Undeclared Wars & Unnecessary Evil

This particular essay has been prompted by a report that shows Britain is at the bottom of the child poverty league in Europe which is very disappointing because it means football isn’t the only thing we are crap at in Europe. I don’t know why we should be so crap at making sure nobody lives in poverty. After all, we happen to have £20 billion pounds to spare. This money could be used to improve the quality of life for a lot of people. At least, I presume it’s to spare, because the Prime Minister has decided to spend it on replacing the Trident missile system, Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Thing is, I can’t help but wonder if we really need it. After all, the Americans are our allies and they have loads of missiles. We could just borrow a few off them. They don’t even have to ship them over for us. They just have to fire them in this direction. I can think of quite a few people who we can make stand at the impact site and catch 'em. They’ll be alright so long as they don’t drop 'em.

It will save us £20 billion pounds. It will also, possibly get rid of a list of annoying people such as; men on bicycles who wear shorts that makes their behinds look like shrinkwrapped walnuts; traffic wardens; people who put me on hold; people who don’t say thanks when I hold a door open for them, treating me like a doorman (I wouldn’t mind so much, but they don’t tip either).

I expect, as is the case with all the other good ideas I’ve had, that this one will be ignored. Spending money on a replacement for the Trident Missile System will be seen as a necessary evil. So, I’ve got a plan B. Let’s invade Iran. We drop the impoverished children mentioned on the league table, onto Iran’s nuclear facility. Then they can help the Iranians take care of it by sweeping up and giving it a lick of paint. It’ll also keep the kids out of trouble, because as we know, the Iranian justice system thinks chopping the hands off a thief is better than sending them to a university for furthering their education in crime; sorry, did I say university? I meant prison.

This idea will also be good for their future. Big business has a tendency to hire people from other countries as a source of cheap labour. The kids will be well placed when another parts manufacturer decides to make its workforce redundant and seek employees who will work for next to nothing. The kids can up stakes and walk to China, stopping only to say hello to the Tibetans coming the other way, trying to escape the brutal and somewhat genocidal Chinese dictatorship currently occupying Tibet. They can swap stories and show each other photographs; this is my Uncle Frank in Blackpool riding a donkey, can be traded for this is my cousin, a Tibetan nun imprisoned for speaking out about human rights violations.

Another benefit of sending some of our poor huddled masses to Iran is that it will leave room for the million of Iraqis refugees who have left that country, or been made homeless since we invaded it. Oh, hang on. That would mean we had more poor and unemployed people on our hands wouldn’t it. Perhaps it isn’t such a good idea after all.


I know. Let’s leave it up the Government, shall we? They have policies for tackling child poverty. My favourite one is the way New Labour is raising taxes on the people whose wage is less than £17,000 per annum. I don’t actually see how taking money off the poorer sections of society is going to help, but what do I know? I’m only a reasonably intelligent, well read man. Most of the leading lights in Government have been to prison… I mean university. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor and Prime Minister in waiting, the man who actually raised the taxes on the poor really cares about impoverished children.

I know this because, just in case taking money off the poorer sections of society doesn’t eradicate it, he is giving more money to the wealthy and big business. This shows how dedicated New Labour is to tackling poverty. They think it is such a terrible blight on society they are making doubly sure the rich don’t suffer from it by giving them tax cuts; marvelous, and there I was thinking they didn’t actually give a flying fuck.

This policy reminds me of how New Labour has made the world a safer place by making sure there are a lot more people in the world who want to kill us. By this, I don’t just mean the Americans who regularly seem to shoot our soldiers in so called ‘friendly fire’ incidents. No, that’s just the military equivalent of the big dog accidentally stepping on its puppy while it’s chewing on the Iraqi bone.

Are all these extra people who would like to kill us are the reason why we need the replacement for the Trident Missile System? Personally I’d be more in favour of the Colgate Missile System. It won’t slaughter millions of people, but if we use it, we can at least be on our guard against anybody who smell unreasonably minty.

