Saturday 21 June 2014

What they think of Tony Blair now

Tony Blair’s 14 June 2014 call to arms was lambasted and ridiculed by many more than me, including several who signed up for slaughter back in 2003.

On 16 June 2014, his Deputy Prime Minister, John (Lord) Prescott, said this on Sky News:
"He says he’s disappointed with what has happened in Iraq... but he wants to invade somewhere else now… I said to him at the time, your great danger, when you want to go and do these regime changes, you’re back to what Bush called a crusade… Put on a white sheet and a red cross, and we’re back to the crusades. It’s all about religion, in these countries it’s gone on for a thousand years… I don't agree with Tony as I didn’t then.”
You disagreed, Johnny? Funny how you still voted to go slaughter Iraqis though, isn’t it?

On 15 June 2014, Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003, said this in the Mail on Sunday:
“We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule… For all his evil, he kept a lid on sectarian violence.

Bush and Blair were repeatedly warned by their advisers and diplomats to make dispositions accordingly. But, as we now know, very little was done until the last minute; and what was done... simply made things far worse."
Former Lib Dem leader, Paddy (Lord) Ashdown, who, along with the rest of his party, did not sign up for the invasion of Iraq without explicit UN approval, said this when interviewed by Murnaghan for Sky News:
“I’m having a bit of a difficulty getting my mind round the idea that a problem that has been caused or made worse by killing many, many Arab Muslims in the Middle East is going to be made better by killing more with western weapons.”
Others were much more damning and extensive in their condemnation.

On 15 June 2014, Blair’s former International Development Secretary, Clare Short, was interviewed by Dermot Murhaghan for Sky News. 

During this she said:
“He is absolutely consistently wrong, wrong, wrong and of course he has become a complete American Neocon who thinks military action, bombing, attacking will solve the problems when it is actually making more and more tension, anger, division, bitterness in the Middle East.

The truth is it’s not only Iraq that is absolutely the touchstone that’s thrown all the Middle East into chaos, the deceit about why to go, it wasn’t, he said, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it was about WMD and Saddam Hussein could stay if he didn’t have them. Now it’s all about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

But it was done in such a deceitful way with a lack of proper preparation for afterwards that we got chaos, we got the total destruction of the Ba’athist party so the whole of the Sunni community was alienated…

Malaki is very sectarian and very corrupt, the army doesn’t work, it’s not just ISIS but this is also supported by the disgruntled Sunni people and then similarly in Syria, Western policy has been more interested in getting rid of Assad than helping the people of Syria get the democracy that they rose up peacefully to get.

So arms are coming in from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to the opposition and the nasty Al Qaeda type of ideas, the distorted ideas of Islam, come out of Saudi Arabia, the big friend of the West and the big friend of Blair.

Then we’ve got Israel/Palestine and the unbearable suffering of the Palestinian people and the endless breaches of international law by Israel propped up by the US and so on and it’s just a recipe for further explosions. So just more bombing will not solve it, it will just exacerbate it…

We have been wrong in Syria but we have been wrong by wanting to get rid of Assad rather than help the people of Syria and that’s because we are focused on being hostile to Iran. The truth is, we won’t get any solutions in Iraq or Syria without being allies of Iran and Iran indeed has offered help…

Kofi Annan was the first Special Representative to Syria, he said stop arming both sides, have a transitional government which would have included Assad for a time and let the people of Syria have their own government. Instead we thought we can get rid of him, let’s let the Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia arm the opposition and we’ve ended up with the chaos and mess of Syria.”
And that, ladies and gents, is a about as frank and accurate an assessment you’re ever going to get from as a New Labour stalwart who, actually, voted to make war upon Iraq in 2003.

On 15 June 2014, the leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, was quoted thus by The Daily Express:
"In almost every country in which the West has intervened or even implied support for regime change, the situation has been made worse and not better. This is true of Libya, Syria and of course Iraq. Tony Blair's state of outright denial of the obvious consequences of his disastrous decision-making on Iraq is making increasingly uncomfortable viewing.

