Apocalypse Times

"In order to demonstrate the power of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Hadrian once ordered a unit of mounted cavalry to swim across the Danube and back again in perfect formation. On seeing this the barbarian leaders 'stood in terror of the Romans'. Nearly 2,000 years later, as the Balkans crisis raged, US negotiators fostered the co-operation of Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, by seating him under a Cruise missile. The desired effect was much the same."

From a review by George Pendle of the book Are we Rome? - The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy in the FT weekend magazine, 26-27 May 2007

...and congratulates them on bringing security and stability to the country - and less than a week later 5 Britons are kidnapped in Baghdad.

Who says the insurgents don't have a sense of humour?

Actually, joking aside, this is very serious, and for more than just the obvious reasons. If the 5 were taken by the Madi army - Sadrists - and if Moqtada al-Sadr really has just come back from a month-long trip to Iran, this might be the first piece of a bigger plan going something like this:

The whole world knows that Blair is leaving office in 4 weeks. What better time to stage a high-profile kidnapping: not only to show his protestations that Iraq is getting better as the ravings of a hopelessly delusional, war criminal toerag - which of course they are - but to bring Iraq back into the public mind and put huge pressure on Brown to make an early exit from Iraq with or without the Americans. If the hostages were to be executed - say one a day for the five days before Blair leaves office, the executions filmed and put on the internet for access by the world's media - it would not only make absolutely sure that Blair retires the most reviled and hated man in UK history but it would place unstoppable pressure on Brown.

And once the UK has withdrawn its troops, the US is left alone in Iraq to face the Tet offensive predicted by so many for this summer. Mano a mano, the Great Satan against the insurgents. And America would lose.

...that's Tacitus spinning like a top in his grave.

"Lord Falconer, the justice secretary, announced plans for legislation aimed at reducing the prison population when the new Ministry of Justice took over responsibility for prisons from the Home Office this month." Guardian, May 30th 2007

So let's get this straight: the same government which has created 3000 crimes (count 'em - 3000: that's 300 a year for their decade in office, or roughly 6 a week, although of course Parliament doesn't sit every week of the year) is now legislating to reduce the prison population...

It would be laughable if it wasn't so scary. This country is being 'governed' by madmen - deeply incompetent, thoroughly delusional madmen...

Oh and it was Tacitus, by the way, who once said "The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws". The UK isn't a republic, of course, but still, go figure...

"For nearly five years the present ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering."
Benjamin Disraeli, 1873

Interesting piece from Iain Dale's blog.

Can't be right, though, surely? I remember distinctly Blair saying the War on Terror was to preserve our traditional freedoms? Unless of course he's a lying toerag?...

"I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite-Sunni divisions. Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hardball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise. In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief - and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty - is that were we to withdraw, things would improve. I say belief because that may not be the case. I can't predict the future. Iraq and its neighbours and its internal forces are extremely difficult to understand. In a single province in Iraq fifty-four new political parties emerged after three months following the invasion. And even Iraqis struggle to distinguish between the parties called the Islamic Call Movement, the Islamic Call Tendency, and the Islamic Call Muslim Party. All the parties that call themselves Hezbollah or Hamas have nothing to do with their namesakes on the other side of Arabia.

So I cannot guarantee that the situation will improve following a withdrawal. In some countries, civil wars do indeed continue for a very long time.

Whatever government emerges after our departure is likely to be Islamist and authoritarian. People talk sometimes too easily about choosing between lesser evils. In this case the choices may be genuinely evil. But I am certain that our presence is not improving things. Despite some claims to the contrary, there is not a single indicator of significant, overall improvement I know of over the last four years, neither in electricity, nor in education, nor in police training, nor in the military. You might be able to achieve a temporary blitz, a temporary numerical drop in the number of security incidents, through deploying 20,000 troops into Baghdad, but this is not sustainable.

There is no evidence I have seen that either the Iraqi police or army is prepared to take over our role, so long as we stay. In this situation there is simply no point hanging around. It would seem to me that starting to leave tomorrow, as opposed to in two years' time or six years' time, would make no difference; the situation would be the same. And there cannot be a justification for continuing, day by day, to kill Iraqis and to have our own soldiers killed in this kind of war.

...

