Tony Blair, public welcome rally, Parliament House, Canberra, Monday 27 March 2006 

Ed. There was a small but committed crowd (100-200) at this public rally representing many organizations and concerned individuals.  The focus was on freedom for Iraq, non-discrimination against Muslims in Australia, and civil liberties for all.  Lead speakers were Senator Kerry Nettle and her parliamentary guest Terry Hicks, David’s father.

The important thing we did there was to bear witness to how many people feel on these issues – our numbers on the day were unimportant. I’m publishing here my speech notes and Keysar Trad’s speech text – a powerful statement which he kindly sent me.

TK,  31 March 2006

 

Tony Kevin’s speech notes:

 

Two and a half years ago in October 2003 we saw here the spectacle of an imperial visit to our Australian Parliament House by George Bush.  So this is the visit of the third member of the shameful troika that ticked off on the invasion of Iraq, an act of naked aggression in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and falsely justified by cooked-up and phoney intelligence about alleged WMD ready for use in Iraq.

 

100,000 Iraqi dead later, why does Blair come here to Canberra? There is nothing to celebrate by way of any mutual achievement. These three mediocre leaders have, comprehensively, stuffed it up. They have dishonoured our three countries.   They should be hiding their heads in shame, not organising distasteful celebratory appearances together.

 

Blair is really in Australia for the bread and circuses of the Commonwealth Games. His visit to our Parliament House is a pathetic afterthought.

 

I wonder, what will these three men be remembered for in history? Not what they would like to be remembered for - their national leadership.

 

They’ll be remembered for launching what is politely now called by mainstream pundits a “war of choice” – we here another term for it here today , we are not afraid to call it a war of aggression, that had no just cause – against a defenceless and broken country that sits on a lot of oil.   It wasn’t a war, it was a turkey shoot by a vastly superior coalition of Western military powers determined to take control of Iraq’s oil.  

 

But the occupation history is another story. The worst horror, both for occupied Iraq and for its occupiers, began after the invasion war, with the war of resistance. The three years since the invasion began in March 2003 are years of unmitigated disaster for the people of Iraq.

 

I don’t hesitate to say this – it it what most Iraqis think now - Saddam’s regime for all its many faults was certainly better than this unending anarchy, impunity, loss of so many lives,  and social breakdown  – that is the judgement of the Iraqi people and I respect their judgement.

 

Iraqi civilian fatalities directly caused by combat are reliably calculated at over 25.000 now and when one factors in indirect deaths from shock and hunger and war-caused diseases the total is certainly in excess of 100,000. 

 

The occupation of Iraq is a major ongoing war crime no matter how the commentariat tries to dress it up and sanitise it now as ‘a mistake’. And the three guilty leaders are Bush, Blair and Howard. All three are as guilty as Milosevic and should be arraigned in the International Criminal Court.  

 

Blair deserves a particular opprobrium, because the Bush gang listened a little to Blair, while Howard just dutifully said “Australia too”. Blair might have stopped this war but he chose opportunistically to fly with the American neo-con looney-tunes. He spun the truth as shamelessly as did Bush’s people did. He laid Britain’s international standing on the line and squandered it. A decent man, British defence scientist David Kelly, was driven to his death under the accumulated pressure of official lies and media attempts to expose them.

 

Tony Blair as he now is - a thoroughly discredited figure - is an awful warning of what can happen to Labor politicians when they start believing in their own spin, and think they can create new realities out of their own false propaganda. This should be a salutary lesson to anyone in Australia’s Labor Party who thinks they can monkey with the truth. 

 

The invasion of Iraq is a huge ongoing shame and horror.  And it has damaged our society us here in Australia too. By validating anti-Muslim prejudices, it has taken the joy and security out of the lives of Australian Muslims. It is pushing the overwhelmingly decent community of Australian Muslims to the margins of our society.

 

The ongoing war is eroding compassion and civility in Australia. I believe we wouldn’t have had the Cronulla riots if we had not invaded Iraq, for it is the unacknowledged guilt of our participation in unjust aggression that is the main driver of growing anti-Muslim prejudice in Australia.  For it is human nature to hate those whom we wrong. Every time Australian racists see an Australian Muslim woman or girl in a hijab,  they are reminded of their guilty knowledge of what we, our coalition, is doing in Iraq – sacking cities, shooting down civilians, terrorizing and humiliating men, women and children, torturing people. Australian forces may not have directly done all those things but we know about them, we are associated with them as a military ally, and when necessary we help the US to cover them up as at Abu Ghraib.    

