Greetings on behalf of Chumbawamba, and solidarity with everyone demonstrating outside Menwith Hill today .

After his ruthless exploitation of the situation following the 9-11 attacks on the USA, President Bush and his war cabinet have forged ahead with their plans to re-arm the US military and re-order their economic interests across the planet.

STOP SON OF STAR WARS

Bush’s election promise to build the Son of Star Wars missile defence system is forging ahead. Whilst  reports of this development are casually omitted from most regular news channels the signs here at the US miltary Menwith Hill base are that the project is under full steam, with no consideration of whether we the British public want such a thing. The reason being of course that, as opinion poll after opinion poll have resoundingly condemned Tony Blair’s support of George Bush’s rush to war against Iraq, if people knew that was going on here ostensibly in our name but absolutely without our consent they would be similarly outraged.

If we are to take the Bush administration at face value, then the key element of their  post 9-11 strategy to police the planet would be their determination to make the US use of pre-emptive strikes acceptable. This is exactly what is happening in Bush’s relentless push towards war with Iraq. In many ways such a strategy renders the need for a defensive missile sheild redundant. If the US military destroy countries they believe have the potential  to threaten the USA with long range missiles, before those
missiles can be built in the first place then why the need for a multi-billion dollar system to shoot  down missiles which would not even exist, let alone be launched?

In reality Son of Star Wars  has almost nothing to do with preventing actual attacks on the USA, and almost everything to do with the US militarisation of space. Had Son of Star Wars been in place on 9-11 it would not have stopped the terrorist attacks on the USA. If Son of Star Wars were in place now, today it would be being used  to enforce the so-called no fly zone over Iraq. If it were in place and the war against Iraq goes ahead it would be being put to even more devastating and aggressive use to as part of the plan  take out the infrastructure of Iraqi society on the ground.  In fact, in the same way that Bush is trying to change the rules so that he can get away with pre-emptive strikes, once the Son of Star Wars system is built , so he will change the language to turn a so-called defensive shield into a new and devastating part of the US military arsenal.

So, if there were any doubt, the struggle to Stop the War against Iraq is part of the struggle to stop the Son of Star Wars system being completed. And the struggle to stop the Son of Star Wars system being completed is part of the struggle to Stop the War against Iraq.

STOP THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ

This week has seen President Bush seeking to ram home his determination to launch a massive and unprovoked attack on Iraq, and it looks like Congress will probably by now have voted in favour of Bush’s latest bellicose ramblings.

Speaking  last  Monday  (October 7th) in Cincinnati  on the one year anniversary of the start of the bombing of Afghanistan, Bush talked in grandiose terms of an apocalyptic struggle between good an evil, saying “ the threat posed by Saddam could dwarf the damage done in the Sept. 11 attacks.”

He is right in one sense, but  - just as more civilians were killed  in Afghanistan than died in the terrorist attacks on the USA on 9-11 -  the most likely apocalyptic nature of any conflict with Iraq will be in the form of thousands more Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. and British bombs. And, the evil intent in the instance of an all-out U.S. - British assault on Iraq, must surely sit to some large degree within the Bush war office, when virtually the whole world, with the notable exception of Tony Blair,  is counselling against such
an attack.

STOP THE OIL WARS

What Bush did not mention  in Cincinatti was his administration’s perception of oil as a worthy cause to go to war for, or the strategic importance of a US military prescence in the Gulf region to his government’s skewed view of how best to police the planet.

Indeed, the ‘smoking gun’  that betrays the the current US administration’s  barbaric doggedness to force this war on the world, has been in the public domain at least since the the US National Energy Policy Report of May 2001. At the time the report,  authored by  Dick Cheney,  was front page news because it basically embraced the oil industry,  and it showed the contempt for environmental concerns, held by the Bush regime.  However,  in the small print, Cheney  -  “one of America's richest and most powerful oil industry magnates” in the days before  he became Vice President  - outlined the imperative need to increase U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil supplies. What he was actually saying was that the U.S. could no longer rely on Saudi Arabia (and this was before 9-11 remember, and his cause has become even more urgent since 9-11).  Cheney boldly stated that  the US needed an alternative source of oil from the region and everybody in government and political analysts knew that he was talking about Iraq.

Add to this the fact that Iraq has always been a target closer to Bush junior’s own heart  In low key fund-raisier in Houston to the party faithful at the end of September 2002, Bush described  Saddam Hussein as "a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time." It seems obvious that  the Bush administration made up its mind on this at least around the time of the president’s “Axis of Evil” speech back in January 2002 if not even before 9-11, and they remains  absolutely determined to go to war with Iraq, regardless of what the UN or anybody else thinks.

By March 2002, in the small print pages of the liberal newspapers political analysts were already predicting how the U.S government would force its war-like agenda on Iraq and the world.  The game of cat and mouse with the UN regarding arms inspections would give the impression that diplomacy had failed and  and by making the conditions so tough as to be impossible for the arms inspectors to return to Iraq, the US government could convince enough people in the right places to go ahead with their bloody war. And, so it has come to pass, every time the UN  reaches agreement with Iraqi diplomats on conditions for the return of the arms inspectors,  the US government has shook its head sternly and said that is not good enough.

By early April Bush had invited Tony Blair to Texas for strategic talks on how the war would be carried out and both the US and British establishments have been quietly moving their armaments and troops into position ever since. Qatar has surreptitiously  replaced Saudi Arabia as the US command centre of operations in the region. Presumably, the USA’s bomb factories  have by now, or have very nearly, replenished stockpiles depleted by the bombing of Afghanistan, as observers report that the US aircraft carriers in or around the Gulf region are fully ready and primed for yet another campaign of relentless destruction from the air.

Britain took another step to align itself with the Bush war drive and the hawks in the US government  by announcing last Saturday (October 5th,) that air bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which proved essential to US forces during  the bombing of Afghanistan, would be ready and willing to assist in the destruction of Iraq.  Whitehall sources said October 7th that it is assumed Tony Blair will give the order before the month is out that defence chiefs  mobilise  a sizeable British force in readiness for the attack on Iraq.

STOP GEORGE BUSH

The US administration has not had all its own way and the opposition to this build up to war, has been far greater on all fronts than they anticipated. If this war is to be avoided, it requires no less than the complete and utter humiliation of the Bush administration  to stop their march towards insanity. Unfortunately, the Bush team are so gung-ho that it seems unlikely that anything will stop them in their tracks. The mass of world opinion is against  the Bush war drive, and we need to increase the pressure on them in any way we can  to step back from war, but all the signs are, and have consistently been, that Bush will go ahead and do it anyway.