It is a fairly basic moral principle that we are primarily responsible for actions we commit ourselves – or help others commit – and not for those committed by others. It follows that, as citizens in a democratic country, who exercise some degree of control over our government, we share some degree of moral responsibility for its actions. And the crimes Britain has assisted Israel in committing against the Palestinians are grave indeed.

Last September, The Guardian reported the testimony of “dozens of troops” from Israeli pressure group Breaking The Silence, who “acted on standing orders” to “open fire on people regardless of whether they were armed or not.” In one soldier’s words, there was “pressure to get kills”. According to another, “The commanders said kill as many as possible”. Gaza, he claimed, “was considered a playground for sharpshooters”.

This April The Guardian reported a “huge jump” in British arms sales to Israel. According to the Foreign Office, these sales are perfectly legal: “The bottom line” being “that no piece of kit is used for external aggression or internal repression”.

Shockingly, this comes a mere four years after Jack Straw publicly admitted Israel was breaching assurances that military equipment would not be used against civilians or in the occupied territories. Despite the government’s public posturing, Britain has since sold Israel leg-irons, electric shock belts, chemical and biological agents, categories covering mortars, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, military explosives, infrared and radar sensors.

A mere two months after Straw’s admission, in “a move which ministers said was dictated by the interests of British arms companies”, The Guardian reported, BAE Systems were still selling Israel “Head up Displays” for F16 aircraft – the same F16s that, according to Amnesty International, Israel “routinely used” to “bomb and shell Palestinian residential areas”.

As Straw explained, “Any interruption to the supply of these components would have serious implications for Britain’s defence relations with the United States.” Their supply continues to this day – providing some insight not only into the priorities of the British government, but also, dear reader, into where your tuition fees are going.

This is an ongoing crime which needs to be stopped, if we take our moral responsibilities seriously. We can certainly do a lot worse, it seems to me, than start by supporting the Ethical Investment campaign here at York.

With the bombing of the al-Askari “golden” mosque in Samarra on the 22nd of February, Iraq seemed to have taken a step closer to civil war. Over the following week, according to Baghdad’s main morgue, the ensuing sectarian violence claimed 1,300 lives – making it “the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives”, The Washington Post reported, most of the killing coming “at the hands of self-styled executioners”.

The aftermath of the bombing also saw significant calls for unity between Shiite and Sunni leaders – and a good deal of condemnation directed at the occupation. Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demanded an end to attacks on Sunni mosques, even sending members of his Mehdi army to protect Sunni mosques within 24 hours of the attack.

“We are not enemies but brothers,” he said, “And he who assaults sacraments and mosques shall get his just punishment.” He also called for a peaceful demonstration in Baghdad, “involving Shiites, Sunnis and others, in which you will demand the withdrawal of the Occupying forces”. On the 26th of February, Representatives of Al-Sadr later met with members of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, widely seen as the most significant public voice of the Sunni insurgency. Both groups condemned attacks that might lead to civil war.

The aftermath of the bombing has demonstrated an underlying tension in the nature of Iraq’s insurgency between sectarian conflict and popular resistance to foreign occupation.
The occupation of Iraq is opposed by a substantial majority of Iraqis. Last October, for instance, The Telegraph reported the results of a secret Ministry of Defence poll of Iraqis, which concluded that 82% of Iraqis were “strongly opposed” to the presence of coalition troops; indeed 67% felt less secure because of the occupation.

It is not difficult to see why: Human Rights Watch’s 2006 report on “the absence of basic precautions by the U.S. military to protect civilians, including at checkpoints”. One marine lieutenant, cited in the Economist, summed up the characteristic trigger-happy attitude: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them; it’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.” Torture of detainees, HRW report, is also far from unusual, U.S. Military personnel attesting to “routine and severe beatings of detainees”.
A more recent poll by the Project on International Policy Attitudes found similar attitudes among Iraqis: 87% of Iraqis want a timeline for withdrawal of troops. 64% that the number of violent attacks would decrease; 61% that inter-ethnic violence would decrease; 67% that the availability of public services would increase.