I am sick to the stomach of this whole Iraq occupation which is laying waste and destroying a nation and its people , just as 35 years ago we and our US ally laid waste and destroyed the peoples of South Vietnam and Cambodia. 

Our state leaders – Bush, Blair, Howard - have learned nothing from that experience. Because basically, they don’t care what happens to the people of Iraq. For them, this is about power and it is about oil. They are getting ready to do something like it again, in Iran.  

We’re here today to say that’s just not acceptable. We’re here to bear witness to decency,  human compassion  and common humanity.  We’re here to tell Tony Blair and John  Howard  – we despise the misery you have caused in Iraq. Hang your head in shame, because you did this. And now you’re here to enjoy your bread and circuses, pretending that everything is normal. .It is not – we are living through the most abnormal and corrupted times I have ever known in Australia. 

There is a fashionable mainstream view now that we made a “mistake” invading Iraq but that the right thing now is to keep forces there “for as long as they are needed”, in order to “protect the fragile democracy” the coalition put in place after Saddam.  That is self-serving hypocrisy. Translation - our leaders are afraid that what is left of Iraq might fall into the Iranian orbit of influence and our cheap oil supplies might be put at risk. Better, they say privately, to maintain the present anarchy and chaos in Iraq, as long as the oil pipelines keep flowing. 

Democracy, genuine self-determination, will only come to Iraq when the last foreign occupying soldier leaves, not before. Our Australian troops should be out now, with no ifs, no buts. 

And yet, incredibly, the Howard Government refuses to exclude the possibility of increasing Australian troop numbers in Iraq,  even as everybody else  - Blair and Bush included –talk about reducing theirs. What on earth is going on here?

I’ll tell you – it’s about our wheat sales. Howard is desperate to try to hold onto our endangered wheat market in Iraq, because he knows that if we lose that major market, the blame will rightly be sheeted home to him, in crucial rural electorates, for the way his warmongering politics corrupted and destroyed Australia’s best wheat market in the Middle East.  So he is desperately trying now to curry favour with everyone who matters in the US-led occupation and its puppet government in Iraq, hoping for some spin-off benefit to our wheat exporters. 

Our soldiers in Iraq are hostages to the mess Howard made of our Iraq policy. Canada which did not invade Iraq is now happily selling wheat there. The US is happily selling wheat there. And we have stuffed our largest wheat market, we are despised throughout the Middle East as mercenaries and liars, while our soldiers remain over there risking their lives in Iraq.  Terrific policy. Terrific outcomes. 

On the AWB Cole inquiry, we are seeing even now a strange reluctance by those who interpret the news for us to confront the fact of where the $290 million kickbacks money was stolen from.  Not from the UN, not from Australian wheat farmers, not from the Australian taxpayer. No, $290 million was stolen from sick and starving Iraq children in Saddam’s Iraq. .It was money supposed to pay for essential food and medicines for poor Iraqi families suffering under sanctions.  That is what the Oil for Food program was set up to do – use monies earned from limited allowed Iraqi oil sales,  to keep sick and hungry Iraqi kids alive. And that is the money that the AWB, Howard’s Ministers looking on in full knowledge, and Saddam’s officials, were stealing. Robbing a church collection plate for the poor and hungry is about as low as one can go. That is what they did, but we don’t seem to want to confront that reality. Just another example of the contempt for human life in Iraq that stains the whole coalition Iraq war policy. We still cannot face what we did.  

Finally there is Iran. Egged on by hawks in Tel Aviv and their agents of influence around the Western world, the Anglo Club is now toying with the idea of a preemptive air strike –a surgical strike, so-called - on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons precursor facilities. Maybe this will be Tony Blair’s swansong ?

Once again, we are being sold a huge lie, being steadily persuaded that Iran really is trying to make nuclear bombs and really is determined to destroy Israel. What poppycock. Shamelessly, these propagandists are even claiming – yes, we admit our intelligence got it wrong in Iraq, but this time we are really right !  

