Crandolph’s Barbaric Yawp

In 1970 the Canadian/American band Steppenwolf released a themed album titled Monster.  It was one of the first gatefold-covered ’70s concept albums, with a real concept running through all the tracks (unlike, say, Sgt. Pepper’s…), and the topic was politics.  The band had already tackled politics before in tracks like "The Ostrich" and "Don’t Step on the Grass, Sam" in between the other songs of groovy love and "heavy metal thunder." But this entire album was going to lay it out on the table, and whack the listener over the head with a message of social and economic liberalism.  It’s hard to imagine a mainstream band attempting this today, or even being capable of it.  (There was Rage Against the Machine, but who could understand them?  And had they just had a Top Ten hit on their previous album?)

The album leads off with the 9+ minute track "Monster - Suicide - America."  In theory this is a suite of 3 different songs, but I don’t imagine there are many people lifting the needle after the first 3 or 6 minutes.  It works as a whole song, and what a song!  It basically lays down a summarized history of the country and inspires the upcoming generation to do better with a stirring coda.  We can surmise that the Clintons and the Dubya were too into Fleetwood Mac (or cocaine) around this time to notice.

"Monster - Suicide - America" - John Kay and Jerry Edmonton, copyright 1969

Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands, to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And till the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

The Blue and Grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war was over
They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has its share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But its protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it’s a monster and will not obey

The spirit was freedom and justice
And its keepers seemed generous and kind
Its leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won’t pay it no mind
Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
Now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it’s all just an echo of what they’ve been told

Yeah, there’s a monster on the loose
It’s got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin’

The cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin’ the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can’t understand
We don’t know how to mind our own business
‘Cause the whole world’s got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who’s the winner we can’t pay the cost

‘Cause there’s a monster on the loose
It’s got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin’

American, where are you now
Don’t you care about your sons and daughters
Don’t you know we need you now
We can’t fight alone against the monster

American, where are you now
Don’t you care about your sons and daughters
Don’t you know we need you now
We can’t fight alone against the monster

I am weary of the fact that these Hunter S. Thompson words written when I was barely 1 year old have been valid my entire life:

"How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?"

- from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72

… and with Leni Riefenstahl finally dead, who should film it?

That’s the only remaining question, all of the other answers supplied in such predictable fashion that I struggle to stay awake typing these very words.

In short, the leadership of the Democratic Party wants more war, more military spending and more aggressive recruitment [link to current DLC conference article], and they want it now.  Happy days are here again my ass!  In any other western democracy our two major parties would not be considered "centrist" or "center-right" or even "conservative."  In any other democracy people who advocate spending more than half of a federal budget on military expenditure, as well as the bombing and threatening of significant parts of the world, would rightly be considered dangerous far-right lunatics.  At least the Austrian neo-fascists advocate retaining a system of national healthcare; we don’t even get that much from our "centrists."

I’ll be posting as much of Hillary’s hatespeak tomorrow as I’ll be able to find, I’m sure that fresh from threatening Iran at the AIPAC lovefest she’ll be in rare form at the DLC conference.  How many more truly dastardly things does this creature have to advocate and vote for before liberal America scrapes the Hillary 2008 stickers off of their Volvos?

The entire premise of Clinton’s move to the right as paving the road to victory is a demonstrably faulty one.  In two elections, after 12 years of Republican misrule and then after 4 years of his own, Bill Clinton failed to win a majority of the popular vote (1992 figures, 1996 figures.)  Clinton wouldn’t have won without the H. Ross Perot candidacy, and Perot was likely the only reason that turnout "hovered" near 50%.  Perot energized some people to participate in the process who would otherwise have stayed cynical and stayed at home.  While I don’t agree with all of his politics, he seems to have a genuine concern about the future of the average American.  It’s a sad day when a billionaire has to be the lone advocate for avoiding NAFTA on the national stage because it would hurt the Average Joe American, yet this is what the two major parties fostered.  If the Nader and Buchanan candidacies are any gauge, a person isn’t even allowed to say that in a national debate unless they do have a billion dollars of their own money to spend.

