Ten years on: Endless war?

David Cameron told us recently that the war against terrorism in north and west Africa would last for decades. That's why he has now sent 300 British troops to Mali to aid the French intervention there.

This is on top of the more than a decade in which Britain has been directly involved in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The Afghan war has gone on longer than the first and second world wars combined, and is recognised even by its supporters as having been lost.

The Iraq war was a disaster from beginning to end, with terrible and continuing costs to the Iraqi people.

The Libya bombing and intervention was hailed by Cameron as a great success but is now acknowledged as partly contributing to the conflict in Mali. Fighting and instability continues in Libya.

How many decades do successive British governments expect the public to put up with these wars?

They pretend to be motivated by humanitarian concerns. But these wars are about two things - regime change and the control of strategically important and natural resource-rich areas.

It is relatively easy for the major imperial powers to effect regime change. Superior air power and weaponry, the funding of opposition groups as the new government in waiting, and the exploitation of grievances against unpopular dictators all play their part.

But the Western powers do so with little thought of what the political and military consequences of this regime change will be, and with no concern for the humanitarian consequences.

They therefore create new grievances, new oppositions to their interests, which then require a new war on terror.

This disastrous vicious circle of events highlights the real truth - that the war on terror has been a failure on every front and that every new war is a consequence of the previous ones.

It's not as though they haven't been warned.

It is 10 years since an estimated 30 million people marched on every continent to oppose the war in Iraq.

In Britain, two million marched in London and another 100,000 in Glasgow, where Tony Blair was speaking to the Scottish Labour Party conference.

Everything that protesters said on those demonstrations has turned out to be true. And everything that Blair and his allies told us in justification of the war has turned out to be a lie.

There were, famously, no weapons of mass destruction - yet now the supposed existence of chemical or nuclear weapons are again being used as pretexts for attacks on Syria and Iran.

The war has not made the world safer, but much more dangerous.

The "war on terror" as it was originally called has helped to create terrorism.

Al-Qaida was seen as a threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001. Now it and its associates are present in Yemen, Mali, Algeria, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere.

In Iraq alone, probably around a million people have died and millions have been displaced, suffered injury or been denied a normal life.

The war in Iraq was not the conclusion of this war on terror. It simply heralded a new and more deadly phase.

Intervention did not end there, but has spread to Libya and Mali, as well as continuing in Afghanistan. It is happening covertly in Syria and Iran.

The Israelis have continued their oppression of the Palestinians, building illegal settlements and an apartheid wall and waging war on the people of Gaza.

Islamophobia has increased dramatically since 2001, with Muslims now routinely identified as extremists or terrorists by politicians and media.

Torture, rendition and the abuse of prisoners has become commonplace as a result of the war on terror.

Guantanamo camp, Bagram air base and Abu Ghraib prison have all become notorious blots on a supposed civilisation.

Governments have chosen to use military might, backed by supine politicians and media, to overrule public opinion. The February 15 demonstrations of 2003 marked the biggest mass protests ever in history. And the majority of opinion polls in most countries show continued opposition to the wars.

Blair's arrogance in ignoring this opposition created a democratic deficit that still exists.

In Britain the government is enforcing austerity through cuts in welfare, education and health but never hesitates to spend billions on weapons and new deployments of troops.

The cost of four years of the Afghanistan war, £20 billion, is the same as planned government "savings" on the NHS.

The issues are connected. The globalised neoliberal system relies heavily on its military wing to maintain strategic control of markets and to gain access to raw materials.

So we face both economic crisis with devastating consequences and a rampant imperialism intervening in ever-wider areas of the globe.

It is these connected issues which make the anti-war movement so important.

We didn't stop the war but we did create a mass movement to oppose imperialist war. We have made it harder for them to launch further wars.

We have also made the connection between war and economic crisis, and campaigned against attacks on civil liberties and Islamophobia.

The conference this weekend brings together some of the best international campaigners, activists and speakers to reiterate our opposition to the war 10 years ago. But more importantly, it's about confronting war today by opposing present interventions and future threats.

This means a renewal of the anti-war movement, a commitment to organising, educating and campaigning in the months ahead.

We should know by now that we cannot rely on the politicians to stop wars. Only the mass of people can do that.

• Lindsey German is convener of the Stop the War Coalition and author of a new book, How A Century of War Changed the Lives of Women (Pluto Press).