A massive campaign is under way to convince public opinion in the West of the necessity of a preemptive military strike on Iran.  “Better an armed attack on Iran now, than allowing an Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons”, they claim. Influential people in the Australian Labor Party –intelligent people - are allowing themselves to be sucked in by this nonsense. But any military strike no matter how “surgical” (perhaps only killing 10,000 Iranian people as collateral damage?),  would be another cruel and dangerous folly, just as the invasion of Iraq was. Australia must have no part in this.

Ladies and gentlemen, show Tony Blair and John Howard today how we loathe and despise such policies. Show Blair and Howard the contempt we hold them in.

Tony Kevin, 27 March 2006.

**

Keysar Trad Canberra rally speech:   

“I would like to pay my respects to the original custodians of the land.

 

This was a hypocritical war in a hypocritical world,  where US neo-cons managed to recruit British Labor under an evangelist PM who has seen fit to grace our shores to bring to us one simple message:

He said: His war against Iraq is a clash about civilization.

The warmongers are gathering inside this building behind me to count their spoils.  The British PM is with his Australian counterpart to celebrate a most ignoble, vicious, indecent military campaign that has claimed by some accounts over 250,000 lives and has transformed the placid Iraqi people into resistance fighters.

They gather inside to nut out plans to sell us their war whilst we gather out here, from all over Australia to say: No to war, bring back the troops.

They gather inside this building to scheme nefariously for death, rape and pillage of Iraqis and Afghans whilst we gather out here to say:  No more blood for oil.  No Neo-con crusade, no more war about civilization.

We want peace, we want to respect the right of the Iraqi people to live in peace, we want to allow the beleaguered Iraqis, whose lands we contaminated with depleted uranium, whose children we have killed over a period of fifteen years.  We want them to enjoy peace and to resume a normal life free from occupation, free from foreign troops on their soil, free from dubious bombings and death squads in police and military uniforms.

Mr Blair, your nation has a history of belligerent colonialism that has kept our fair planet in a state of war for 100’s of years.  Have you not learnt: War is not the answer?  Invading Afghanistan and Iraq is not a solution.

Your actions Mr Blair, along with the two other cronies in Washington and Canberra have destabilized our world, deprived us of our civil liberties and made a mockery of our democratic values.

You say that your war is about civilization, yet you have just ransacked the oldest civilization on earth.

You claim to be fighting terrorists, yet your war does nothing other than create terrorists.

Your concept of governance,  Mr Blair, is barbarous, it is based on wars, on violence, on killing, all justified by lies and continued lies and even more lies.

You say that you want to teach the fundamentalists about women’s rights, how so dear sir, is this done by killing the husbands of these women, by killing their fathers, by killing their children and then by coalition troops raping them?  You are a murderer, Sir, and your coalition troops are rapists of the worst kind.

Blair says: His war is between democracy and violence, so far, his war has produced a sham democracy and a great deal of bloody violence, death, destruction, arbitrary arrests and detentions and prisoner abuse.

Who is writing your ideas, Sir?  You say it is a battle about modernity and yet the coalition forces have bombed Afghanistan and Iraq into the stone age.

It seems fashionable for the deceivers leading the coalition of death and destruction to describe their actions by their opposite meaning.

You, Mr. Blair, have destroyed, you have killed, you have raped, you have pillaged, you have sacked, you are stealing, robbing, murdering. You are rotten to the core. Welcome in our country.

Iraq is bleeding, Sir, this once beautiful country is being transformed into contaminated rubble.  This is your war, it is your legacy, it is your shame, it is your ignominy, and we will not be silent nor will we ever acquiesce.

We will not be neutralized by your sophistry, we will not profit from your war and we will not consume your lies about Islam and the Muslims.

We know that you are peddling lies about Muslims to justify your sick grab for Iraqi resources.

I’ll tell you what, you want to know a country in dire need of liberty, it is Palestine, it has been occupied for nearly sixty years, its people have been displaced, they are subjected to daily attacks by the Zionists, let us see your standards, morality and sense of fairness there.”

– Keysar Trad .