To be honest, when I first heard about Trident, I thought it was just a massive fork to be used in case we were attacked by a huge sausage, but no. It’s a ‘nuclear deterrent’ apparently. Strangely enough, the ‘nuclear deterrent’ works the opposite way in the Middle East. If Iran gets one, then other countries in the region will feel that they need some too, so rather than a ‘nuclear deterrent’ it becomes ‘nuclear encouragement’. It would be embarrassing to start a nuclear war with Israel and suddenly remembering you’d forgotten to pack the mutually assured destruction along with the sandwiches and special spatula for getting sand out of your camel's crack.


Speaking of war, we had one, not so much with Iraq, but in Iraq, because they really didn’t stand a chance against the array of firepower brought to bear on them. We did this because we were told Iraq was a threat, but really if it was a threat the war would have lasted longer than it takes to do the crossword in the Times. President Bush said it was part of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ (Iraq, not The Times) along with Iran and Syria, sort of like a stool of terrorism, so to speak; and he should know all about stools, what with being a complete shithead himself.

Iraq was our enemy because Bush and Blair said Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. So, Britain and America and its allies in the Coalition of ‘The Willing,’ went to war to save us. It sounds like an impressive alliance, a consensus between the nations of the world that the war was justified and needed to be fought. The truth is that apart from Britain and America, most of the countries in the coalition only achieved the status ‘country,’ because they had managed to save up enough money to buy their own flag. They were, essentially, mercenaries, doing the job because of various financial incentives from the Americans. Rather than it being a war fought for moral reasons, some of the smaller countries went just for the promise of half an hour on Bush’s Play Station and a couple of tickets to Disneyland.

As you know, we didn’t find any Weapons of Mass Destruction. We even went to the bother of dropping lots of them on the Iraqis just to remind them what they looked like, but it was all in vain. What did we find? We found some people who were quite happy to kill each other inbetween killing everybody else. We also found a lot of people who were stuck in the middle, sectarian hatred on one side, aggressive and fearful soldiers on the other side. The average soldier thought he had come to make the world a safer place, and to liberate the Iraqis from a brutal dictator. That illusion was soon dispelled when they were ordered to secure the Ministry for Oil while the hospitals were looted.

As for the dictator, we found him in the end. We found him down a hole, presumably looking for the Weapons of Mass Destruction that he was supposed to have. The ones which brought his world crashing down around his big head; though he may have actually just been hiding his mad arse until the Americans noticed all the ‘Yankee go Home’ T-shirts, and took the hint.

What happened to the WMD’s that Bush and Blair were so eager to protect us from? I don’t know. Either our leaders lied (probably, because their lips were moving) and used the WMD story as a pretext for invasion, or… maybe Iran borrowed them; like a cup of sugar. After all, what are neighbours for? Alright, so Saddam thought they were for invading, but for normal people, what are neighbours supposed to be for? Neighbours borrow things; a bit like the way Europe borrowed America from the indigenous population and forgot to return it when they finished fucking it up; though to be fair, they did let the Indians have a bowl of sugar for it; before they shot them and gave the survivors bit parts in movies starring John Wayne. Actually, now I think of it, we had a neighbour who borrowed our video, but that was only because we went out and left the window slightly ajar.

Obviously Iraq isn’t a threat to us so we don’t need to have the Trident Missile System to protect us from them. Iraq can’t even protect itself from itself anymore. Sure, our presence there is the reason why the threat from terrorism has increased but you know how the saying goes; you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and using white phosphorus on civilians.


I know. That’s a really negative outlook. Some good has come out of the occupation of Iraq. It has created jobs and incentives for people which is something Blair and Bush haven’t been too good at in the past. It would probably have been better if the jobs they created weren’t ‘suicide bomber’ and ‘Interrogator’ and the incentives didn’t include forty virgins in heaven but at least they didn’t encourage the formation of any more boy bands.

Trident is going to be really effective in protecting us against the suicide bomber. Next time there is a terrorist threat on the underground in London, we can just nuke it. That’ll teach them not to fuck with us. Or maybe Trident actually is a big fork and we can just harpoon the daft bastard with the rucksack, matching bomb and Quaran accessories. Of course, the worry is that a terrorist will turn up with a nuclear bomb and detonate it to which I say, Chernobyl.

