"I'm sorry to say that this is not just a matter of history, this is a
matter of here and now for the future because words mean what they say,"
said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in a Channel Four News interview on Thursday,
January 23.
Jack Straw was actually responding to the issue that, according to the interviewer,
there is a split in the five Permanent Members of the Security Council with
Britain and the US on one side and Russia, China and France on the other. He
was trying to convince anyone who would listen that the UN Resolution of November
8 puts the onus of proof on Saddam Hussein. 
One of the issues that public opinion is objecting to is that Britain and the
US are declaring that they will not be bound by UN Resolutions, let alone Saddam
Hussein. This is the import of Jack Straw's saying that the objections to Britain
and the US going to war against Iraq are not just a matter of history. In the
"here and now", Britain and the US are pursuing a criminal course
based on force and the threat of force, as Jack Straw and the government are
only too happy to emphasise.
This is truly the medieval politics of "might makes right". Just as
the government want to "tip the balance" in favour of the "victim"
in the British judicial system by overturning the assumption that an accused
is innocent until proved otherwise, so with Saddam Hussein. The "onus of
proof" is on Saddam Hussein to produce "evidence" that Iraq does
not have "weapons of mass destruction". What would that proof be?
On the other hand, there is no "onus of proof" for anything on Tony
Blair and George Bush. They are amassing a vast array of not only weapons of
mass destruction but hundreds of thousands of troops, warships, tanks, fighters,
helicopters, not to mention their whole propaganda machine and the capitalist
press. All to make sure that if Saddam Hussein does not take his "one last
chance", they will destroy Iraq and its regime.
This is very much the "here and now" of the matter if Jack Straw only
paused to think. The evidence does not need a team of weapons inspectors under
the control of the US superpower to unearth. It does not need any "smoking
gun". It is naked dictate by US imperialism and the British government,
that they are the ones threatening war and destruction. And why? What is the
future for which the here and now is preparing? It is the dominance of the strategic,
political and economic interests of Anglo-US imperialism. To this monster, no
other interests matter. To make it more criminal, it is done under the signboard
of the "civilising mission" of "Western democracy". In other
words, the methods and ethos of colonial conquest and genocide, which are a
matter of historical record, are being utilised in the here and now to bring
about not so much a future for US and Britain as the destruction of a future
for humanity.
Jack Straw and the British government have a twisted pride in affirming that
their policy is based on the "credible use of force". Their words
on this score mean what they say and must be utterly condemned. It is the logic
of gangsters. Submit to us or else. The choice of avoiding your destruction
is entirely up to you. This is the "international order" to which
Bush and Blair are dedicated.
It is first of all the US and Britain which must disarm for the future, and
it is the duty of the working class and all the anti-war forces to build the
movement to bring this about, to bring into being a government which is implacably
opposed to the conduct of international affairs based on the threat of war and
the use of military force.