And this:
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Middle East needs peace
By George Galloway MP
The issue we face on Iraq is whether Britain is prepared to join a pre-emptive attack by the United States that is not sanctioned by the UN Security Council.
There are two problems. The first is the leadership qualities of George W Bush. The Prime Minister tells us, as George Bush himself might put it, that we have been mis-underestimating the President. But the British people have seen and heard the President and they think they are estimating him just about right as a man who we would not want to be at the wheel of the car as we drive along the edge of a cliff, with ourselves sitting in the back seat.
Are we mis-underestimating the President’s friends? Are we mis-underestimating Donald Rumsfeld whose picture appeared in the Guardian the other day shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war after he had just handed over the latest US satellite surveillance so that the Iraqi regime could better target the Iranians who were our foes in that war?
Are we mis-underestimating Paul Wolfowitz, a man who used to make even Ronald Reagan’s blood run cold? Are we mis-underestimating the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, a man who voted in the United States Congress against the resolution for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison?
It is much more comforting to be on the side of Nelson Mandela in this argument than on the side of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush. I ask Labour MPs: how did we end up on George Bush’s side of an argument with Al Gore, the Democrats’ presidential candidate.
Would it not have been better if new Labour had strengthened the new Democrats or even the peace party within the Republicans rather than siding with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush?
Why are some Labour MPs and ministers on George W Bush’s side of the argument and not on the side of Gerhard Schroeder, the leader of the German Social Democrats?
The second problem is even more substantial. The British people instinctively know that adding another war to the Middle East does not seem like a sensible idea.
People see Israel demolishing — brick by brick — the solemn commitments in the Oslo agreement. They see the bulldozers, like some prehistoric animal, tearing down President Arafat’s compound.
The British people see the devastation and the flames in Palestine, the unresolved conflicts in Afghanistan and the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism and hatred against the west and they know that it is extremely unlikely that the world can be made a safer place by launching yet another war in that region — a war of 60 days and nights of intensive carpet bombardment followed by 250,000 western soldiers invading and occupying an Arab Muslim country.
They know that that does not sound like a recipe for security and peace in the world or like a recipe for the diminution of terrorism.