The problems in Iraq are now so deep, complex, and intractable that they cannot be solved by surges or new tactics. They can only be solved by Iraqi political leadership and Iraqi I political processes. We can provide diplomatic and economic support. We can continue to protect ourselves against terrorist attacks on our home soil through intelligence and special forces operations in Iraq. But we cannot win through an indefinite blanket occupation because we lack the will, the resources, the legitimacy, and also the consent necessary to play such a role. My instinct is that Iraqis can overcome their problems and create a functioning nation. But even if I'm wrong: I believe that what good we can do we have done. We should leave now."

from Iraq: The Question by Rory Stewart, in The New York Review, May 31 2007

After the last general election, with New Labour's majority cut by 100 seats, Blair said he would listen. Less than 18 months later he was supporting an Israeli war on Lebanon, against the wishes of his country and an overwhelming majority of Labour MPs. Oh he was listening, all right: but sadly what he was listening to was the voice of a deranged American President on the red phone from the White House...

And now, as Brown tours the country attending hustings for an election that will never happen, he too has said he will listen. And he won't have to strain his hearing very hard to hear one word repeated, over and over. Iraq. Iraq. Iraq.

We have already had indications that there will be an inquiry into Iraq: not - very specifically NOT - into the legality or otherwise of the war, but into what to do next. A Baker inquiry for the UK (but maybe we won't comprehensively ignore ours).

However, if I were Brown I would spend some time just reading the press.

On Friday in The Guardian, Iain (sometimes M) Banks said he had torn up his passport and sent half to Blair because "I was so angry about the illegality and immorality of the war. And this was me - a comfortably off, white Caucasian atheist from a vaguely Protestant background. If I thought it was a disgusting, what would Muslims think about how their co-religionists were being treated?"

In today's Observer, in the This Much I Know column (a 5-second lifestyle piece), Muriel Gray says "When you're furious about something like the Iraq war, you've got to remember - they didn't ask you, it's not your responsibility. You're not in charge." (No, but we know who is in charge, who is responsible, don't we?)

Also in today's Observer, in an article about how a 40-something journalist bonded with his 12-year-old daughter by taking her to see her favourite punk/goth bands, he says, quite in passing about an Israeli band failing to mention the war on Lebanon: "Not that the British bands ever sang about Tony Blair's carnage in Iraq".

Iraq is everywhere, just below the surface. It permeates every conversation, it is a subtext to almost every edition of every newspaper with a brain, it comes up in every pub conversation and at every dinner party. And it's not going away. We know we were lied to.

I'm not talking about chavs or Sun readers - they're too busy figuring out how not to drown under all the debt they were allowed to take on over the past 10 years. People who care about Iraq are a minority - but then again so are the number of people who bother voting any more. Someone who cares about politics enough to take part in the process is interested enough to know they were lied to. Ipso facto.

The British public want Blair's head on a stick - and if we're not given Blair's we'll settle for Brown's. It may very well be that the price for winning the next election is Blair's liberty - is that a price Brown is prepared to pay? I don't see why not. Blair lied to Brown's face at least twice - Granita and the Admiralty House peace dinner party hosted by Prescott. Brown doesn't owe Blair a thing: yeah, sure, Blair won three elections - and destroyed pretty much every institution he touched, from the civil service to the army to the Labour Party, in the process...

Brown's problem is that he knows that we know that he voted for (and indeed funded) the war. But this shouldn't be beyond an adroit political manipulator to get out of. "Since accepting the post of Prime Minister I have become privy to facts which mean I can no longer endorse the decision to go to war, and today appoint a full inquiry..." - that sort of thing. We know that Brown knows that we know that he voted for the war - but Blair's head on a platter sure would buy a lot of forgiveness...

"Bombs, kidnappings and sectarian killings: these are what people talk about in Baghdad. There is not much Iraqis can do about these threats, except run away. I am always talking to people about how to get to Jordan or Syria, and about the chances of getting asylum in the UK or elsewhere in Europe. Out of a population of 27 million, four million Iraqis - more than the population of Ireland - have fled their homes. This is the biggest exodus of refugees in the Middle East since Palestinians were forced from their homes in 1948. Many left after finding a bullet in an envelope slipped under the door or a death threat scrawled on the front of their houses. There are relatively safe areas inside Iraq to which the Shia can flee; the Sunni are in danger wherever they go unless they leave the country altogether.

...