There was no place in Iraq for al Qaeda or its affiliates under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Yet now the country is over-run by Islamists who are also making advances in Syria and the whole region is sliding towards a full-scale Sunni versus Shia conflict.

The lesson is not, as Mr Blair implies, that the West should intervene in Syria, let alone once more in Iraq. The lesson is that the West should declare an end to the era of military intervention abroad.

Nobody should forget that the most devastating direct consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been suffered by the likes of Mr Blair, but by the civilian populations of these countries and of course by our own brave service personnel in terms of deaths and terrible injuries.

Mr Blair has long since become an embarrassment on the international stage and his remaining political friends would be well advised to urge an extended period of silence on his behalf."
On 15 June 2014, Leo McKinstry, a former aide to Harriet Harman, said this in his Sunday Express article, ‘Tony Blair is the real weapon of mass destruction:’
“Our fractured society and destabilised world show that we are still paying a terrible price for his period in office. We have had incompetent, misguided and ineffectual prime ministers in the past but never in our recent history has there been one so contemptuous of our national interest or so disdainful of our heritage…

In the name of supposed multicultural tolerance he imported savage intolerance; a strategy driven partly by a desire for crude political advantage, given that more than 80 per cent of immigrants vote Labour, and partly by his ideological hostility to the make-up of his country. Loathing traditional Britain he wanted to change it irreversibly. In that goal he succeeded only too well, with many Britons now feeling like aliens in their own land.

Indeed, in such places as London, Leicester and Slough, white British people are significantly in a minority Tragically, Blair brought the same mix of messianic zeal and eagerness for change to his blood-soaked foreign policy. During his first six years in Downing Street he became involved in several wars: in Sierra Leone, in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
This last action, in league with George W Bush, was by far the most ill-judged. Launched on the dubious pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, it was meant to bring about a change in regime that would act as a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.

Instead, it not only sparked one of the most terrible bloodbaths the world has known but also emboldened Islamism throughout the region. The consequences have been obvious. Egypt, Syria and Libya are gripped by permanent strife, Israel is under greater threat and Iraq is falling apart.

The ultimate symbols of Blair's failure are the heads of Iraqi soldiers and policemen, hacked off by the Islamic militants, that now line the streets of Mosul…

He left a trail of wreckage but he never has to face up to this. Thanks to the enormous wealth he has accumulated since his resignation in 2007 and his privileged lifestyle as a perma-tanned, globetrotting elder statesman, he is insulated from the problems he created.”
On 15 June 2014, General Sir Michael Rose, former UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia, said this in The Mail on Sunday:
"Anyone who doubts Tony Blair's self-delusion over Iraq should look at the 2,800-word essay he has posted on his website… He remains in complete denial over the disaster he inflicted not only on the people of Iraq, but also on many millions throughout the Middle East as a result of the 2003 invasion.

It goes without saying that if you start a war, you should be sure that the end result will be demonstrably better than the situation prior to the conflict. Only someone who has lost touch with reality could possibly claim Iraq today is more stable or that life has become better for its inhabitants.

Blair accepts not a shred of responsibility and still refuses to apologise for taking us to war…

The invasion of Iraq and its terrible aftermath was the cause of the Arab Spring. This is because the young people involved in the uprisings throughout the Middle East felt empowered by the removal of Saddam, who had ruled with an iron fist for 24 years.

Many were appalled by what they regarded in Iraq as Western interference in Arab affairs, which encouraged them to overthrow their pro-Western dictators. It was no surprise subsequently that what started out as a series of anti-West pro-democracy revolutions would soon be hijacked by Islamic extremists.

To blame Prime Minister Maliki takes some beating for sheer gall. Maliki may be corrupt, partisan, authoritarian and a puppet of Iran's Shia Muslim regime. But Blair brazenly seems to dismiss the fact that he would never have been in power had the 2003 invasion not taken place.

