3-17-08, 9:36 am

Original source: Morning Star

Despite the continued efforts by the police authorities to denigrate and underestimate the size of the anti-war movement in Britain, it has become clear that somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people turned out at the weekend to oppose Britain's continued involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and its sabre-rattling frenzy over Iran.

In London and Glasgow and across the world, ordinary people continue to voice their opposition to the imperialism which is spreading death, disease, loss and disruption far and wide.

Inside Parliament, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg - markedly more resolute-sounding now than his party was at the start of the Iraq war - speaks for us all with his warning against 'blindly' following Washington's lead.

'On this anniversary of the greatest post-war strategic failure in British foreign policy,' he says, 'both Labour and Conservatives must learn from their fateful decision to back George Bush's invasion of Iraq.

'Never again should the objections of millions of British citizens be so lightly ignored. Never again should we blindly follow instructions from the White House. Never again should we do such untold damage to the international rule of law.'

Let's face it, few of us would disagree with a word of that. But it would have perhaps been better if the Lib Dems had maintained their anti-war position once the war had started, not dropped it like a hot brick the moment that the invading powers commenced hostilities.

Labour, with the usual honourable exceptions, maintains a sheepish silence on the hundreds of thousand of deaths and the virtual destruction of one of the world's older civilisations - as well it might.

Every Labour MP who voted for the war, who steamed ahead with mass killing at the behest of a devious and duplicitous prime minister, is compromised and shares the guilt of the war criminals Bush and Blair.

And Labour's present leader, the man who announced, when chancellor, that he would fund the slaughter however much it took, maintains a guilty silence on Britain's shame, hoping against hope that the mud won't stick.

But the troops are still in Iraq, killing and being killed, seemingly without end. They are in Afghanistan facing the same prospects and, if Bush and his ilk have their way, they will move into Iran as well.

The Tories, as is their usual form, want the best of both worlds, at once supporting the warmongers - as they did throughout the war - and attempting to gain a cheap electoral advantage by calling for an inquiry into the war.

But, given the chance of power, they, too, will grab onto the US coat-tails and slide into war under the orders of our transatlantic cousins.

Eventually, there will be a general election and who will the peace-loving people of Britain vote for then?

Some will be lucky. They will have a Jeremy Corbyn or a George Galloway to vote for and they will be able to say that they voted for a fighter for peace.

But not so for most of us. For us, neither Lib Dems, Tories nor new Labour will suffice. For the sake of peace and democracy, the decent elements of the Labour Party must reclaim their organisation and build the strength to resist US imperialism.

For the alternative will see our young people dying in the streets of Iran, as they have in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Morning Star