Has the Western coalition crossed the Rubicon?

Summary
Fears are increasing that the coalition is knowingly condemning tens of thousands of Afghans to death this winter. Complicity in this silent slaughter will strengthen the hand of terrorists on both sides, including the US/Israeli third world war lobby who believe a war against the whole Islamic world has already started.

If, as the pessimists fear, we are on the road to Armageddon, decisions over the next few days could represent a larger milestone, larger than even September 11.

According to a broad consensus of aid agencies, Mary Robinson UN Human Rights Commissioner, and the International Red Cross, by refusing a halt to the bombing Tony Blair has expressly and knowingly condemned tens of thousands of people to death in Afghanistan. He has signed the death certificate issued by Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush.

An exaggeration, surely? Well let's take a look at the facts. Oxfam's job is trying to save the poor and the miserable, and when that fails, count the corpses. They are good at their job, they've got a reputation to think of, they're in for the long haul and that means decades. They've been in the starvation business longer than anyone in the war cabinet has been in Parliament.

Oxfam have done their counting, they don't want to get it wrong, they know if they do they may be mocked in the spring. They've counted again, and again. They know that people in Afghanistan will be boiling grass and roots and animal feed, they'll be eating their livestock, and that will keep many alive. But that still leaves tens of thousands, it could be hundreds of thousands who won't make it. This is as certain as anything can be, says the other world coalition, a coalition which believes all human lives are of equal value, whether they live in New York or whether they live in Kabul.

Tony Blair has never had a real job outside Parliament, never run a business, never even run a consultancy, has failed so far to deliver any noticeable improvements in the NHS in peaceful, easy to administrate Britain. His enemies say he can't tell the difference between spin and reality. Now Tony Blair is a world statesman, and one thing is certain. Moderates across the world will not succumb to the spin unless it fits the facts.

This is not Ruanda where hardly anyone realised what was going on until it was too late. This time the whole world is watching. They have watched Osama Bin Laden abandon a life of privilege, take up a cause and (if indeed it was him) ruthlessly murder six thousand people. They have watched the west condemn this as a terible crime against humanity and demand that the world should change as a result.

But now events are moving on, the next scene could be avoidable, consciously willed mass starvation, Oxfam believe it could be hundreds of thousands, death on a scale which mocks Al Quaida's efforts, death promoted by comfortable men who never seem to have sacrificed anything very much in their whole lives.

The world has been told by George Bush to take sides. Whose side will they take if Oxfam turns out to be right? The spinners in Number 10 are relaxed. 70% back the bombing. It's Bin Laden's fault, we're doing everything we can to get the food through. Everything except stopping the bombing? Well, the food's getting in. So it's their word against Oxfam. Who will the world believe, Clare Short or Mary Robinson?

The story gets worse. Oxfam have been told by Number 10, off the record of course, that it's out of Tony Blair's hands, that the Americans are running this, there's nothing anyone can do in the UK any longer. A senior government lawyer speculates whether the total absence of British bombs right now could be a result of legal advice to Number 10 that with mass death looming the current campaign is no longer proportional.

Unless number 10 has been telling fibs to Oxfam, it looks like the coalition has been captured by the hawks, the people who believe that the third world war started long ago, the people who want to bomb Baghdad, conspicuously not ruled out by Tony Blair last week. Acording to the war `games` palyed out a t a top US military think tank, reports The Observer's Mary Riddell, this scenario leads to a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. No wonder the hawks have been so keen to ensure that Saddam does not develop his own nuke.

In the post Kossovo world, we are talking what many may see as genocide here, genocide in Afghanistan and later perhaps genocide in Baghdad. The key to organising genocide is complicity. The leader makes the followers complicit step by step, each step is worse and each time it's harder to get off. It spreads from the centre outwards, from the leader, say Bush/Rumsfeld to the underlings, say Blair/Short to the operatives, the bomber pilots, to the population.

If Oxfam is right, and Rumsfeld's people have now got control, when should Tony Blair get off this conveyor belt, assuming of course that he would want to? Once 50,000 have died in Afghanistan what's such a big deal about an attack on Baghdad? This all looks a long way away, but many of the elements are already in place. The precedent for secretly presented `incontrovertible proof` has been set. The evidence to justify an initial attack is mostly there, say the hawks.

The time to get off the conveyor belt is now, that's when a good chunk of the 70% apparent supporters in the UK will get off, now is certainly when the moderates in the middle east, Osama Bin Laden's targets for the next wave of recruits, will be getting off.
 
On Question Time straight after the September 11 atrocity the audience was pretty doveish, but the line that got the biggest applause was perhaops a surpise in the new world. It came from tory David Davies: Tony Blair's first responsibility is to defend the people of Britain. But this proposition does not quite have the implications Mr Davies seemed to imagine.

The idea for the coalition was clever, let us be frank, because it was going to rein in the reckless war party in the US. But if the coalition does not do that it's worse than useless, it's making us all part of the problem not the solution, and the British people targets for further waves of revenge stretching into the distant future, revenge condoned by those huge swathes of world opinion which value American and British lives no higher than Afghan or Iraqi lives.

Many of these people will not in Number Ten's phrase spend overlong asking who the `author` of the situation is, and some might even think it is the CIA or even Zbigniev Brzezinski, ex US national security advisor who proudly confessed recently to having lured the Russians into Afghanistan in the first place. Many don't take kindly to being told who did it on basis of secret evidence presented to NATO. Unlike Robin Cooke they do not think that support for an action, however enthusiastic, is the same as being the organiser or even the instigator. They just count the dead. When the dead in Afghanistan go over 6,000 they may start to think that it's America's turn again.

If Oxfam and most of the aid agencies are right, and if the bombing doesn't stop, some time soon Tony Blair will have to have a difficult conversation with George Bush. He will have to say it's either Rumsfeld or me. If he flunks this conversation, if he has already flunked it, Britain will be crossing the Rubicon, and this failure of British foreign policy will have propelled the world a lot further down the path to Armageddon even than the events of September 11.