I guess the other use for Trident is to stop the U.S Military from shooting our soldiers. Kill any more of our troops and we take out the White House when George Bush is in there wondering who the painting of the austere looking man with the beard and stovepipe hat is. It was Bush who described Iraq and Iran and Syria as being an ‘Axis of evil.’ We know what happened to Iraq. It got a pseudo-democracy though it will be some time before anybody opens a McDonalds or has a retarded Texan rig an election like a proper democracy. The large Happy Jihad Meal with Milk Sheik is a long way off and the Osama Bin Burger is just a dream; and besides, before you tried to get one Bush would warn it that you were coming and it would go into hiding. That just leaves Syria and Iran, and of those two, Iran is the one that is in the spotlight at the moment.

George Bush and Tony Blair, the Abbott and Costello of the Apocalypse, will save us from little old evil Iran; one of the ‘Axis of Evil.’ Bush can’t even spell axis, never mind protect us from it. He thinks ‘axis’ are what you use to chop down trees; but does he know what evil is? I’m not sure he does.

I read a child’s a definition of evil once. He said evil was the word live, spelt backwards. That seems like a good enough definition to me. Anything that is anti-life is evil. So, have the Iranians invaded a country, resulting in over half a million deaths? No, but Dubya has, in his effort to stamp out evil. It’s a great piece of logic. Perhaps the Romans didn’t mean to kill Jesus when they nailed him to the cross for his message of Love; they just wanted to stick him a little higher up so people standing at the back could see what a nice guy he was; perhaps they tried glue first. and then someone pointed out that they had some nails left over from building the crucifix, so…

Bush and Blair leading the fight against evil, is like having a political party, financed by the rich, (which is, basically all of them) leading the fight against child poverty; the fact is, we have poverty because the people the politicians actually represent have all the money. All you and I do is tick the box to decide who will actually be screwing us. Oh, and we also pay taxes.


What do we get for our money? We get Bush and Blair; fighting fire with fire, evil with evil, all the time wondering why the fire is getting bigger and the evil in the world is grinning back at them and holding a marshmallow over the inferno; having a little time out; because Bush and Blair are doing its work for it.

The evil that they speak of is terrorism; and what is terrorism? According to the dictionary it is ‘the systematic and organized use of violence and intimidation to force a government or community, etc to act in a certain way or accept certain demands.’

Constantly having Bush and Blair and all the other fuckwits telling us we are in danger from terrorism is most definitely an attempt to intimidate the local and international community we live in. They use this intimidation so that we accept the violence and evil done unto people in other parts of the world. They say it is a necessary evil for the safety of the freedom loving peoples of the world. The ‘systematic and organized use of violence’ by, primarily, America, is terrorism on an apocalyptic scale for those on the receiving end.

Iraq was invaded because of the WMD’s, which President Bush knew did not exist. That was the justification for the ‘unnecessary evil’ of war; but the fact that they did not exist means that the invasion of Iraq was not necessary and that leaves us with just the evil and the perpetual blood sacrifice to it. The war has provided enough bodies (600,000) for two hundred times the catastrophe of the World Trade Centre. If the death of 3000 Americans in an unprovoked attack was justification enough to go to war, then how much more justified are those who declare war on us for the unprovoked attack on Iraq by Britain and the United States.

Yet, oddly enough, the two governments deny that their actions in the Middle East have any connection with the emergence of young Muslims who are willing to die to prove a point. We have provoked the smaller terrorism by the larger terrorism of Blair and Bush.

I wonder if Tony Blair and George Bush stood on top of the six hundred thousand corpses, on a clear day, could they see Disneyland from Ground Zero in New York? Probably not, but I bet they can see a bright new future; for Blair, the lucrative lecture circuit in America, and for Bush; perhaps a little more golf; and for the rest of us? Well, like the Iraqis, we are irrelevant in the power play. We provide the taxes, the cannon fodder and the votes; and give our consent by silence and our unwillingness to trade our comfort for protest because the mound of dead isn’t high enough, or white enough, but mainly, it isn’t composed of us or the people we love.

