George Galloway, ' B52s, sticks of bombs, carpet bombing - is that sharp?', Response to Aghan war -2001

2 November 2011, Westminster, United Kingdom

I do not have time. I believe that some of my hon. friends and some opposition members will join us in the lobby and that a substantial number of hon. members will abstain. We and the abstainers will only grow in number in the days to come.

There is a fantastic dislocation between the atmosphere in the chamber and the atmosphere outside in the country, and still more in the wider world. One would not think, listening to the secretary of state for defence, that more than half the population of this country want the bombing to stop now so that humanitarian aid can flood in.

One would not know, listening to some of my colleagues who often lecture us about feminism, that more than half the women in Britain are demanding an end to the war. One would not know, listening to the Liberal Democrat spokespeople, that more than half the Liberal voters in the country are demanding an end to the war. One would not know, listening to some Labour Members, that millions - if the opinion polls are right, some 12m to 14m people - in this country were demanding an end to the war, or that millions of them were Labour voters.

One certainly would not know from some hon. members who represent constituencies with substantial Muslim populations that there was great unease and opposition to the war in our country. One would not know that the campaign was going disastrously around the world. One would not know that it is scarcely possible for an American politician to set foot in the Arab countries. Our prime minister has to go as what The Wall Street Journal unkindly described as "the American ambassador" to those countries.

When our prime minister goes to Arab countries, he receives short shrift from the leaders whom he meets. As my hon. friend the member for Linlithgow said, countries such as Iran are unequivocally against the bombing. Syria lectured the prime minister yesterday against bombing. If anyone here thinks that public opinion in the Arab world is with them, they are living in cloud cuckoo land.

I have the benefit of watching Arab television, listening to the phone-in programmes and reading the Arab press. If Members of Parliament think that they have the support of the Islamic world - 1.3bn people stron - they are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Our new friend General Musharraf promised his people at the outset that the campaign would be short, sharp and targeted. The fact that it is neither short nor sharp is the reason why it is now a dagger pointed at his heart. Everyone in Pakistan knows it. More than 90% of the people of Pakistan are demanding that their government desist from co-operating in the savage bombardment of Afghanistan. That is a fact. The secretary of state for international development may think that General Musharraf is secure in his post. I do not know anyone else who thinks that the self-appointed president of Pakistan is in any way secure.

Sharp? B52s, sticks of bombs, carpet bombing - is that sharp? We saw just how accurate the targeted, laser-guided weapons were. Now we have moved to carpet bombing from B52s. We are told that the bombing is of military positions, as if the military lines in Afghanistan were somehow wholly separate from the villages and towns in which people lived, not to mention from the displaced people in Afghanistan.

Sharp? Cluster bombs? I never thought I would hear Labour spokespeople defending cluster bombs. Is the military struggle with the Taliban so finely poised that we cannot eschew the use of cluster bombs? I watched the secretary of state for international development on the beach at Brighton - done up in her mine-clearing suit - weeping about the victims of land mines. She knows that in so far as cluster bombs are not land mines they are worse than land mines, because land mines at least are mapped - land mines dropped from aeroplanes are by definition unmappable.

I only have time to deal with a couple of additional points. The aims of a campaign such as this cannot be separated from its likely outcome. Members who wish it to be restricted to Afghanistan are fooling themselves: this war is going to be extended to other countries. If they do not want that to happen, they must join us now. If they do not want the Northern Alliance, they must join us.

The Northern Alliance are the people who destroyed and beggared Afghanistan in the first place, whose mediaeval obscurantism put the women in chains, destroyed the towns and cities, took the women out of the universities, hanged the former President Najibullah from a lamp-post - they put his penis in his mouth and left him hanging to rot. That is the Northern Alliance - your new best friends who you hope to put into power.

My last point is this: we want this war stopped during Ramadan - not out of respect for the Muslims, but because it would give the government a chance, without losing face, to send a message to the Islamic world that they are going to pause during the holy month of Ramadan; that they are going to consider how the project has gone so far; that they are going to consult more widely; that they are going to try diplomacy; that they are going to try legal means and political means during that pause in the war; and that, above all, they are going to flood the country with humanitarian assistance - food and kindness - which will do far more to win the masses of Afghanistan to their cause than bombing them from B52s and bombing them with cluster bombs will ever do.

George Galloway: 'Are you ready to die for that?' King and Country debate Oxford Union - 2023

9 February 2023, Oxford Union, Oxford, United Kingdom

The topic ‘That This House Will under no circumstances fight for its King and its Country’ was famously debated in the union in 1933, when pacifism debates were all the rage post WW1 and in the buildup to WW2. The question was reposited 90 years to the day.

Mr. President, Right honourable and honourable gentleman, gallant officers of the military, there's an awful lot of fighters in here. Have you noticed? They're all ready to fight.

 I would've opposed this motion in 1933 for the reasons articulated by my colleagues in their opening speeches. In fact, I would've been the first in the queue of the recruiting office, had I been alive to fight fascism. Indeed, I would've been agitating to fight fascism in Spain three years before the Second World War. In 1936, both of my grandfathers fought fascism, under Montgomery, all the way from El Alamain to Monte Casino. I'm a former boy soldier, Lance Bombardier, Royal Artillery Battery 2, Army cadet force. I'm a former cadet in the Royal Marines, # in Dorset. I'm not a pacifist. In fact, I'll go five rounds with Tobias Elwood after the debate if he's up for it! And I'm twice his age!

