[continued from previous message] 
  
 Mr. Galloway:  The exchanges that we have just heard are further evidence 
 of my point that in this bubble people just do not get it. If I cannot 
 touch the heart of the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead with what happened 
 to the people in Falluja, I shall move on to firmer ground. 
  
 Does the House not believe that hatred and bitterness have been engendered 
 by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of 
 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 succeedI 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 
 enrages 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 Iraqis 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 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)