Three and a half years after the US captured Baghdad, it is extraordinary how little of the city it actually controls. At the end of January, US and Iraqi soldiers tried to fight their way into Haifa Street, less than a mile from the Green Zone, a district with a population of 170,000 that has long been a bastion of Sunni insurgents. In a file I found a New York Times piece about the incursions into Haifa Street, entitled 'There are signs that the tide may be turning on Iraq's street of fear'; it seemed to be well informed - until I noticed that it was dated 21 March 2005. It was an optimistic account of one of the US army's previous failed offensives into Haifa Street.

...

Just how dangerous Baghdad is for Americans was underlined last month when a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni area of al-Fadhil close to the central market. The US army immediately sent in a rescue team, but by the time it arrived four of the five members of the helicopter's crew had been executed by shots to the head (the fifth died in the crash); within hours their identity cards were being shown on insurgent websites. The lack of control is even more apparent in the provinces. Recently US and Iraqi commanders gave a self-congratulatory press conference on the situation in Baquba, the capital of the fruit-growing province of Diyala. 'The situation in Baquba,' they claimed, 'is reassuring and under control'; nasty rumours, they said, were being 'circulated by bad people'. A few hours later insurgents stormed Baquba's mayoral office, kidnapped the mayor and blew up the building. The local council's response was to sack 1500 members of the Diyala police force on grounds that they had failed to resist the insurgency. The council now complains that insurgents are in effective control of Baquba and that Nouri al-Maliki's government, which is preoccupied with the Baghdad security plan, has sent them no help."

from an article entitled Nowhere to Hide by Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books, 22nd February 2007

Labels: insurgents, Iraq

Report in yesterday's Guardian that Iranian-backed insurgent/Al-Qaeda forces in Iraq are planning a summer offensive to break American political will and force a rapid timetable for withdrawal.

Sounds highly plausible to me. I've been saying for a long time now that Iran has been playing a complete blinder, running rings around the ideological and deeply delusional zealots in the White House and Downing Street. For years now all the evidence is that they've been infiltrating Republican Guard elements across the border to train insurgents (cf the huge increase in IEDs), keeping America tied up so that there is neither the military manpower or the will to launch a ground attack on Iran (and if America thinks it can fight and win a war against Iran from the air it should think again - any aggression against Iran will result in a massive spike in attacks on US forces in Iraq with concomitant, and politically unacceptable, casualties).

Those of us who have been comparing Iraq to Vietnam have been right all along. The war has now been through the Dien Bien Phu phase - US and UK forces bunkered down, ceding control of surrounding areas to insurgents, taking casualties every time they venture out on patrol, their bases under continual rocket and mortar attack - and if reports are right this summer could see the Tet phase; a country-wide uprising against the occupiers to break the political will of the coalition and force withdrawal.

I take no satisfaction in any of this. A quite senseless number of people - civilian and military - have died already, and it looks like there will be a lot more blood spilt before this thing is over. As always the blame lies with the politicians who blundered into this - guided by religion and ideology rather than an intelligent analysis of the situation, arrogant, dismissive of the critics who have been proven right at every turn, delusional in their refusal to accept any responsibility or criticism.

If I had my way I'd ship the fucking lot of 'em to Baghdad and make them fight the war...

Labels: insurgency, Iran, Iraq, Tet

This from ft.com, from Gideon Rachman's blog:

"The Talibanisation of Pakistan Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's north-west frontier province, is a depressing place to visit at the moment. Islamic militancy and violence are spilling over the border from Afghanistan. Suicide bombings used to be unknown in Peshawar. But there have been 16 since September. A bombing in January killed the local police chief, who had been cracking down on militants. Another bombing last week blew up a local hotel and killed about 24 people. This is following the pattern of Afghanistan itself. Suicide bombings did not happen there until 2005. Now they are a deadly, weekly occurrence in Afghanistan, and have spilled across the border into Pakistan."

So much for making the world a safer place. There were many of us who warned at the time hat switching focus from Afghanistan to Iraq was a big mistake which would allow the Taliban time to regroup and dilute the West's response to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Blair, of course, famously said that the West would not walk away from Afghanistan this time - before proceeding to do just that.

This isn't the benefit of hindsight. This is what many many people were saying at the time. But as with everything else the liars and the warmongers didn't listen...

Labels: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Iraq, Pakistan, war on terror

Tell it like it is, Jimmy!

White House hits back at Carter

The White House has hit back by saying that Carter is 'increasingly irrelevant'. Not from where I'm sitting: from here it looks like it's the madmen in the White House who still think the Iraq was is winnable who are the irrelevant ones...