In 2000, of course, born-again, pro-corporate Al Gore was able to barely nip Official National Buffoon George W. Bush when Bush stumbled though his cue cards like a learning disabled toddler.  When it came down to the Republicans outright stealing the election, and putting the ball in the Democrats’ court, the Dems naturally folded.  Winning the election already won owing to the cartoonishly laughable selection of Bush the Lesser for the top spot would’ve required a single Democratic senator standng up for the voting rights of dark people, and this is apparently too much to ask.  Why would a lot of southern African-Americans bother to turn out again if it amounts to nothing?  Of course even in this case Al Gore managed to lose every single southern state, even Mississippi (the only majority black state), even Tennessee (his home state), even Arkansas (Clinton’s home state).  This should be another indication to the Democratic true believer that a right-hand turn is a wrong one.

A rightward turn failed to crack the 50% mark for the Democrats again in 2004, with the general population that still bothers voting so turned off to the Democrats that they also somehow managed to lose 4 seats in the Senate and 2 in the House after 4 years of George W. Bush.  To some people this might suggest "we’ve taken a wrong turn" instead of "we need to push harder in the same direction."  This is the crux of my argument against the party; they’re not only sell-out weasels, they are bad at it.  Who is excited about voting for the JV Republicans?  Apparently a) people who receive direct payment in working for the party via jobs and favors, b) the terminally naive and c) those willing to cast a cynical vote for the least-worst, out of a weary sense of vague civic responsibility, having given up on the concept of voting for what one really wants.  This is no way to build a winning coalition.

And once you "win" on a right-wing platform, what have you "won?"  Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, NAFTA?  How about healthcare?  A living wage?  Clinton had actually set 5 consecutive all-time-high records in military spending, in some cases granting the Pentagon more money than they asked for (recent Bush military budgets, with over 95% of elected Democrats voting with him, have since surpassed that - good-fucking-bye Peace Dividend.)  Of course we bombed Serbia, the Sudan, a Chinese embassy (not to mention Waco, TX) and a whole lot more of Iraq in the Clinton era, while maintaing a massively lethal embargo on Iraq to boot.  An embargo which apparently was, in some twisted way, "worth it."  According to (actual) liberal economist Robert C. Pollin, even the touted economic performance of the Clinton years was an overstated bubble which widened the gap between rich and poor.  The fact that the prison population doubled under Bubba seems to support this notion.

That was the Clinton Experience for the average American - lowered expectations, taxes sent to Boeing and Honeywell instead of the local schools and hospitals, and quite possibly a stint in prison or the military.  How do Democratic true believers describe the Clinton years?  Astoundingly, without fail, the mantra is sounded as "EIGHT YEARS OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY."  Ronald Reagan would be proud.

If you want poor and struggling people to vote for you - and if the U.S. has anything these days, we have poor people - you have to offer them something.  America has not swung to the right; this has things ass-backwards.  American politicians and business leaders swung to the right, and haven’t given people who disagree a damn reason to bother voting.  Polling indicates that a majority of Americans support a withdrawal from Iraq and universal healthcare, just for starters.

The right-wing cranks can only peddle their hate on issues like gay marriage to rightist true believers who keep voting because they win… but they win through attrition.  Reasonable working class folk have simply stopped voting.

When you lose elections with, say, 55% turnout by, say, 3% of those people, might it not occur to you that you could pick that up from the 45% of the population who don’t bother?  On the whole they are a whole lot more reasonable than the half of the population who are motivated to vote by their current choices.   For the most part the non-voters tend to have more dire need of economic assistance from the government and tend to take a more live-and-let-live approach to social issues. Gaining these votes requires offering that 45% of the population - the people who get laid-off and still send their sons to die for oil, who would like to be able to smoke their pot in peace and not have their doors kicked in, whose kids need health insurance - a reason to bother, and when a party is putting moralizing corporate sycophant millionaires who want to send more sons to die out there as candidates, that simply ain’t gonna happen.