But if the hill of the dead isn’t us, then who are the dead? I’ll tell you; it’s 'them'. It’s them and they, to be precise. Bush refers to 'them', when he says, ‘why do they hate us?’ He say’s it is because ‘they hate our freedoms.’ By this he means the freedom, as an unelected President, to take the US on the equivalent of the Columbine killing spree. We could also throw in the freedom to take from the poor and give to the rich, the freedom to fill the airwaves with bullshit to keep the populace dumb and distracted whilst they are robbed blind, and the freedom to spill blood and not face the consequences. The freedom to be at the bottom of the child poverty league in Europe, increase taxes on the poor and give tax cuts to the rich. There is also the freedom to redefine evil as being what ‘they' do, and not what 'we' do. When we kill civilians it's called collateral damage, but when 'they' kill civilians it's terrorism.

The Iranian regime has its own set of freedoms, with which they screw their own people with, much like ours do to us. On the world stage, the curtains have recently been drawn back to reveal swarthy men with beards. They took fifteen British marines captive, saying the marines were in Iranian waters. The British Government reacted by saying they must be released. It was the diplomatic equivalent of knocking on the door and saying, ‘excuse me, but can we have our ball back?’ The Iranians said, ‘fuck off!’ or words to that effect, ‘they were in our territory. If you admit it and say sorry, we’ll release them, and no… we really don’t care how big your Dad is.’

Our Dad is, of course, America, so we denied any wrongdoing and with a most peculiar defense, too. We said, ‘the marines were in Iraqi waters, and not Iranian waters.’ So, the fact that we were on water that belongs to a country we have occupied so we can rob it blind, is the best the foreign office can come up with? Bush may have called Iran evil, but I don’t seem to remember him saying it was stupid.

Our Ministry of Defense produced a map backing up our claim, to make it look as if the nasty Iranians were taking advantage of good old, decent, honorable Britain. But the truth of the matter is, the area that the ship was in doesn’t actually belong to Iran or Iraq. The area in question happens to be under dispute. This is according to the former head of the Maritime section of the Foreign Office, Mr Craig Murray. His duties include the responsibility for sea claims. Fortunately, as you will know by now, our sailors and marines were released. The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said they were been given their freedom as an Easter present to the British people, making it sound like they would all be covered in chocolate. He also said, "on the occasion of the birthday of the great prophet and for the occasion of the passing of Christ, I say the Islamic Republic government and the Iranian people — with all powers and legal right to put the soldiers on trial — forgave those 15." How nice of him, and how fortunate it is that they were only accused of trespassing; if they had been shoplifting, they could have had their hands cut off. The Iranian system of justice is a little harsh to say the least.

The capture and release of the hostages comes at a time when pressure is being brought to bear against Iran over their ambition to have nuclear weapons, or at least one, to be going on with, until they can afford the full set to play with. Their desire for such a weapon is understandable. It is surrounded by the military forces of America and Britain, two nations which have unleashed their firepower on Iraq to secure the oil. We are the aggressors in the scenario, no matter how reprehensible the regime ruling Iran might be to us. If we withdraw, then it is Iran that is the threat to what has been gained at the cost of so much blood. The majority Shia in Iraq have more in common with Iran, than they have with the Sunni minority in Iraq. It is logical to assume that America, under the Neo-Conservatives, having fabricated a reason to occupy Iraq, could just as easily fabricate a reason to attack Iran. The US administration has already been caught exaggerating the threat of the Iranian's nuclear program.


That the US is in Iraq for the oil cannot be stressed enough. It can and will take out anything that threatens that objective because it has already proved it’s willingness under this administration, to kill for it. The situation in Iraq on one hand looks like an unmitigated disaster, but in truth it was a great success. People are dying every day because of it, but so what. This is just business as usual. The tobacco industry kills millions of people. Over a thousand people a day die from smoking related conditions and diseases. But the money still keeps rolling in to the bloated bank accounts of the tobacco giants. It would take just a few days to equal the death toll from 9/11 but this is completely acceptable in a business where it has an overwhelming influence on the government. Iraq is just a concentration of death and misery, killing condensed into a relatively small area. But business is good. Even if the US withdrew tomorrow, big business has made a killing and at this moment in time, the business that has the most influential on the government in the US is Oil. Hell, it even has its own President in office.