There can also be little doubt that the occupation is the root of the Iraqi insurgency. According to a recent report, U.S. intelligence agencies informed the U.S. Government as early as October 2003 that “the insurgency was fuelled by local conditions – not foreign terrorists – and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.” The insurgency, they warned, “was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war.”

Despite this, the Bush administration has continued to portray the insurgency as constituted by “former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists,” the report notes, “even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.” As a study last September by the Washington-based Centre for Stategic and International Studies concluded, the US government has been “feeding the myth” that foreign fighters form the backbone of the insurgency: the real percentage of foreign fighters is “well below 10%, and may well be closer to 4% to 6%.”

But whether popular discontent does ensure an end to the occupation, or its replacement with UN peacekeeping forces, most Iraqis, it seems, would be glad to see the back of it.

The issue of public services is one of the most notable. Predictably, Labour have tried to win back core supporters alienated over Iraq by presenting themselves as defenders of the progressive agenda, moving “forward not back”, defending the NHS from erosion by the Conservatives and so on. But in reality, both Labour and Tories have long been singing from the same hymn sheet.

The Tory-spawned “Private Finance Initiative”, wholeheartedly adopted by New Labour ever since they entered government, has lumbered the public purse with billions of pounds worth of inordinately expensive bills (£130bn over the next 25 years, according to the Centre for Policy Studies). The builders of Altcourse prison in Liverpool, for instance, broke even within 3 years – with 22 years’ worth of contract left, all at public expense. In the NHS, Octagon Healthcare is being handsomely reimbursed for its £229m contribution, costing the public five times the cost of construction over 30 years. In the wake of Jamie Oliver’s campaign, South London schools recently“discovered” that they have irreversibly handed over control of menus to subcontractor Scolarest, with the schools liable to pay compensation for any violation of their 25-year contract.

None of this, of course, has become an “election issue”. When Michael Howard proclaims that “public and private sectors can achieve more by working together than by working apart”, it is without acknowledging how many of these reforms have already been adopted, and what a wholesale disaster they have been.

A similar, and consistent, silence is applied to Britain’s major allies around the world – a rather extraordinary exclusion given the huge levels of public scepticism over current British foreign policy. Russian abuses in Chechnya, for instance, have been described as “abysmal” by Human Rights Watch, who have documented widespread looting, physical abuse and extrajudicial executions by Russian security forces. “Enforced disappearances” are now “so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity”. Britain, however, refrains from using any influence, diplomatic or otherwise (including its annual aid programme, export credits and substantial trade links) to address this situation, and has rejected calls for a war crimes tribunal as “counter-productive”.

Similarly, while pulling out all the stops to argue for the “moral” war in Iraq, in February 2003 Britain granted Uzbekistan an “open license” to purchase armaments. Uzbekistan currently has between seven and ten thousand political prisoners; according to Human Rights Watch, its police “use electric shock, beatings and rape”, “asphyxiate detainees with plastic bags, sprinkle chlorine in gas masks and shut off the air” and “hang men naked by their wrists and ankles”.

These are just two issues – there are many others – in which business interests, be they defence contractors or construction companies, have a decisive influence on government policy – and the media seems only too happy to look away.

The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez might be forgiven, then, for recently claiming (with typically bombastic rhetoric) that if he is assassinated the person responsible will be the President of the United States. “I will not hide, I will walk in the streets with all of you … but I know I am condemned to death” he told assembled listeners last month.

Chavez is undoubtedly right to think that Washington has its eye on him. The fourth largest exporter of oil to the US, Venezuela is of massive strategic concern to the Bush administration. Some of Chavez’s policies, however, have made the relationship an icy one.

Chavez’s government has nearly doubled taxes on foreign oil companies and regained control of the state-owned PDVSAoil company. Increased oil revenues, opposed by the IMF, along with a substantial land reform programme have been a key part of Chavez’s progressive redistribution policies.

Government funding has been poured into literacy, health and other social programmes, teaching, so it claims, over a million adults to read and write in the last year – the biggest literacy programme in history.

