further stated that "history will forgive" the U.S. and Britain if they erred about the weapons of mass destruction, but would never forgive them if they had failed to act and the threat proved real.

Of course, Mr. Blair is not being honest about U.S. President Bush and himself possibly "erring" on the side of caution. The evidence emerging on a daily basis is proving quite conclusively that both governments and both leaders were well aware long before the invasion that their claims about weapons of mass destruction were false. They knew this fact because their respective intelligence agencies had advised them months earlier that their so-called evidence was forged. Yet they chose to use the fabricated evidence anyway to justify their attack on the sovereign country of Iraq.

In order to cover up this criminal activity, Blair is attempting to downplay the issue of weapons of mass destruction by claiming that the bringing of "liberty" to the Iraqi people justifies everything. He goes so far as to claim that: "We promised Iraq democratic government. We will deliver it. We promised them the chance to use their oil wealth for all their citizens and not a corrupt elite. We will do so." It is unclear how Mr. Blair intends to accomplish in Iraq what his government and the Bush administration have failed to accomplish in their own countries. It is also unclear how Mr. Blair could be oblivious to the fact that this new justification for invading Iraq actually constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity under international law.

However, even this justification is already wearing thin. In recent days several members of the Iraqi national council, all of them hand-picked by the Bush administration, have been publicly complaining that they have been given no real role in administering Iraq and that the American "liberation" is beginning to look more and more like an occupation. Demands have been raised, echoed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, that the American and British armed forces begin immediately to withdraw from Iraq and transfer control of the country to a civilian authority run by Iraqis. Blair's silence on the issue of the withdrawal of Anglo-American troops and the establishment of an Iraqi civil authority puts the lie to his claim that the underlying motive for the invasion was to bring "liberty" to the Iraqi people or to put the control of their oil into their own hands.

In his speech, Mr Blair went to great lengths to refute claims that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was an act of imperialism. However, in his desperate attempt to cover up his and Bush's criminal conspiracy to mislead the world, Mr. Blair has actually confirmed the imperialist nature of the invasion. Gone is the pretence that the Anglo-Americans were forced to act in order to save the world from a potential holocaust. In its place is the claim that the United States and Britain have the right to invade any country which "violates human rights" in order to bring liberty and democracy to those countries. Not only does this claim harken back to Churchill's 1946 "Cold War" speech, in which he stated that the "English speaking countries" had a special role to play in bringing freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, it also raises the old banner of British colonialism and imperialism, the racist slogan of "White Man's Burden". The face of the "new" imperialism is looking more and more like the face of "old" imperialism every day.