7 June 2017

Al Jazeera: Corbyn was right in 2003, and he is right again today

The import of Corbyn's statement must be considered in its historical context. Despite the legion of people who stood figuratively and philosophically with the then backbench Labour MP, Corbyn faced a deep and vitriolic thicket of establishment opposition, particularly from Britain's rancid reactionary press that universally supported then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's disastrous military misadventure and instinctively libelled the war's opponents as quislings. [...]

But Corbyn's speech arrived at its moral crescendo when he warned the mesmerised throng, and, by, extension, the rest of us, of the calamitous human and geopolitical consequences the obdurate trans-Atlantic architects of the pestilential Iraq invasion would ultimately cause.

His voice rising in plaintive anger, Corbyn said the war would "set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression, and the misery of future generations ... the way to free us from the scourge of war is to free ourselves from the scourge of injustice, of poverty, and of misery". [...]

In this regard, Corbyn made what many other politicians consider a politically fatal admission: Britain, France and the United States (or their regional proxies) invading and dropping bombs on Afghanistan and other, predominately Arab countries - from Iraq, Syria, Yemen to Libya - year after dreadful year have fuelled, rather than stemmed, the terror visited upon so many, in so many places.

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