General Colin Powell, US Secretary of State for Defence at the time of the invasion, famously remarked: 'You break it, you own it'. Blair broke Iraq but simply won't accept any responsibility for doing so…

So far, our adventures in the Middle East have served only to increase hatred of the West and recruit still more insurgents to fight alongside our enemy. But Blair, all too clearly, cannot face this brutal truth. He once said that war is an imperfect instrument for righting human distress. He should pay more heed to his own words.”
On 16 June 2014, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said this on BBC TV:
"You've got to be honest and you've got to be realistic about where it has gone wrong… It patently went wrong in 2003, because we opened the way to a lot of sectarian bloodshed and to al Qaeda entering the country in a way that simply wasn't the case before the invasion of Iraq.”
Earlier that day, he said this in The Telegraph:
"I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad. He wrote an essay on his website on Sunday that struck me as unhinged in its refusal to face facts. In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help….

The truth is that we destroyed the institutions of authority in Iraq without having the foggiest idea what would come next. As one senior British general has put it to me, ‘we snipped the spinal cord’ without any plan to replace it. There are more than 100,000 dead Iraqis who would be alive today if we had not gone in and created the conditions for such a conflict, to say nothing of the troops from America, Britain and other countries who have lost their lives in the shambles….

Blair's argument (if that is the word for his chain of bonkers assertions) is that we were right in 2003, and that we would be right to intervene again. Many rightly recoil from that logic. It is surely obvious that the 2003 invasion was a misbegotten folly…

The Iraq war was a tragic mistake; and by refusing to accept this, Blair is now undermining the very cause he advocates, the possibility of serious and effective intervention. We cannot make this case for an active Britain that is engaged with the world unless we are at least honest about our failures.

Somebody needs to get on to Tony Blair and tell him to put a sock in it, or at least to accept the reality of the disaster he helped to engender."
Boris Johnson, an MP at the time, also voted for war in 2003.

Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, was quoted thus by the 16 June 2014 edition of The Daily Record:
“Tony Blair has now claimed that the invasion of Iraq was about whether or not Saddam Hussein remained in power. Eleven years ago he said it was about weapons of mass destruction. No reinterpretation of history will absolve the former prime minister of a direct line of responsibility for this sequence of disasters.

He is guilty of breathtaking amnesia on his reasons for invading Iraq and clearly hopes everybody will conveniently forget his 2003 decision, the consequences of which have played out over 11 years, with hundreds of thousands dead.

We have reached a position where Western powers’ ability to intervene in any conflict, even in a just manner, has been totally undermined by the legacy of the Iraq disaster, with a damaging loss of moral credibility.”
On 18 June 2014, Sir Peter Tapsell, Father of the House of Commons, posed this question to David Cameron during Prime Minister’s Questions:
“Is he aware of the growing sentiment that, as the publication of the Chilcot report is being so long delayed, the ancient, but still existing, power of backbenchers to commence the procedures of impeachment should now be activated to bring Mr Tony Blair to account for allegedly misleading the House on the necessity of the invasion of Iraq in 2003?”
On 20 June 2014, Frederick Forsyth, author of 'Day of the Jackal,' said this in The Express:
“Despite the weirdness of Tony Blair it is far too easy for commentators to be wise after the event… But blame still attaches in shedloads to God's representative (self--promoted) on Earth on three counts. In order not to upset his appalling chancellor Gordon Brown he sent our lads into Iraq with far too few numbers and cheap, obsolescent equipment.

Half of our 179 losses came from useless Snatch Land Rovers being sent against powerful landmines, and faulty radios (the six MPs who could not call for help as they were slaughtered). And he lied to the Commons, for which a vigorous opposition ought to have impeached him.

Finally, even 11 years later, an honest man would admit he made a mistake. Unfortunately Anthony Charles Linton Blair is not that, never has been and never will be. Nothing he left behind has been to the improvement of our country.”
On 30 May 2003, Tony Blair said this in the House of Commons:
"We have won a magnificent victory in Iraq."
Not saying that now, is he?