Labels: Blair, Bush, Carter, Iraq

Dear Mr Brown
Now that Tony Blair has announced his resignation and a date to leave office, and in the absence of any challengers for the position, it now seems certain as though, after many years of waiting, you will at last achieve your ambition to become Prime Minister. I wish you well.

You will inherit a country poisoned by anger and distrust towards our political leaders.

One of the first things you will need to do when you take up residence at 10 Downing Street is to answer this question, both to yourself and to the people of this country: do you believe in Parliamentary democracy?

If you don't, you will continue the Blairite agenda of spin and news management, of contempt for the electorate who put Labour into power, of arrogant exercise of power - and you will lose the next general election, and you will deserve to.

If, however, you do believe in Parliamentary democracy, then you must also accept that there can be no exercise of authority without responsibility. And if you believe that, on coming to full power you will appoint a full inquiry into Iraq.

As recently as Friday 11th May of this year, on Radio 4's Any Questions, a Blairite sycophant trotted out the tired line that she wished people would look forward and not back, that we are where we are. But people look back to 2003 for one very simple reason: we know we were lied to.

Many, many of us, even at the time, didn't believe the lies about WMDs, didn't believe 'intelligence dossiers' downloaded from the internet, didn't believe the 45-minute warning scaremongering (even before we knew of Jonathan Powell's infamous line to Tony Blair, talking about the Evening Standard: "What do you want the headline to be?"). We knew that America, with Blair's collusion, was fabricating a war to achieve the frustrated ambitions of neocons denied power by Clinton for eight years, who had spent that time festering about what would have happened if only the Coalition forces had marched on Baghdad in 1991. They wanted Saddam gone, they wanted Iraqi oil, and they wanted to open a new market to American capitalism.

A million people marched against the war in London alone. Tony Blair ignored us. We have never forgotten that, and we never will.

On taking power you will have an opportunity Blair has never had, despite all his public pleading in 2004: to draw a line under Iraq and to move on. However the British public will not allow you to do this until the guilty - those who lied us into this catastrophic, unwinnable war which has shattered a nation, destabilised a region, destroyed the morale of the British Army (recruitment at an all-time low: the number of AWOL soldiers at an all-time high: four times as many soldiers leaving as joining) and made the whole world a massively more unsafe place than it was - are identified and punished. Those of us who care about such things - and we are not a majority but we have long memories and are very vociferous - will settle for nothing less. We know we were lied to.

The lies told to us, the people, by Blair to justify a war he had already agreed to support have poisoned the entire body politic. We were told that this was a war to defend our freedoms. Yet we now live in a country where one cannot have a cake with the word 'Peace' iced onto it in Parliament Square because this counts as a 'demonstration'. Where people who wear t-shirts accusing Bush and Blair of war crimes are arrested in Brighton. Where a peace campaigner who - quite peacefully - reads out a list of the war dead at the Cenotaph is arrested. This is what our soldiers are fighting and dying for? This is democracy? This is our much-trumpeted 'freedom'?

The standard argument against a full inquiry, of course, is that after Hutton and Butler there's no point, that all the ground has been gone over and Blair was vindicated. You know, as I know, that this is nonsense: the terms of reference of those inquiries were set so narrowly that the conclusion was guaranteed. Lord Butler, for example, knew of the 'Downing Street memo' (which stated, infamously, that in Washington 'the intelligence was being fixed around the policy' - oh it was 'fixed' alright), but decided that he could not comment on it or allow it to influence him because it related to American foreign policy, and as such was beyond the remit of his inquiry. Utterly ludicrous.

Then there is the small matter of Lord Goldsmith's equally infamous u-turn. On 7th March 2003 he indicated that an attack on Iraq would be illegal. Ten days later he u-turned and suddenly decided that it would be legal after all. Why? This war was fought in the name of the British people, in our name. Many more than 100 UK service personnel have died to date in Iraq. We have a right to know. We demand to know. Lord Goldsmith had months to come to his original conclusion, and then overturned it in 10 days. Why?

These questions have not gone away in the past four years and they will not go away.

Do you believe in Parliamentary democracy and accountability, Mr Brown, or do you not?