Incidentally, here is a quote from Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, refuting accusations that the war was over oil. 'The oil revenues, which people falsely claim that we want to seize, should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people administered through the UN.' However, after the invasion was over, Britain co-sponsored a resolution in the Security Council which gave the US and UK control over Iraq's oil revenues. (More details here)

Oil is the main reason why the US supports Israel. Israel is its ally in a very important region of the world. Israel in the Middle East is to America what Britain is in Europe. We are the strategic staging posts for the US Military if the crunch comes to the crunch. We are it's foothold in Europe and Israel is it’s foothold in the Middle East. Empires need outposts and vast amounts of resources, new markets and fresh blood, literally and figuratively speaking.

The US has positioned its warships near to Iran in a gesture of intimidation, stating the Iranian's nuclear ambitions as a reason. Also the support Iran allegedly gives to Shia terrorists/resistance fighters in Iraq. It would be surprising if Iran didn’t give them some assistance. If Iraq is completely pacified it will free up men and material that the US can use elsewhere, thus increasing the threat to Iran.

The Americans and the British governments are pressuring for sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear ambitions. We have also been at war with Iran by proxy for a long time. In the Middle East, we are not seen as the good guys and for good reasons, especially in Iran. The US administration under President Reagan stood behind another great bastion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East; Saddam Hussein. He went from hanging out with the good old boys from the US to…well, just hanging.


But back in the day when Saddam decided to invade Iran the US gave him billion dollar loans, the components for chemical weapons and military intelligence. This invasion cost a million lives on either side and was his biggest crime. This was why the Iranians requested that the attack upon them should be taken into account during his trial. Naturally, the Americans turned the request down not wanting to be called to the witness stand for their own culpability in such slaughter.

It was President Reagan who decided that the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran. That was in 1982, and for some reason, in 2007 the Iranians are still pissed off over a million dead people; such a lack of forgiveness isn’t very Christian of them. No wonder Dubya thinks they are evil, him being a Christian who regularly speaks to God.

Of course, when legality and necessity clashed, then necessity won; another necessary evil I guess. Saddam was the lesser of two evils. The US Government on behalf of the taxpayer guaranteed loans of billions of dollars to Iraq, which was nice of them; especially seeing as the neither Reagan or Bush wouldn’t do the same to give their own poor people universal healthcare. This willingness to support the ability of Saddam to wage war was the reason why the US expected to encounter chemical weapons when they invaded Iraq. They had after all supplied the materials to make it so that Saddam could crack on with killing Iranians.

So, here we are wondering if America will attack Iran, when in fact, it has been attacking it, one way or the other for years. The US has threatened to ‘deal’ with Iran if it finds proof that Iran is supplying arms to the ‘terrorists’ in Iraq. It hasn’t apologized for supplying Iraq with arms, intelligence, chemical weapons and finance to Saddam for the purpose of killing a million Iranians.

Of course, the difference between the US and Iran, in supplying the means to wage war, is that the Iranians aren’t as good at it as the US. Also, America has God on its side and the Iranians have beards; and that’s just the women. In fact, not only is God on the side of the Americans, George Bush actually has Him on the payroll and speaks to him daily. According to Bush it was God who told him to go into Iraq in the first place. Luckily enough, after the coup d’etat that brought Bush to power, he found a rather large army lying around doing nothing much after his Dad had finished playing with it.

President Bush sent the military to Iran’s noisy neighbour. God had said, ‘go hence and get rid of the evil dictator, bring democracy to the Iraqi people; get rid of the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and just in case they don’t know what WMDs look like, drop a shitload on them as a reminder… and while you’re at it, look ye for the chemical weapons we sold to Saddam; wouldn’t want him turning up with a receipt and asking for his money back. You know how untrustworthy these Arab types are. After all, one has watched the Die Hard movies.’

And now, thanks to Bush and his Crusade, Iraq is on the road to democracy. Soon, they too can have a government that lies to them and manages the country on behalf of the powerful businesses that have funded the election campaigns and greased the appropriate palms.

Iran, of course, doesn’t have a democracy as we know it. Instead it has a system of government with hardcore misogyny enshrined in it's laws. Justice is hamstrung by the dogma of Islam more than it is tempered by it's wisdom. As with all religions, it is interpreted to suit the prejudices and ignorance of the interpreter. It also brings out the best in men and the worse, but when it brings out the worst and that is coupled with blind, unreasoning, unquestionable dogma, the last thing you want is that person sitting in judgment of you which is what happens in Iran.

