After Obama, the UK needs to officially come clean on the 1953 Iranian coup d’état.

At the recent United Nations annual gathering of world leaders in September, President Barack Obama once again admitted to America’s role in the coup d’état which overthrew the government of the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953.  This is not the first time Obama has mentioned this sore and defining episode in American-Iranian relations. In his 2009 Cairo speech Obama was more explicit in laying out America’s involvement. He acknowledged that during “the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”

The reason why Obama may have used the indefinite article, “a role”, in describing America’s involvement is largely because there was another external actor. If America had acted alone in overthrowing Mossadegh’s government Continue reading

Why the United States must Reject British Foreign Policy in Syria.

One of the effects of the Obama presidency is that it has turned international warmongering on its head. The script, has been somewhat flipped. During the George W. Bush era there was very little doubt who was perceived to be leading the mindless, breast-beating clamour for war. What is now clear and impossible to avoid is that the United Kingdom is assuming the lead in calling for more Western intervention in the Middle East. As such and like Libya, the British have been leading the calls for a United States led intervention in Syria.[1]

In an interview with the historian Niall Ferguson, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, declared his “frustration” at the lack of interest in intervening in Syria. He had similarly declared his frustration when it did not seem the British were going to be granted an intervention in Libya.[2]

Since Obama’s re-election Cameron has raised the verbal stakes in advocating intervention in Syria. Firstly, on the day of Obama’s historic re-election and on the back of peddling weapons to the Persian Gulf despots Continue reading

British Culpability in the Killing of the American Ambassador in Libya.

Inevitably and tragically the United States has once again experienced a blowback of a policy not of its sole provenance.

On the evening of 11th September 2012 the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed in Benghazi alongside three other Americans apparently during demonstrations against an internet video clip defaming the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic religion’s last prophet. His killing was also on the heels of the announcement that al-Qaeda’s second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi had been taken out by an American drone.

The ambassador is officially said to have died of asphyxiation after an armed group stormed the compound of the American mission. Currently the finger of blame points to an Islamist-Salafi militia, Ansar al-Shari’ah, as the culprits behind the fatal deed.[1]

Members of the militia had originally and quickly taken up arms during the uprising against Gadhaffi’s rule. Gadhaffi had made wild threats on television against the demonstrators and western media erroneously and falsely reported that his troops were committing rape crimes and employing foreign “African” mercenaries to do his violent bidding. Yet the only known foreigners in the early period of the uprising were the captured British MI6 agents.

Overlooked during this period was not only the racist lynching of black Libyans and Sub-Sahara African migrant workers Continue reading

Obama-bashing and the British urge to intervene in Libya

The current war on Libya largely led by Britain and France once again highlights the shortcomings of the British anti-war movement.

In the run up to the war on Iraqin 2003 and many years afterwards, many of the leading individuals within this movement circumvented the fact that Britainwas invading Iraqfor its own interests. Instead they mischievously popularised the notion that Tony Blair was beholden to George W. Bush. The latter, they strongly claimed, was dragging the former along into this illegal venture.[1]

Blair, they inveterately argued, was not a co-partner, co-conspirator and co-leader in this military enterprise but a mere “poodle”.[2] The poor soul had his innate and natural sincerity taken advantage of by big bad George W. Bush; he was seduced by the power of a photo-op on the Oval office’s green lawn and at times he was even “stabbed in the back” for Continue reading

Obama: British Empire worse than al-Qaeda?

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them…”

President Barack Hussain Obama

Well, he didn’t exactly put it that way but a closer reading and a more honestly keen interpretation inevitably leads those of us sympathetic towards a sincere anti-imperialist tradition to logically infer and quite inevitably draw that conclusion. The comparison and then verdict is clearly implicit and what more noble platform to affirm this absolute truth, than at his own inauguration, as President of the United States of America: one of the first nations, if not the first nation to free itself from the British parasitic and imperialist yoke.

History testifies that if the American revolutionaries had not liberated Continue reading