You stated recently that the British public needed to embrace the 'big and serious issues' facing this country. Doubtless when you said that you were thinking of climate change, or global terrorism. But what could be bigger or more serious than a Prime Minister who lied - I believe quite knowingly, quite consistently, aware exactly of what he was doing - to take his country into an illegal and immoral war against a country weakened by ten years of sanctions: sanctions which even many of those charged with enforcing them described as 'genocide'? Sanctions - sponsored by the US - which succeeded only in killing 500,000 Iraqi children and old people and in strengthening the regime they were meant to depose by ensuring that the Baathists distributed what dwindling resources were allowed into the country? I never believed, even in 2002 or 2003 in the run-up to war, that a country so financially starved could ever actually have working WMDs: as proved to be the case. Saddam told the truth when he said Iraq had no WMDs and Bush and Blair lied when they said he did. Saddam was a complete monster, of course: but there are also monsters in the White House and Whitehall - Saddam learned at least a part of what he knew about monstering from his American paymasters when he was fighting against Iran as the West's proxy between 1980 and 1988.

And if Blair believed that he was acting honestly in his decisions towards war, why did he make so much of the policy on various sofas around Downing Street? Why were so many meetings unminuted? Why did he sideline Cabinet, mislead Parliament, deceive the people? Because, like criminals the world over he knew that what he was doing was criminal, and didn't want to leave an audit trail of evidence. I firmly believe that, and will continue to do so until a full independent inquiry persuades me otherwise.

How can the British people hope to tackle the big, serious issues if we cannot trust what our political leaders are telling us? How can we be expected to make the sacrifices and face the difficulties necessary to save the planet from climate chaos if we have no faith in those telling us what needs to be done? So you see, Mr Brown, Blair's betrayal of trust over Iraq goes to the very heart of government and governing, to the very centre of power and its exercise. We know we were lied to.

In his resignation speech Blair asked us to believe that he always did what he thought was right. So did Hitler. So did Mao. So did Stalin. So what? The ultimate judgement, as to be fair he conceded, is not his to make. It is for the law to decide whether he acted legally. The courts and the prisons are full of people who thought that they were right, but with whom the law disagreed. Blair's legacy has already been written in the blood of nearly three-quarters of a million dead Iraqis. For my own part there is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that he is a liar, a war criminal and a traitor. Soon he will be off to America to collect his thirty pieces of silver on the lecture circuit as reward for his Quisling, craven subservience to a deranged, fascist, monstrous US administration (I've heard a figure of £2.5m - something under four pounds for every dead Iraqi). He will never be forgiven for what he did and he will never be forgotten. Not being well-read in history I doubt very much whether Blair knows or cares who Vidkun Quisling was or what happened to him - but I bet you do, Mr Brown.

Unlike Blair, you have the opportunity to draw a line under Iraq, to move on. I would urge you to take it. If the British public are to reconnect with our political process and our political leaders the guilty must be brought to trial and punished. The first step on that road is a full public inquiry: without limit to its terms of reference, with cross-examination of witnesses, and with the full judicial armoury of subpoena and contempt to get at the truth. The brave service personnel who have died as a result of Blair's folly deserve no less.

Blair does not escape criminal liability for his actions when he leaves Downing Street. He never was allowed to draw a line under Iraq and move on, and he never will be. We know we were lied to.

David Milliband recently said of you (Radio 4 Today programme, 23rd April 2007) that you had "genuinely deep values". The time is fast approaching, Mr Brown, when you will be able to demonstrate the truth or otherwise of that statement. I hope very much that it is true, and that you will act quickly to end the obscene cover-up over Iraq and make those responsible face the consequences of their actions. If you don't, I fear that Iraq and its critics will destroy your Premiership as they have destroyed Blair's.

Blair's legacy has already been written. What will your legacy be, Mr Brown?

Very sincerely yours,

Ian Westbrook

That's Jerry Falwell burning in hell, in the same especially hot corner Bush and Blair are headed for - the corner reserved for hypocrites and liars...

"una volta corrotto, sempre controllato" - once corrupted, always controlled.

Old mafia saying, but could equally apply to Blair's relationship with America...