But the people on the other side arguing against this motion have already damned most of the wars that I came here to oppose! You, you even oppose the First World War and the Afghan War and the Iraq War. Tobias Elwood tells us he opposed the Iraq War. I missed that when I was leading the fight against it, but I am delighted that nowadays you cannot find anyone who will support these wars that our politicians gave us in this 21st century. [interruption] Yes?

With successful military interventions such as the hospital in Sierra Leone, do not agree that it is possible to have successful humanitarian military intervention?

 No, I don't agree with the intervention in either of those cases. A better case could have been made for the Faulklands. An intervention, I did support. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, because that was a direct attack on British people, British citizens, and I supported it. But the examples you gave are not good ones. I'm sorry I gave way to you. I'm not going to dwell on the King, it's just as well he's got a divine right to be King, because nobody would ever have picked him! Least of all his own family!

On this day in 1649, on this day, the Rump parliament, a better parliament than we have today passed the following motion: 'The office of a King in this land is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the life and liberty and public interest of the people of this nation.' I wish the parliament would pass that motion today.

I'm not going to dwell on the King for it would be an absurdity as has been acknowledged here, that because King Charles tells you you've got to go and fight and die in a war, you're going to do it! Utterly absurd.

So let's turn to Country. Who is the country? What is the country? Who you going to fight for, Rishi Sunak! You, you upgraded the lack of height of my colleague. Have you seen Rishi Sunak? In fact, if you push Zelensky on Sunak's shoulders, you still wouldn't even get a Napoleon. These are small men. Are you really going to follow ... give them a blank check. Yes, I'll fight for you, Rishi Sunak! You only have to roll the name, or his predecessor. What was her name? Liz Truss. Are you telling me that if Liz Truss said you had to go to war and die, you would do it because she was the prime minister. Tony Blair. Tony Blair, yes. [to opposition supporter clapping loudly] yes, I knew you were an idiot from the sunglasses that you are wearing.Tony Blair. Anyone?

Tony Blair, anyone? Who caused the death of a million people and counting! Who cascaded fanatic Islamist extremism around the world. You call them spores, the murder cult of Isis, Al-Qaeda, the head chopping throat cutters, the million dead Iraqis and you want to do it all again, by signing a blank check to Tobias Elwood? He told you, did you notice the word, the caveat that he slipped in for you? There's no conscription -- yet. He said, did you notice it? He was on television less than two weeks ago calling for martial law to be introduced in this country. In which case, I saw your lips move on Sky News. I saw your lips move on Sky News. And if we had martial law, we wouldn't be having this debate. And it might not be long before you can take off your fur hat and put on a tin one and go off to fight and die on the question of whether Kipensk is on one side of a line when it's been in four different countries in the last hundred years.

You ready to die for that? Because I'm not.

And I'm not ready for sure to give a blank check to politicians to command my loyalty. My loyalty is to God, to my religion. I believe in St. Thomas Aquinas's concept of 'the just war'. I'll fight in a just war. If somebody attacks us, I'll fight them, getting on in years as I am. I'll tell my son to go and fight them. All of my sons, all of my daughters for a just cause. But you are not fighting for a just cause If you sign up to the concept that you will fight for King and Country because that's an unqualified commitment that you are making

My colleague was mocked for pointing out that there are circumstances in which, what does that bell mean by the way, some people have spoken for 20 minutes, she pointed out, there are circumstances in which we would fight.

Now I saved this last bit for little Ben Wallace, who I was told was coming here tonight and frankly, he's the only reason I'm here and he didn't show up. You're going to fight with wha? With what? You said I'd attack Tommy Atkins. I never have. I attack the donkeys that exploit the lives and limbs of the lions that they send into these wars. You will never hear me attack an individual British soldier. Far from it. I'm one of the volunteers of Jim Davidson's Care After Combat, looking after people that have been abandoned by the politicians that gaily sent them into war. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's on the streets with the homeless people. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's in the mental health hospital, damaged and abandoned by those that sent him into war. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's disproportionately in the prison system and not as a warder. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's disproportionately hooked on drugs. He's in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. I've picked him up myself, hooked on fentanyl and all these new opioids. That's what Tommy Atkins ends up doing in Tory Britain.

They send these men after war filled with their fake patriotism, King and country, straw hats and trumpets, and when they come back, they have no use for them. They leave them to rot on the streets without houses, jobs, futures, hope.

So don't come here and wave your flags at me. Don't come here and sound the tinny brass trumpet of your patriotism. Yes, we will fight for the working people of this country. Yes, we will fight for the good things about our way of life. By the way, when did you fall out of love with using armed force to take territory? We controlled 25% of the entire world's surface and ruled one third of the people of the world under our flag. All of it taken by armed conquest. All of those people held in subjugation by the British Empire and now they want to parade as if they were Boy Scouts that oppose the acquisition of other people's territory by force. These hypocrites.

Robert Burns, my national poet, put it this way. In an ode on the occasion of a National Thanksgiving:

“Ye Hypocrites, are these your pranks
To murder men and gie God thanks
Desist for shame, proceed no further
God won't accept your thanks for murder.”

I move.

George Galloway: 'You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported', defence to US Senate - 2005

17 May 2005, Washington DC, USA

Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

Now you refer at length to a company named in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could not possibly be documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."