Iran has executed more of its own citizens than virtually any other country, because of its religion. This includes executing children. In the case of boys, the minimum age for execution is fifteen. For females (and this is one example of the institutionalized misogyny inherent in the system) the age is nine years old; though, saying that, there is no record of a child that age being executed. There are, however, records of children this young being executed, or should I say, becoming collateral damage, whilst liberating the Iraqi people; from their oil, that is.

Iran is also a country where women can be brainwashed into their own inferiority like the way the Hitler youth were brainwashed into their superiority. It is also a place where the death penalty can be applied for apostasy, which is changing one's religion; it may be a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, but not in Iran, not in that particular case.

If a woman commits adultery she can be stoned to death, which is a slight variation on the west where you get stoned before you commit adultery. Iran continues to infringe human rights with the detention of human rights defenders and other prisoners of conscience, unfair trials, torture and mistreatment in detention, deaths in custody and the application of the death penalty; and that’s only on a quiet weekend when there’s nothing good on the television like a documentary about how fucked in the head the West is.


It would seem, from reading this that perhaps invading Iran and bringing Western Democracy to it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all? We could buy the Trident missile system like Tony Blair wants. We could then bomb them back to the Stone Age, or even better, back to 1950 when Iran actually had a democracy.

That’s right. Iran had a democracy. They had a democratically elected leader. That is, until the CIA stepped in and made sure he was removed.

Now, we all know from watching Harrison Ford save the world in films like ‘Clear and Present Danger’ that the C.I.A. is the good guy. Surely they wouldn’t get rid of a democratically elected government? The Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, must have been doing something heinous for the CIA to be involved in his removal from power. He must have been far worse than Saddam Hussein who brought about the death of millions. So, what was he doing? Trying to buy chemical weapons? Or Weapons of Mass Destruction? Was he holding innocent hostages?

No, he was doing none of these things. He was going to do something even worse in the eyes of the West. The democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran was going to nationalize its oil Industry; let the Iranian people reap some of the rewards for having such a precious commodity in their country.

To the American Government it sounded like Communism. To New Labour it would no doubt have sounded like Old Labour. What it actually smacked of was less profit for the Oil Barons of the West. So, the CIA ensured Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was removed from office. In his place they put a man who would be more suitable to the oil companies. It was the first time that the CIA was involved in removing a democratically elected government, but not the last. The Iranian Prime Minister, rather ironically had been named as Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1951, winning out over President Eisenhower who was the one who gave the order for his removal.

How was he removed? Well, remember that definition of terrorism.

‘The systematic and organized use of violence and intimidation to force a government or community, etc to act in a certain way or accept certain demands.’

The CIA used violence and intimidation, including bribery, libel, orchestrated riots and agents posing as communists threatening religious leaders to undermine Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and his government. The American ambassador at the time even got in on the act, lying about attacks on American nationals. For the three hundred Iranians who died as a result of the coup d’etat, the result of the systematic and organized use of violence and intimidation, no lies were necessary; just a few hundred holes in the ground.

Prime Minister Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life. And as for the Iranian people, that community of people who have hopes and dreams and fears and aspirations like us, they were forced to accept a government other than the one they had democratically elected.

Through the use of terror.

And whose idea was this originally? This scandalous act of unseating a democratic government. It was ours, or should I say the British government at the time. It was acting on behalf of the oil company now known as British Petroleum, or BP as it is better known. Not surprisingly, when I looked at the BP website, and the code of conduct on there, it didn’t mention anything about not encouraging the overthrow of democratic governments. Obviously an oversight.

After the coup d’etat, the new leader of Iran, the man the Americans approved of, was the Shah. He was more then happy to play ball with the West, rather than say ‘balls’ to the West, like Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh had done. The Shah relied heavily on American arms and aid and was rightly seen as an American puppet. Oddly enough, the CIA agent who did so much to facilitate the Shah’s rise to power was called Kermit; Kermit Roosevelt; the Muppet who installed a puppet.

It’s ironic, or moronic, I’m never to sure which, that the American intervention in Iran laid the groundwork for the present religious dictatorship that rules Iran today. Britain and America’s terrorism, meant to ensure the Iran would be sympathetic to the commercial interests of the dynamic duo, resulted in a backlash that became the 1979 Islamic revolution.