A majority of Americans still believe in fairness and, unless you scare the shit out of them for months on end, aren’t too jazzed about foreign war entanglements.  The Democratic Party has done nothing to promote fairness in economics or society at large for decades, and they’ve been in a competition to beat the war drum louder than the Republicans for 25 years.  That tends to make sensible voters cynical about the process, and I don’t blame them.  Most working people have an instinctual sense that neither party intends to help them improve their lot in life in any way; only liberal elites feel a need to lecture people that "their vote counts."  Of course even a cursory honest study of gerrymandering suggests that it probably really doesn’t most of the time.  Not without real alternatives at the ballot box and the long, hard road to rebuilding working class voter trust.  The very last thing that would rebuild that trust is having two Republican parties.  One thing that might work, if we can still salvage the nation at this point, would be a series of candidates who keep hammering away at the system with a real people’s platform, one based in economic security, guaranteed rights and a future that need not include war and prison for people not born into wealth.

The DLC is running in the other direction.

Sent earlier today:

—–

To the Editor:

One would hope that, by now, ‘alternative’ weeklies such as yours would have developed a healthy skepticism toward the motivations of the federal government in Iraq.  No such skepticism was evident in your glowing profile of Mike Flowers and his “rewarding” prosecution of Saddam Hussein.

The thinking person has to question the tactic of trying Hussein only for the “relatively minor incident” of his regime’s 1982 retaliatory killings in Dujail.  An obvious reason for the focus on this incident is that it did not directly involve chemical weapons nor inconvenient questions about where Iraq obtained them.  Similarly it does not involve allowing Hussein to speak in any relevant sense about western backing in his war of attrition against Iran, nor his meetings with Donald Rumsfeld, nor the elder Bush’s apparent green light to invade Kuwait.  In short, it is one of the few incidents which brands Hussein as a thug while allowing  our prosecution and a puppet judicial system to avoid the topic that he was our thug.

That the case involves the death penalty is also richly convenient; dead men tell no tales.

This is far from an academic discussion.  Hussein’s prosecution serves as cover and justification for an ongoing war for and occupation of the world’s second largest oil producing nation.  The United States has been instrumental in killing over one million Iraqis over the past decade and a half, the vast majority civilians, and Iraqis continue to die at the rate of as many as 35 per day.  Hussein himself would struggle to keep that pace in a “good” month.  Meanwhile Britain’s Christian Aid estimates some $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth has gone missing during our occupation, including an estimated $4 billion worth of crude oil exported from the country without as much as metering it.  This is looting on a scale that makes Saddam look like a street urchin pickpocket.

This leaves me scratching my head as to why you would report Flowers’ activity uncritically, going so far as to hint that he’s taking a major financial hit in the process.  Flowers is still very much a “highly paid white collar defense attorney,” in this particular case he is simply doing a hatchet job to cover the asses of past and current federal officials, including high-ranking members of the current Bush Administration.  He is quite well compensated compared to the teachers, cops and office workers who read your paper, and in fact his salary, room and board, transportation and security are being paid for with our taxes.  Effectively Flowers is being paid better than most out of our collective funds to pull the wool over our collective eyes.

I would not mind seeing you folks delve into these issues in future articles; any ‘alternative’ publication worth the title would.

Yours,

Chris Randolph

The Sanders-Paul House Joint Resolution I referred to positively some weeks ago in this blog failed, 86-338.  Republicans voted in favor of remaining in the WTO as is 185-39 with 6 non-voters and Democrats favored the same 153-46 with 2 non-voters and one absurd "present."

Thus we see the the dramatic difference between the two major parties on issues of labor, environment, national sovereignty, social justice and trade; the percentages willing to actively vote in favor of screwing the majority of the world’s people and undermining American sovereignty as reagrds labor, environmental and human rights in the service of international capital revealing an 80.4% (R) vs. 75.7% (D) split.  "Vive la difference!"

Rep. Bob Brady (D-PA), a union man no less, naturally did the will of Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the world’s rich and powerful like a good soldier and voted in favor of the established socio-economic order.

… and the 1 voting against was a Republican, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma!  Beyond mere "loyal opposition," the Democrats are proving themselves to be more loyal to Bush on these matters than his own party.  Of the 535 members of Congress, the only 2 to vote against FY 2006 appropriations for America’s new Stasi have been western Republican conservatives with an honest instinct for personal freedom.

