The struggle for justice and prosperity in the Arab world and everywhere depends upon popular resistance to U.S. imperialism and its local clients.
By George Galloway -- Al-Ahram
Sept 17, 2006 -- "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" reads the eponymous statue's inscription in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias. But it is the boastful tyrant's monument, not the self-confidence of his enemies, that lies splintered in the sands.
Five years on from the atrocities of 11 Sept. 2001, George W Bush and the neo- conservatives have managed to turn much of Afghanistan and Iraq into desolation, full of now lifeless things.
Amid this carnage lies another, unlamented casualty -- the colossal wreck of U.S. and British foreign policy. The authors of that wreckage cannot conceivably claim they were not warned of the calamities they would unleash.
Millions of us told them what would happen if they seized on the events of five years ago to launch what the Pentagon now calls the "long war". Four days after the attacks in New York and Washington I spoke in a sitting of the recalled British parliament. I warned that if the United Statse and its allies mishandled the response, they would create a thousand, ten thousand Bin Ladens. Five years on, is that not what's hapened?
Many tens of thousands of people -- mostly women and children -- have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the ultimate perpetrators of the killings, as they sit behind their mahogany desks in the White House and Downing Street, imagine that the rest of us have not noticed how they do not deem those Arab and Muslim dead worthy of the same grief as attends their own?
Do they think we have not noticed how they refuse even to count the number killed in Iraq? Did they believe that the pornographic images of Abu Ghraib would be discounted? Did George Bush and Tony Blair delude themselves into thinking they could whet the knife that Israel plunged into Lebanon without being seen as accomplices to war crimes?
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