This week, US President Donald Trump described the latest campaign of death in the Middle East as “small potatoes”. A journalist in the Oval Office had pressed Trump on what the war on Iran actually was, given that the US government is careful about using the word ‘war’ lest it trigger benefits for service people killed in it, or any oversight from Congress.

A military conflict, said Trump. Small potatoes.

The focus in the U.S., of course, was on how this was an insult to the families of US personnel who had been killed, who in some cases claimed to have been initially denied benefits they might have received if this latest instalment had been described as a war.

Such sentiment speaks directly to the tone and content of our Radical Reprint this month, a prescient warning after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington a quarter of a century ago. Our predecessors, writing in Freedom‘s ‘What We Say’ editorial, opened with a fundamental assessment: “Westerners are more important than other people. This is the only explanation we can see for the response of media and politicians to last week’s atrocities in the United States”.

And such a statement is as true now, if not more so, than it was then. As far as the Iran war goes, American media has space in its heart for those who died while doing and facilitating the bombing, but is less concerned with those actually bombed. Whereas on 9/11 the unequivocal reality was that the US had itself been directly attacked, with thousands of civilian casualties (attacks rightly condemned by our forbears as atrocities), it remained the case that the deeper context for the attacks was overlooked at best by America’s rush for ‘revenge’.

That revenge led to a forever war. Afghanistan was attacked, ostensibly to root out Al-Qaeda, and was then occupied by a US-led coalition of NATO forces. Then came the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the invasion and occupation of the country, where hundreds of thousands died. The full death toll of the US-led forever war numbers in the millions. Today, Trump’s predecessor, George W. Bush, is lionised by some in the US as a figure more committed to constitutional norms and – supposedly – sensitive to the plight of US Muslims. This desperation to label Trump an aberration from an otherwise honourable America ignores extraordinary rendition, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, the PATRIOT Act, Abu Ghraib.

The UK also played its part, as it dutifully did in Iraq from 2003, and failed in both endeavours in its own terms. Britain happily got involved in bombing Libya in 2011, and eventually got involved in Syria too after a false start the first time around when the government was defeated in a Commons vote on the issue.

During the Iraq War, it became a commonplace that then Prime Minister Tony Blair was ‘Bush’s poodle’. The role as foremost international stooge for the American empire is one Blair has held onto even in retirement from that specific office, as attested by his involvement in Trump’s farcical ‘Board of Peace’ and his pathetic fawning over the US President’s plans for Gaza.

Blair gleefully engaged in authoritarian clampdowns on civil liberties, including the 2005 Act which required demonstrations within range of Parliament Square to be licensed by the government. Attempts to bring in ID cards, and ninety days detention without trial for terrorism suspects, were frustrated by Parliament and opposition beyond it, but the ‘war against terror’ and its dichotomisation of politics into – in George W. Bush’s words – ‘good’ against an ‘axis of evil’ was a formative moment for many of today’s government ministers.

Such was the atmosphere in which Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, to name but two, cut their teeth in politics. Both voted for ninety days detention, ID cards, and the Iraq War.

Our forbears at Freedom were not wrong to greet the onset of the ‘war against terror’ with the headline ‘welcome to hell’. For many outside the West, that’s exactly what ensued. And within the West, the rollback of civil liberties – for which the period after 9/11 set the template – has continued, with the same cast of characters in ministerial office.

The forever war rages on.

Freedom, Vol. 62 No. 18, 22 September 2001

Welcome to Hell

Westerners are more important than other people. This is the only explanation we can see for the response of media and politicians to last week’s atrocities in the United States.

We feel nothing but contempt for the hypocrites – pundits, bosses, ‘experts’, the ‘humane’ liberals – who shed crocodile tears for the dead while exploiting an opportunity to sneak through measures they’d never get away with otherwise.

What chance of Blair’s public-private partnership idea being stopped now? How many allies will we find in the fight against the inevitable repression of our liberties?

The TUC, the organisation most likely to scupper the government’s plans for public services, called off congress as a mark of respect for those who died. The killers at the London arms fair, protected by British cops and those same politicians who affect horror at what happened in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania observed no such decency.

Here in Whitechapel, we could almost hear the smacking of their lips as they contemplated a boom in orders. War is the health of the state, but it’s also a tonic for many industrialists’ wallets. What politician (except a couple of old dogs who know their hour has passed) will admit that American foreign policy is the cause of the resentments of the Middle East? None – instead they have to fall back on racist stereotypes of ‘different’ Arabs or offensive platitudes about the psychosis of ‘fundamentalism’.

The biggest and most ruthless killers since 1945 have always been – beyond compare – the paid killers of the developed world and their ‘principled’ bosses. Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq: these were not the actions of religious fundamentalists (though America has such people in abundance – they could be heard last week, howling for revenge).

Of course we’re scared of the next escalation in this new war. But much more terrifying than any holy lunatic is the power of our own governments and their friends.

The big wars of the last century saw huge infringements of civil liberties. But there was a limit to what the state could do: the time came when ‘the enemy’ was finally defeated, and governments had no choice but to relax their hard grip.

This time there’s no land to conquer, no cities to seize. In other words, this is a war that will have no end. Every victorious battle for ‘our’ side will spawn new hatreds and fresh enemies. The freedoms we lose now will never be replaced, until we forcibly take them back.

We are sickened by the hypocrisy, we are scared for the future. But most of all, we are angry. Angry with the governments, angry with the bosses, and – particularly – angry with all those people who can’t see beyond the atrocities of last week to the cesspool of betrayal, greed and opportunism behind them.

This was no ‘human tragedy’. To call it that is to deny its political nature. The authors of last week’s atrocity, like those of the bigger atrocities to come, have names, and the names aren’t just those of the people who hijacked the planes. The names of the guilty are the names of everyone who’s being swept along in this sewer of nationalism. There are a lot of decent people, who can’t see that they’ve already started to take sides for the war to come.

There was a three-minute silence last week for the victims of the attacks. Will there be another one for the victims of America’s revenge?