[continued from previous message] 
  
 Palestinian homes, by the construction of the great apartheid wall in 
 Palestine and by the occupation of Afghanistan? Does it understand that the 
 bitterness and enmity generated by those great events feed the terrorism of 
 bin Laden and the other Islamists? Is that such a controversial point? Is it 
 not obvious? When I was on the Labour Benches and spoke in the immediate 
 aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden. The difference is 
 that I have always despised him. I did so when the Government, in this very 
 House, gave him guns, money and encouragement, and set him to war in 
 Afghanistan. I said that if they handled that event in the wrong way, they 
 would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at 
 least have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If 
 they do, they have their head in the sand. 
  
 There are more people in the world today who hate us more intently than they 
 did before as a result of the actions that we have taken. Does this House 
 understand that the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison have inflamed and 
 deepened that sense of hatred around the world and made our position more 
 dangerous? Do Members of this House not understand that Guantanamo Bay has 
 contributed to the sense of bitterness and hatred against us around the 
 world? Does nobody in this House understand that when Palestinians' houses 
 are knocked down, their olive trees cut down and their children shot by 
 Israeli marksmen, an army of people who want to harm us is created? To say 
 that is not to hope that they succeed-I started by making clear, I hope, my 
 utter rejection and condemnation of the events in London this morning. 
  
 It does not matter whether Britain replaces the Trident submarine system 
 with another. The threat now, as the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John 
 Smith) made clear, is not the intercontinental ballistic missiles of other 
 countries but the asymmetrical threat of angry people who hate us and who 
 are ready to exchange their lives for several of ours, or hundreds of ours, 
 or thousands of ours, if they can do so. Is that really so hard to grasp? 
  
 Given that one cannot defend oneself against every angry man among the 
 enrag=E9s of the earth, it follows that the only thing we can do is address 
 what the Secretary of State called the causal circumstances that lie behind 
 these events. That means trying to reduce the hatred in the world and trying 
 to deal with the political crises out of which these events have flowed. If, 
 instead of doing that, we remain in this consensual bubble in which we have 
 placed ourselves, we will go on making the same mistakes over and over 
 again. We will go on with Guantanamo Bay. We will go on as we are doing, 
 making Abu Ghraib not smaller as we were told would happen after the 
 photographs were published, but bigger. We will go on with occupation and 
 war as the principal instruments of our foreign and defence policy. If we do 
 that, some people will get through and hurt us as they have hurt us here 
 today, and if we still do not learn the lesson, that dismal, melancholic 
 cycle will continue. 
  
 It ought to be common sense that people start from the standpoint that the 
 only thing that matters is whether what we plan to do will make things 
 better or worse. I listened to the Secretary of State lay out the success 
 story of Afghanistan and Iraq, and his account bore no relationship to the 
 truth or reality. He talked about Afghanistan as a success story and about 
 the President of Afghanistan, when everyone knows that Karzai is the 
 president of the congestion charge area of downtown Kabul and no more. He 
 talked about an Afghan army-it is a fantasy. Afghanistan is a patchwork 
 quilt of warlordism, where the warlords' armies dwarf the so-called Afghan 
 national army. He talked about drugs and narcotics: before we invaded the 
 country those lunatics of the Taliban were reducing heroin production in 
 Afghanistan, but the people whom we have put into power there have increased 
 production by 800 per cent. Our armed forces are in Afghanistan and our 
 taxes are being used to support a political structure that is producing 90 
 per cent. of the junk that ends up in the veins of our young people in 
 Glasgow, east London and many other places in the world. 
  
 The Secretary of State talked about Iraq-as if Iraq were any kind of success 
 story. I could not believe my ears as he described, in that complacent, 
 orotund manner, progress over 12 months, 18 months or two years. Iraq is 
 going backwards, not forwards. It is impossible for the Secretary of State 
 to say we shall withdraw in any given time frame, because Iraq is getting 
 worse, not better. There are more people being killed in Iraq now than there 
 were before. More military operations are being conducted by the Iraqi 
 resistance than before. Last Saturday alone, 175 military operations were 
 mounted by the Iraqi resistance on one day. 
  
 American soldiers are dying in such numbers that there is now more 
 appreciation of the mistake of the war in Iraq over the pond in the United 
 States than there appears to be here in the British House of Commons. The 
 kind of debate that we have had today would not happen in the US Congress, 
 because US politicians understand the scale of this disaster far better than 
 the politicians in this Chamber appear even to have begun to do. 
  
 One thousand, eight hundred American boys, conscripted by poverty, 
 unemployment and poor opportunities, have lost their lives as a result of 
 the pack of lies that was the case for the invasion of Iraq, and 17,000 
 American boys have been wounded. Ten per cent. of them are amputees, who 
 will have to go around with no legs for the rest of their lives as a result 
 of the pack of lies on which we went to war in Iraq. 
  
 Eighty-nine of our own boys, including the son of Rose Gentle from Glasgow, 
 19-year-old Gordon, were sent to die in Iraq on a pack of lies. The Prime 
 Minister will not even meet Gordon's mother. He will not meet the mother of 
 a 19-year-old boy who was sent to die in Iraq. Last Monday, I was on a 
 television programme and a call came through from the mother of a 
 17-year-old soldier who was leaving for Iraq the following Monday. He is 17 
 years old, and he is being sent to Iraq, into that quagmire. The 19-year-old 
 Gordon Gentle is dead. Eighty-eight other young men from this country are 
 dead as a result of this, yet our Ministers roll out their jokes and their 
 cod philosophy here today. They have absolutely no grasp of the gravity of 
 the situation, or of how unpopular their stand has become outside these 
 walls. They have learned nothing from the fact that they lost a million 
 votes as a result of what they did in Iraq, or from the fact that millions 
 in Britain marched against them and begged them not to do this. 
  
 The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), in an otherwise fine speech, 
 described today's events as "unpredictable". They were not remotely 
 unpredictable. Our own security services predicted them and warned the 
 Government that if we did this we would be at greater risk from terrorist 
 attacks such as the one that we have suffered this morning 
  
 - -- 
 ================================================================ 
 ~ NY Transfer News Collective   *    A Service of Blythe Systems 
 ~ .        Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us          . 
 ~ 339 Lafayette St.,  New York,  NY  10012  http://www.blythe.org 
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)