And what happened to the deposed Prime Minister of Iran? Well, he’s still there, but the present Iranian government ignores him, because, well, democracy isn’t their thing, really. The only time they ask for a show of hands is from pickpockets, just before they cut them off. The least they could have done, considering they probably wouldn’t have taken power without the aid of the Americans is to send the CIA a thank you card; but did they? No.

I think all of this Machiavellian plotting by the West in the affairs of the Middle East illustrates something which may not be so obvious to some people when Prime Minister Blair and President Bush speak about democracy in the Middle East. They aren’t talking about a leader, elected by the people to do the will of the people. They're talking about a leader with whom the oil companies and other such monsters of commerce and worshippers of Mammon can do business with. If that leader would rather see the profit generated by the natural resources of his country go to its people and not into the coffers of a foreign power, then the CIA will make sure he isn’t there long enough to re-arrange the furniture in his office, let alone redistribute the wealth of his country.

Oh, by the way; the Iraqi government is about to push through a law giving Western oil companies the right to exploit the country's massive oil reserves (more here)

Rather surprisingly, America came close to apologizing for its involvement in the creation of the modern Iran. I use the term ‘modern’ here, somewhat loosely. A state that approves of the death sentence for blasphemy is closer to the barbarity of the Middle Ages than anything else.

In March 2000, Madeleine Albright, who was then Secretary of State, expressed regret about American involvement in removing the Iranian Prime Minister. She said: ‘The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America.’

In other words, Iran does not trust us, and it has good reasons not to. We did, after all, overthrow their government and then brand them as evil when they had the cheek to be pissed off about it.

And what are we doing now. Sending a note of apology to the Iranian people? Not quite. Love means never having to say you are sorry… or could that be having a massive army with the capability of wiping the earth out several times over, means never having to say you’re sorry? Yes, that’s the one.

And so, America and Britain are on the borders of Iran in 2007, because of their interest in oil. Iraq is occupied, tearing itself to pieces as the rabid dog of religion chases its tail in a spiral of sectarian violence and resistance to the invaders. The British and American governments are making threats against the Iranian regime they helped to put in place by their efforts to do the bidding of the oil companies back in the fifties.

Let’s not forget, though that we are the ones who use the oil. I’m not saying give it back to them, suck it out of my car and give me a camel; no, not at all, not unless I can fill it up with unleaded and head down the motorway at eighty…oops, I mean seventy miles an hour; it’s not going to happen is it, because camels can’t run at that speed. Well, not unless someone tells it where I’m going to stick the nozzle.


The oil industry makes huge profits. The people at the top swim in a vast ocean of money while the rest of us, millions and millions of ordinary people have to make do with a little puddle. And the government takes the side of the big corporations against us, just as they did against the people in the Middle East.

Wars are fought over resources. They may be dressed up by ideology of one sort or the other to give the masses something to write home to Mum about, but the real reason is closer to the Viking raids, hundreds of years ago. Somebody else has something you want so you kill them and take it because you can; simple as that. The resource at the moment is oil, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if the resource was water, then Atlantis will have tanks rolling down Mermaid Boulevard at some point in the near future. Another resource is money. If you control that, you control the people, and that is the nature of the war conducted by one strata of society against another; there is the tiny section of society that owns virtually everything, and there is everybody else. This war is undeclared, like the war the oil companies fought against the people of Iran back in the fifties.

That we are bottom in the league of child poverty in Europe isn’t some economic oversight or a lack of money. It is the result of a deliberate policy of the uber-wealthy taking from the rest of society. Poverty in other countries comes from exactly the same source; the uber-wealthy pulling strings to ensure things remain stacked in their favour. To this end of profit and control, an oil company was ultimately behind the movement of governments to overthrow a democratically elected leader. Big business has gotten so good at it, that they now even have their own President in the United States. After all, organizing a coup in your own country is the next logical step after organizing one in a foreign country. Iran, Iraq, Britain, The United States, Nigeria; the names don’t matter so long as there is a profit to be made. There is no political, national or religious affiliation that is greater to this section of humanity, than their devotion to money and the power it affords them.

