Customer Reviews

Regime Unchanged: Why the War on Iraq Changed Nothing

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This book brilliantly exposes Bush and Blair's criminal aggression against Iraq, shredding every last one of their lies. Yet the book also reveals the very defective politics of the anti-war movement, which prevented it from stopping this war, and will prevent it from stopping future wars.

How can we stop wars? The answer is not more of the same, not a stronger anti-war movement with ever-bigger marches, more direct action, anti-war electoral actions and better campaigning. All these we did earlier this year, to the utmost extent, and if they were the answer, there would have been no war.

The answer is something different and new and much more difficult: we have to cut out the root of all wars, capitalism. Without we do this, nothing that we do will stop wars, just as we cannot prevent cholera without stopping filthy water. Only the working class in power will do the job.

The US/British war against Iraq was illegal, immoral, unnecessary and anti-democratic. The UN opposed it. The attack killed 10,000 Iraqi civilians. Iraq was not a threat: it had no WMD. Bush and Blair wanted the war, overriding their peoples' wishes.

Yet after detailing Blair's ceaseless warmongering, Rai somersaults to defend him, writing that Blair "was most reluctant to go to war with Iraq." Why? Because to Rai, social democrat Blair must be better than Republican Bush, when in fact they are the same.

Rai compares postwar Iraq to 1945, when the USA and Britain forcibly crushed resistance in Italy and Greece and restored reactionary regimes throughout much of the world. True - but Rai goes on to write that the Soviet Union serviced and cooperated with this postwar reaction. Actually, the Soviet Union, wherever it could, aided the resistance and defeated US-British schemes to restore reactionary regimes.

The 2003 war was for Iraqi compliance and oil, not for Iraqi freedom and democracy. In Iraq, the USA has cancelled local elections, as in Najaf, and will postpone national elections indefinitely, as it did in Vietnam in the 1950s, because popular forces would win.

Now the people of Iraq must rebuild their country, not foreign troops or humanitarian agencies or the UN. As one Iraqi rightly said, "We do not need foreigners to tell us what to do."