This article did not appear in the Labour and Trade Union Review. But we thought it important enough of include on the website.

Sami Ramadani
March 25, 2008 5:30 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sami_ramadani/2008/03/no_no_to_the_new_dic
tatorship.html

Thousands of people are joining the protest marches and \\\"sit-ins\\\" in Baghdad as I write these lines. They are mainly responding to a call by leading anti-occupation ...

When I was his warm-up act, I used to describe the right hon. Member for
Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) as the best Foreign Secretary we
never had, and his speech this evening showed why. Indeed, an
alternative Administration of all the talents became clear on the Labour
Benches, including the right hon. Gentleman�s friends the right hon.
Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson), and the hon. Members
for ...

The Iraq Study Group report [1], published on 6 December 2006, is brutally frank about the catastrophe that Bush and Blair have visited upon Iraq. It is completely devoid of the optimistic spin that they have continuously spewed out. The word “victory” is conspicuously absent.

The President’s grandiose ambition of bringing democracy to the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, is dismissed in one sentence:

“Most of the region’s countries are ...

On Saturday 26 November 2005, Iraq Occupation Focus hosted a one-day teach-in at the University of London Union entitled “Voices from Occupied Iraq”.
email iraqfocus@riseup.net, website at http://www.iraqoccupationfocus.org.uk .

Position Of Women
There were three women speakers at this Workshop. All three were critical of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.—two were expatriates and one was currently resident in Iraq. ...

On 30 June, the US/UK occupation of Iraq is to end. The occupying powers are going to hand over the government of Iraq to Iraqis. At least that's what they say they are going to do.

But don't Iraqis already govern Iraq through the Iraqi Governing Council and the ministers appointed by it?

That's what we were told when objections were raised to the occupying powers rewriting the laws of Iraq to allow non-Arab foreigners to own Iraqi ...

Blair goes to Basra
Matthew Parris remarked on Any Questions the day after Tony Blair's speech to the US Congress last July that life is too short to reconcile what Blair says with what he's said in the past and to reconcile it with reality.

I was reminded of this when reading Blair's "thank you" speech to British troops in Basra on 4 July. What was he saying? Is anything he says meant to convey meaning, or merely to give ...

The Prime Minister must have thought that all his Christmases had come at once when he heard what was in the Hutton report.

He was cleared of the charge of including the 45-minute claim in the September dossier, knowing it to be "wrong", as alleged by Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme on 29 May 2003. That was hardly a surprise, since he had already been cleared by the Intelligence & Security Committee (ISC) in its report ...

When he took Britain to war last March, the Prime Minister didn’t know that the 45-minute claim in the dossier he published six months earlier applied to battlefield weapons. That’s what he told the House of Commons during its debate on the Hutton report on 4 February

The Prime Minister didn’t volunteer this information. He was put on the spot by Conservative MP, Richard Ottaway, who intervened in his speech to ask when he became ...

For George Bush to have a chance of re-election in November, there must soon be light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq, or at least the appearance of it. That is why 30 June 2004 was chosen for the supposed handover of power to an Iraqi government, and why the date is immoveable. It has been chosen to impress upon the US electorate before the presidential campaign begins in earnest that the US is not bogged down in Iraq; that Iraq is not ...

The invasion of Iraq: Not a humanitarian intervention

Formally, the Government’s reason for invading remains Iraq’s alleged breaches of Security Council resolutions (by failing to give up weapons it didn’t possess). Not that this was a sound basis for invading, since 11 out of 15 members of the Security Council were opposed to military action last March and wanted weapons inspections to continue. And it does seem reasonable that the ...