Tension with Iran is sometimes put down to religious and cultural differences. They are different from us because of what they worship. And sometime it does cause tension, true. But the real unrest and violence and poverty in the world are down to a different religion altogether, and that is the one which requires you to stand before your altar and think not what good you could do with your wealth, but how you can use your wealth to acquire more. It is the church of the God Mammon; the worship and love of money and power.


The worshippers of Mammon could use their glut of trillions upon trillions of dollars to provide clean drinking water for those who die without it. They choose instead, to use the money to acquire even more money with which they can make even more money, squeezing the poor and the middle classes and even the upper classes to get what little blood there is left, out of the stone. The wealth of the uber-rich goes so far beyond that of our upper classes it makes them seem like paupers, shaking their silver bowls under the noses of passers by for a dime. The system we live with siphons the money out of society and into the maw of the uber-rich. They have it in their power to eradicate poverty, but they use it instead, to pressure governments to overthrow elected representatives of sovereign nations.

On average, 18 million people a year die through poverty-related causes. That is fifty thousand a day. The nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed almost fifty thousand people in an instant. Every day we drop the equivalent nuclear bomb of poverty; every day; no mushroom cloud on the horizon, no flash in the sky, just a cold grey statistic that doesn't disturb the digestion of those who could stop it.

Poverty is a bigger killer than terrorism, or even war, because after all, what is terrorism but war-lite; sort of, diet war. We were appalled, and still are, at the attack on the World Trade Centre and the appalling loss of so many people. That was the act which mobilized the United States for war, along with a lot of lies, patriotic bullshit and a desire to secure the oil fields in Iraq. Just imagine an act of war that wiped out nearly the entire population of the United States. Well, that is roughly how many people have died from poverty since 1990. They are victims of the war by the uber-wealthy upon the rest of us in another of life’s little undeclared wars.

We stand on the borders of one of the so called, axis of evil countries, while poverty licks parchment paper off its dry lips. The Iranian regime puffs out its chest, puts on it’s best beard, and rattles sabres at what they call ‘The Great Satan’, meaning the United States, even though it has more in common with a slightly psychotic Elmer Fudd on Crack with the Corn Cob of Indignant Righteousness up his arse (like me when I get a parking fine). Britain stands hand in hand with Elmer Fudd. Incidentally, Britain is known to some Iranians as, ‘the Little Satan,’ which makes us sound rather cute, really, in a sort of cloven hoof sort of way. And it isn’t appropriate really, because we have been plotting in the Middle East far longer than America. In this respect, they are more akin to our younger, bigger and dumber brother, who has picked up some really bad habits from us.

So, as I say, Iran rattles sabres and gives us the finger, and rightly so, because we have meddled in their affairs and shown that we are, to be honest, just as untrustworthy as they are. We, on the other hand rattle intercontinental missiles and our nuclear capability at Iran, as well as our devastating conventional warfare ability. It’s no wonder the Iranians want a nuclear capability. The Middle East is as dangerous a place as it ever was.

I started this by asking what we should do about replacing the Trident Missile System. I say, after much consideration, let’s replace it. Spend all of that money and send a note to the poor. In it, tell them that ‘we are building this missile system in the interests of security, to prevent an aggressive force from attacking and taking the lives of people like you and I; like us. We hope you understand in your present situation of dire need and poverty.’

And then we send the old missile system to the Iranians. They have more to fear from us, than we do from them. The Iranians may stand by as a woman is executed for adultery, but we stand by and watch as our rulers kill in the pursuit of wealth; which is the more barbaric; us or them? If we are ‘civilized’ and ‘responsible’ enough to have nuclear weapons, then so are they.

And I wonder about that old quote from the bible:-

‘Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone’

Or push the button…

I have no love for the opportunists and religious zealots who rule Iran. If it were just them in Iran, I might say, what the hell ‘go ahead and bomb them.’ All misogynists are son’s of bitches anyway, forgive the very bad pun, and the Iranian regime is intolerant, inhumane and misogynist; and that’s just on a weekend.

But then I wonder about the rest of the people; the ones like you and I; the kind of people who voted for a democratic leader and I remember that they are still there; waiting for our bombs to fall.

And Dubya called them evil…