“A terrorist is a man with a bomb but no air force.” Bruce Kent

"Let us expose the obscenity of these people saying it is concern for Iraq that drives them to terrorism." Tony Blair

"Iraq is an almost unimaginable force multiplier for Bin Laden, al-Qaida and their allies... Iraq is a self-recruiting machinery for al-Qaida. Al-Qaida doesn't have to do anything except let Iraq speak for itself." Mike Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit

both quoted in The Guardian, 1st September 2006

"Historians will one day ask if the West did not plunge into its Middle East catastrophe so blithely because not one member of any Western government - except Colin Powell, and he has shuffled off stage - ever fought in a war. The Churchills have gone, used as a wardrobe for a prime minister who lied to his people and a president who, given the chance to fight for his country, felt his Vietnam mission was to defend the skies over Texas.
But still he talks of victory, as ignorant of the past as he is of the future."
Robert Fisk, The Independent, 11th January 2007

"The neocon logic in favour of the Iraq war was that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad: an invasion would install an Iraqi democracy that would force the Palestinians to submit to the Israelis. Now near-unanimity exists on Baker's commission to reveres that formula. The central part of a new policy must be, they believe, that the road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem."
Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian, November 16 2006

Surely not? What, from a government that thought 13,000 Polish migrants would come and then 600,000 turn up? Whatever one thinks of immigration, at the very least the government needs to know how many are here so they can plan. But not these New Labour jokers: they've lost control of this country's borders, just as they've lost control of its streets. Blair's too busy running around denying his culpability over Iraq and trying not to have his collar felt to do anything as mundane as actually focusing on the numbers of migrants coming into the country...

"...recent reports that, when he leaves Downing Street, Mr Blair will go to the Middle East as a 'roving ambassador' to try to revive the stalled peace protest are frankly bizarre. Scarcely anyone alive is less equipped fir such a role. Such little repute as Mr Blair still enjoyed in the Middle East after Iraq was finally destroyed last summer. As part of his perverse determination always to stand shoulder to shoulder with the White House, he endorsed the Israeli war in Lebanon, a war which most of his own MPs, and most British people, deplored at the time, and which most Israelis now think was a mistake.
When the prime minister visited the Levant at the end of last year, Marc Sirois of the Beirut Daily Star told the BBC World Service that the mission was pointless. Mr Blair could not possibly act as an honest broker, since: 'He is identified so strongly by Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular as somebody who supports the policies of the Bush administration and the United States... George Bush might be hated here but at least he's respected. Tony Blair doesn't even have respect'.
That is a bitter truth. Eight years ago, Mr Blair could be acclaimed by an American writer as 'the leader of the free world'. Could anyone say that today without inviting derision?"
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Financial Times, May 10th 2007

Personally, I hope Blair is deluded enough to think he can act as a peace envoy in the Middle East. I hope he goes there. And I hope he gets captured by Islamist insurgents. And I hope they cut his head off, slowly...

So said Blair in his resignation speech in Sedgefield.

If he thinks it's right to conspire with a foreign power (America) to support an illegal attack on a country weakened by 10 years of sanctions which even those charged with implementing them described as genocide; if he thinks it's right to then lie to his own Parliament, his own people about his reasons for doing so; if that's what he thinks then he really is the deluded little cunt so many people think he is.

He lied and he lied and he lied and now he's going to spend the rest of his life trying to justify what he did, safely tucked away in America and insulated by their regard for him (and of course they have a high regard of him - he's done a great job for them), spinning ever further off into delusional self-justification even as every leak and new revelation confirms his guilt and complicity.

What a complete cunt. He should be in prison, not in 10 Downing Street...

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson

And yet we now have leaders - on both sides of the Atlantic - who proclaim to believe such nonsense, and what is even worse to make policy based on their childish, superstitious beliefs. God (is there is a God) help us all...

"The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny." Oakeshott

"There are fewer policemen in the streets of authoritarian countries than in democracies because control is exercised more subtly." Istvan Deak

Which is another way of saying what Chomsky said when I saw him at Exeter University in the mid-80s: if we didn't have so much freedom we wouldn't need such subtle forms of mind control. It was real simple in Stalinist Russia - you said something the authorities disagreed with and you got dragged into the street and shot or hauled off to a gulag for twenty years. We don't do that kind of shit in the West - or at least we didn't, pre-Long War...

...definition of democracy Blair has subscribed to over the past 10 years:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” H.L. Mencken

"Natural Labour supporters have been put off voting for their party because of a toxic combination of Blair, Iraq, sleaze and what's happening to public services. All of this was avoidable... We said after the 2005 election victory that Blair should go and that if he insisted on prolonging his premiership he would damage the party and the country. The hard work of thousands of councillors and party activists around the country has been undone by a Prime Minister who outstayed his welcome. These elections signal the death knell for the politics of Blairism."
Neal Lawson, chairman of Compass, in The Independent, Saturday 5th May 2007

Labels: Blair, elections