"We all really have to get  beyond flaming on the internet and get down to the left and right settling differences  with bare knuckles. And I’m dead serious about
being willing to fight the guy. I speak for
no one but myself, but I am fed up with wingnut
hostility, threats and garbage like permits to hunt liberals and have no moral qualms about taking out my frustrations on a wingnut given to fantasizing about beating people into unconsciousness, just to give
him a chance to make his dreams, theoretically
anyway, come true. I owe it to 1,700 dead US servicemen and thousands of dead Iraqis
to pummel the hell out of at least one lying-assed
right wing scumbag. …"

With this tirade the lefty web presence known as Rev. Mykeru calls out a habitually physically theatening right wing net presence named Steve Crager, who in typical Yellow Elephant fashion refuses to show.

The problem with the Yellow Elephant campaign, of course. is that it limits the hypocrisy of volunteering poor kids to do your fighting to the Republican Party and its members.  Anyone who works to elect Democrats who want and wanted to send additional divisions into Iraq and Afghanistan to "do the job right" and isn’t lining up at their recruiting office or sending their own children into harm’s way is, in fairness, equally open to the same criticism.

It’s never to early to pick up an Xmas gift for the war-positive anti-abortion fanatic in your clan.

Link.

Very good news on the local political front: John Braxton, the reformist candidate for Philadelphia City Controller who was bumped from the ballot in the Democratic primary by the local machine, has entered the race as a Green candidate.  This is fantastic news in that not only will we have a real choice in the race come November, but we also have a reformer who realizes that if he’s going to have any impact he has to break away from the party and take them on directly.  I hope this is the beginning of a trend.  Had Seth Williams gone this route, I think he had a better than decent shot at victory in November.  (I still recommend casting a write-in vote for him against the misrule of Lynne Abraham.)

The Green Party of Philadelphia (GPOP) is working to gather signatures to put him on the ballot.  Expect me to hit you up for yours.  It’ll take well over 7,000 signatures to get Braxton on in this city-wide race.

I strongly recommend that people put their time into the Braxton candidacy instead of wasting their time attempting to replace Rick Santorum with his clone Bob Casey Jr.  An examination of Casey’s sorry website suggests that Casey really has no agenda and isn’t in any hurry to share his views on any topic.  Considering most people who oppose Santorum don’t actually agree with Casey on anything of substance either this is hardly a surprise.  I surmise he plans to rely upon his father’s name, party machinery and not literally being Rick Santorum.  One wonders how, if they bother to track things and notice (questionable!), liberal Pennsylvania will feel if they work their little hearts out to elect a new senator who spends the next 6 years voting for the confirmation of anti-choice judges, expanding the federal death penatly, and continued war at the expense of all other federal spending.   As it stands Casey’s primary issue seems to be a push to crack down on convicted sex offenders harder than we do now, primarily through ‘community notification’ which may not even be constitutional.  I wonder if Willie Horton is available for a photo shoot.

GPOP is looking to run as many people as possible in 2006, which is really the best way of gaining ballot access (by "stacking" signatures in overlapping districts for different offices) and, hopefully, gaining media coverage.  Who wants to be a State Representative or State Senate candidate?  Don’t worry that you ‘don’t know enough’ for the office.  You do; if you wade through my blog odds are that you’re generally much better informed than the party functionary chump who misrepresents you in Harrisburg currently.  If interested, shoot me a message.  We can gather signatures together all next summer should I run for Congress again …

This blog appears to be the first place that Braxton’s Green candidacy is being reported anywhere.  A genuine scoop!  Can a Pulitzer be far behind?

Well, as a British citizen - a London MP, no less - he can’t be.

Compare and contrast these remarks with anything  you’ve heard from any Democratic legislator in the past 15 years; this is what opposition sounds like.  And on the morning of terrorist strikes in his own district no less.  Americans should demand nothing less than this sort of representation and refuse to give one penny or one minute of time to any candidate who doesn’t provide it.

Maybe then things might change for the better.

—–

From Hansard ­ House of Commons, 7th July , 4.29pm,

Mr. George Galloway: The hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) said that it is a funny old world, and that is certainly true with regard to the issue that he raised. I am, I think, a longer-serving Member of this House than he is, and I remember when the Labour Benches were littered with members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Indeed, Members who wear different badges today used then to sport daily the badges of CND.

