Don't do as we do

What adds to the farce is the third state's insistence that it has no intention of acquiring a nuclear bomb. It is simply developing its civil nuclear power programme, as Gordon Brown has announced for this country.

Although Mr Brown spoke of Britain's supposed leading role, "with the US and our European partners," in preventing Iran's nuclear weapons programme, his speech bore the usual servile Made in Washington imprint.

In this, his identification of Iran as the main source of tension and export of terrorism in the region is fully in tune with US rhetoric.

Mr Brown, like his predecessor Tony Blair, has signed up lock, stock and barrel to the US anti-terrorism phony prospectus that ignores the real reasons for instability in western and central Asia and manufactures a succession of scapegoats.

US determination to control oil and gas supplies, to dominate the region militarily, to back compliant Arab despots and to support unconditionally its surrogate Israel lies at the heart of most regional conflicts.

Our Prime Minister knows that, if the Palestinian people were no longer to be denied their national rights, this would eliminate much of the tension.

But he plays along with the preposterous notion of Israel as a victim, whose very existence is under threat, citing the comments - or at least their dubious interpretation - by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad.

The idea that Iran has the power to wipe Israel from the face of the earth - even assuming that this was the true meaning of his comments - is too fanciful for words.

Israel is a regional superpower, backed up by its own weapons of mass destruction and by the only global superpower.

Its continued expansion by means of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and development of its illegal colonisation of the West Bank depends to a large extent on a false picture being painted by imperialist news media and politicians and accepted by people in Europe and the US.

The image of Europe's dispossessed people finding their way to Palestine, setting up the state of Israel and making the desert bloom ignores the reality that the desert was well fertilised with the blood of the Palestinian occupants of the land, many of whom were massacred or driven out by the new colonisers.

Mr Brown's speech at the Knesset was an opportunity missed.

Instead of talking about justice and equality being the basis for a new reality in the region, he fawned on those in Washington and Tel Aviv whose political success depends on maintaining injustice, subjugation and exploitation.

And as Mr Blair fell in line over the invasion of Iraq, so Mr Brown is doing so over Afghanistan, offering the vista of decades of military intervention, more suffering for the Afghan people and a steady succession of military coffins returning to Britain.

New Labour's watchwords of privatisation and war must spark ever greater opposition in the labour movement to force a change of direction.