This article illustrates that the arguments for the UK's wars in the Middle East are false.

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UK's Middle East Wars Unjustifiable and Unaffordable

Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell warned us in their 1955 manifesto that the human race has a choice. We can renounce war or we can bring about our own end.

This is even clearer now than it was half a century ago.  Knowing this, countless millions round the world ardently want peace. The people of Britain want peace. Yet the British government and our allies, the Americans, insist on trying to have their way through war. This is intolerable. By what right do our leaders continue to impose the curse of war on an unwilling world?

The arguments for our wars are transparently false.

Even proponents of war generally consider that a violent response should be proportional to the offense. Our government's justification for our wars in the Middle East is that they are necessary to make British citizens at home safe from terrorists.

War, conducted primarily by the Americans and the British, has been waged in Iraq since 2003 and in Afghanistan since 2001. Since these wars began 52 British citizens have died in the UK in a terrorist attack.

Since no official record is published listing the number of Iraqi civilians killed ("We do not do body counts' General Tommy Franks) estimates for the current total vary widely from an absolute minimum of 94,7081 to 1,366,3502

In 2006 the medical journal, The Lancet, published an article that estimated the number of Iraqis who had died since the war began was 600,000.

But even if we take the very lowest figure for the Iraqi deaths, the relationship between 52 civilian deaths in the UK and 94,708 in Iraq quite clearly exposes the truth.

These wars are NOT a proportional response to any threat to British citizens.

(The estimates of civilian deaths as a result of the war in Afghanistan range between 12,400 and 32,0573.)

The terrorist atrocity in Britain which resulted in the death of 52 citizens took place in 2005.

In the same year 3,201 people were killed in UK road accidents; 28,954 people were seriously injured and the total number of casualties was 271,0174.

Moreover the 52 terrorist killings has been, to date, a one-off event; the figures for death and injury on the roads are similar every year.

In addition, every year the number of deaths in the UK due to hospital infections alone is variously estimated to be between 5,000 and 20,0005.

If the government was concerned about saving British lives it would be immeasurably more effective in its utilisation of citizens wealth if its military spending on gratuitous wars (at the behest, we have to assume, of the military/industrial complex and our leaders' prompters in the Pentagon) were redirected to ensuring better driving on our roads and on achieving cleaner hospitals.

Again the figures expose the truth.

Gargantuan squandering of resources.

In 2008 the cost of global military spending and the arms trade was 1.46 trillion dollars. Our allies, the Americans, were responsible for 41.5% of this total6.

We British too, unlike the majority of the other 191 states in the United Nations, squander a vast amount of our wealth on wars, the military and the arms trade; wealth and effort which needs to be redirected to saving the planet.

Military spending by the British government for the year 2009 is listed, by the universally respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), as 65.3 billion pounds. This does not include such items as the 76 billion pounds7 for Trident Renewal, the billions being spent on our nuclear weapons factory at Aldermaston or the 11 billion pounds earmarked to build the new War Academy at St Athan in South Wales. Yet the 65.3 billion SIPRI figure alone represents a cost of 1,060 to every man, woman and child in the UK. The figure will be similar every year the government maintains its militaristic foreign policy. By comparison the cost of China's military expenditure amounts to only 64 per person (about one sixteenth of the UK figure). That for India is 26 per person. Our vast military spending would be rationally incomprehensible even in normal circumstances but in the context of a financial crisis which is about to cost every family 2,400 a year8 it is doubly so.

We cannot afford this profligacy. Our energies and wealth are needed elsewhere.

The necessary way forward.

The era in which it was tolerable for old men to send young men to their deaths in foreign wars is long gone. We must have an end to wars at the behest of vainglorious or paranoid politicians. The world has moved on. We need the money and the manpower to tackle the urgent problems which face us all; global warming, the need for sustainable energy sources, the coming water scarcity, the population explosion, the aging of populations.

Getting on the right track will take a paradigm shift in the way we relate to the rest of the world. We must move from confrontation to cooperation; from protecting the interests of the state to ensuring the wellbeing of the planet and all its occupants. The "Manifest Destiny' and "Full Spectrum Dominance' of the George W. Bush days are the exact opposite of the attitudes needed. President Obama has spoken in different terms but his pursuance of the war in Afghanistan shows he has still a lot to prove. In his acceptance speech for the Noble Peace Prize he expressed the view that the war is necessary to bring about peace; a business-as-usual sentiment which inspires a sense of dread and which underlines the urgent truth that our "Special Relationship' must not mean aping American aggression.

To succeed in turning around global warming there needs to be a turn around in the posture of the violent, war-waging states.

1. http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/ [11.12.09]

2. http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq [11.12.09]

3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)

4..http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/casualtiesgbar/roadcasualtiesgreatBritain2005

5. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/14968.php

6. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp

The U.N.'s entire budget is 1.8% of the world military expenditure

7. http://www.cnduk.org/index.php/20081119647/press-releases/trident

8. Independent 11.12.09 Jim McCluskey 5.1.10

Authors Bio:
I have had a career in Civil Engineering and Landscape Architecture and had a consultancy firm which spanned these two disciplines. I have had books on design published by the Architectural Press and E. and F.N. Spon.
I am a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers, and the Institution of Highways and Transportation. I am an Associate of the Institute of Landscape Architects.

In recent years I have been working in the anti-nuclear weapons movement with Abolition 2000, CND and the Kingston Peace Council. I have also been working with the World Court Project and Stop the War Coalition with a view to achieving peaceful rather than violent solutions to conflicts in foreign affairs.
I have produced two A5 publications on the subject of "The Nuclear Threat'.

Jim McCluskey. Bsc, MICE. MIStructE, MIHT, ALI.
3 St Margarets Road,
Twickenham,
Middx. TW1 2LN.
Tel: 020 8892 5704