Mr. Kevan Jones:  Some of them are in the Cabinet.

Mr. Galloway:  Indeed; the Cabinet is full of them. That was a time when Britain was facing a Soviet Union and an eastern Europe bristling with thousands upon thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, all aimed at us. Now that there is no such adversary, those same Members have swapped their badges. I have no doubt that they will comprehensively vote down the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Pendle at the parliamentary Labour party meeting. As he is a gentle soul, I fear for his safety on that occasion if the reports I hear of the PLP are anything like accurate.

I have been sitting through the debate feeling not that it is a funny old world but that it is another world. The sort of complacent consensus that has crept by osmosis through the Chamber as the hours have passed is so utterly different from, and in contradiction to, the attitude outside in the country and around the world that I became more persuaded than ever that the House of Commons is out of touch with reality.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) is no longer in his place. He may well be an expert on defence procurement matters but, in his  mini discourse on Islam, he reminded us of the universal truth that a little knowledge is dangerous. His Reader’s Digest analysis of Islam and the people of the Muslim world-more than 1,000 million strong-illustrated the chasm between the east and the powerful here in the west.

At least one, perhaps two of the explosions this morning took place in my constituency. Many of those caught up in the events were my constituents, heading to work in the City and the west end. I spent four hours or so this morning at the Royal London hospital in my constituency where the medical staff are toiling, without a break, to deal with the casualties who are being brought in in their scores-perhaps, by now, in their hundreds.

I walked among the emergency workers, including the fire brigade staff, in the very stations
that have in the past few weeks had fire engines taken away from them as economy measures. I refer to the fire station at Bethnal Green in my constituency and the fire station in the King’s Cross-Euston area-the two places where the fire services are stretched almost to breaking point in dealing with the consequences of this morning’s events. The people of the east end and the emergency workers are going about their business calmly and stoically in the way for which our country is famous.

I condemn the act that was committed this morning. I have no need to speculate about its authorship. It is absolutely clear that Islamist extremists, inspired by the al-Qaeda world outlook, are responsible. I condemn it utterly as a despicable act, committed against working people on their way to work, without warning, on tubes and buses. Let there be no equivocation: the primary responsibility for this morning’s bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts.

However, it would be crass to do other than what the Secretary of State for Defence in a
way invited us to do. We cannot separate the acts from the political  backdrop. They did not come out of a clear blue sky, any more than those monstrous mosquitoes that struck the twin towers and other buildings in the United States on 9/11 2001. The Defence Secretary said that we must look at the causal circumstances behind the problems of security and defence in the world. I insist that we do so.

If Members examine our debate
tomorrow in the cold light of day they will discover a self-evident truth: many Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy
with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel
and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they
can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed
in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death.
When the US armed forces, their backs guarded, as a result of
a decision by our politicians, by our armed forces, systematically
reduced Falluja, a city the size of Coventry, brick by brick
and killed an unknown number of people-probably the number runs
to thousands, if not tens of thousands-not a whisper found its
way into the Chamber. I have grown used to that. I know that
for many people in the House and in power in this country the
blood of some people is worth more than the blood of others.

Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con):  Will the hon. Gentleman clarify a whisper that has come
to the House? Did he say elsewhere today that Londoners had this coming? Is it true that he said that?

Mr. Galloway:  That is a despicable
smear.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal):  Order. I remind all hon. Members that we are debating
the fourth report of the Defence Committee.
      
Mr. Galloway:  The Minister of State says from a sedentary position
that it is more or less right. I take it that that means that
it is not right. I have never uttered any such words. The words that I am speaking now are my words. If the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) would care to listen, he can disagree
with me, but he should not attempt to put into my mouth words that I have never spoken. Madam Deputy Speaker, I ask for your
protection. [Hon. Members: "Oh!"] It is either that,
or I shall keep speaking and no one else will-

Madam Deputy Speaker:  Order.
I have already asked hon. Members to debate the motion on the
   Order Paper. Perhaps we would all do well to confine our remarks to that.

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 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 enragés 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.