Wealthy sectors of society – or rather “the squalid ones” in Chavez’s framing – are not enthused. Nor, it seems, is the U.S. government. The Bush administration has always regarded the Chavez’s democratically elected government as lacking “legitimacy”. Condoleeza Rice, US Secretary of State, recently described Venezuela as a “negative force” in Latin America, accusing Chavez of turning the country into a totalitarian society.

Chavez’s government has recently drawn criticism after the appointment of seventeen new Supreme Court judges, who many feel are on side with the government, in what has been seen as an attempt to gain complete control over the Judiciary.

His support among the poor majority, however, still remains high, being consistently victorious in popular votes, most recently last August, when he was returned to office enjoying 60 percent of the vote.

Chavez’s fear of a potential coup attempt might have been seen as paranoid and implausible, had one not already been attempted.

In April 2002, Chavez was kidnapped and forced out of office by a combination of business leaders and a clique within the military; massive popular unrest quickly forced the coup plotters to reinstate him.

Recently declassified CIA documents reveal that Washington was well aware of the imminent coup attempt before it happened. Moreover, as a U.S. State Department internal investigation into Washington’s role in the coup noted that the US had provided substantial support programmes totalling about $3.3 million to Venezuelan organisations and individuals, some of whom are understood to have been involved in the the coup.

Why, though, should Chavez’s policies in Venezuela be quite so provocative in Washington? As some have suggested, the upper echelons of the American government seem to regard its refusal to play ball as deeply threatening.

“America can’t let us stay in power”, Miguel Bustamante Madriz, a minister under Chavez said. “We are the exception to the new globalization order. If we succeed, we are an example to the Americas.” Whether or not they do succeed – and what the U.S. has left in store for Mr Chavez is yet to be seen.

The Senate confirmed the nomination of Gonzales who, in a January 2002 memo, described provisions of the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and “obsolete”, and encouraged the suspension of “prisoner-of-war” status for suspected fighters captured in Afghanistan, has provoked deep unease among a range of human rights groups.

This memo and another in August of the same year have exposed a climate of legal impunity, in which torture has been redefined to suit the requirements of US interrogators.

The US-based Center for Constitutional Rights went as far as to call Gonzales’ approval a “travesty,” taking one of the “architects of an illegal and immoral policy and installing him as the official who is charged with protecting our constitutional rights.”

A dozen ex-military officials have also protested against the decision. In an open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, they implored senators to ask tough questions of Gonzales, saying that he has encouraged operations that “fostered greater animosity toward the United States, undermined our intelligence-gathering efforts, and added to the risks facing our troops serving around the world.”

From Bush, however, Gonzales has received extensive accolades, for his “sharp intellect and sound judgment”, which have “helped shape our policies in the war on terror,” as he told reporters. “He always gives me his frank opinion”, said the President when delivering Gonzales’ nomination and also described him as “a calm and steady voice in times of crisis”, with an “unwavering principle of respect for the law.”

Most of the criticisms levelled at Gonzales relate to his aforementioned January memo, and a now infamous August 2002 memo by Justice Department lawyers, which Gonzalez was substantially involved in drafting, arguing that torture and even deliberate killing of terrorist suspects may be justified as necessary to protect the US.

It also, say critics, sought to avoid criminal penalties for US interrogators by setting the bar absurdly high for what can reasonably be considered “torture” – namely anything involving severe pain equivalent to that experienced during organ failure. The memo was publicly rescinded by a Justice department memorandum in December 2004 which declares acts of torture “abhorrent” and recognises international law.

Much criticism is also directed at Gonzales’ close links with the Bush administration, which seem to deeply compromise his integrity. Gonzales previously worked under Bush in Texas, preparing a brief report on every death row clemency request, where his failure to provide crucial information elicited a great deal of criticism.

In public Gonzales has been extensively backtracking in anticipation of his approval for the position. “Contrary to reports”, he declared during recent questioning by members of the senate, “I consider the Geneva Conventions neither obsolete nor quaint”; that the US “must be committed to preserving civil rights and civil liberties.” Regarding his role in drafting the controversial memos, he was vague and noncommittal – but he affirms that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions are still applicable in Iraq.

Nevertheless in the mind of many, Gonzales’ appointment is likely to extend the climate of abuse and legal impunity for many more years.