On the same day he also said this:
"We regard the United States as our allies and partners. We are proud of what we have achieved together against tyranny and in defence of freedom, most recently in Iraq… The United States is not wrong but right to be tough in dealing with them. We must support the United States."
Yeah, we noticed that, Tony. ‘My country right or wrong,’ eh? Only the USA was never your country. You were supposed to be looking after ours.

In June 2003, George Bush said this:
"God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
In the same vein, on 4 March 2006, Michael Parkinson asked Tony Blair if he regretted sending troops into Iraq.

He replied:
"In the end there is a judgment that, well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people."
Asked to explain what he meant, he said:
"If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."
So now we know. 

As far as Our Dear former Leader and his best pal, George, were concerned the decision to invade Iraq was not theirs. The decision was made by God and, in Tony's case, 'others' as well.

Is this OK by you? Are you happy that Tony B was prepared to bow to will of 'other people' and the Almighty in the matter of mass slaughter?

Who were these others, do you think? They certainly were NOT the British people. Blair couldn't have cared less about what we thought or wanted. Well, we all know that Tony B is the ultimate groupie. If he sees someone perched a few rungs higher up the greasy pole than he is, the fawn, simper and wag-the-tail mechanism clicks in and it's up we jolly well slither.

So, George Bush, then? Tony Blair wanted to impress the most powerful man on the planet. Well, yes and no. George Bush was, nominally, that most powerful man. But he was also an idiot. He never had a single thought in the vacant space surrounded by his skull that wasn't put there by a puppet-master. George was the smirking chimpanzee that the smirking chimps of the US Bible belt, boardroom and bar could empathise with.

Until their sons and daughters came home in body bags.

Look behind Bush, look to who pulled his strings if you want to find out who the 'other people' were. Who told him what to say and what to do? Who encouraged him to think the way he did?

Clare Short spelt it out in the interview above.
"He has become a complete American Neocon," she says.
The Neoconservative politicians and journalists of America's eastern seaboard delberately fashioned the environment in which the most intellectually challenged US President in history could flourish for a sound byte or two. All that oil. All that kudos. All those pats on the head from those who knew so much better than he did. These were the 'other people,' folks.

The journalist, Ari Shavit, gave us a bit of clue as to the familial allegiances of these 'others' in a 3 April 2003 edition of the Israeli daily, Haaretz, when he wrote:
"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, MOST OF THEM JEWISH, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history."
On 19 April 2013, Carl Bernstein, who, with Bob Woodward, brought about the downfall of Richard Nixon via their investigation of Watergate, said this on MSNBC’s 'Morning Joe' show:
“This was an insane war that brought us low economically, morally. We went to war against a guy who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. It was a total pretext! It’s inexplicable and there you go to Cheney, there you go to Bush, there you go to THE JEWISH NEOCONS WHO WANTED TO REMAKE THE WORLD.”


Both Shavit and Bernstein are Jewish themselves.

As for Tony B's 'God,' well, it sure wasn't the God of The New Testament that he was cuddling up to, that's for sure. No peace, love and turning the other cheek for our own dear warmonger.

Nope, the bloke who didn't 'do God' when Alistair Campbell was around was and still is a fan of the very Jewish God of the Old Testament. You know, the one who advocates lots and lots of fire and brimstone, down-on-your-knees trembling and begging for his love, mercy and benificence; together with a big bunch of dispossession, butchery and genocide. Down to the last woman, child and pet hamster. Check out the book of Joshua if you don't believe me.

I’d put good money on the fact that the very Jewish God who instructed old Josh to slaughter everything indigenous in the land that he had promised to the Hebrew, isn't too far removed from the white-bearded thunderer that Tony B genuflects in front of.

I might be wrong. Maybe Our Dear former Leader was just doing his buck-passing bit for the umpteenth time. You know, 'Don't blame me! It was God what done it. I was only following orders!'

Whatever the truth happens to be, the chap in charge back in March 2003 was a toerag.

As for the latter day morality-light character of the multi-millionaire still passing the blood-soaked buck 11 years after his ‘magnificent victory in Iraq,’ you don't have to take my word for it, the insiders cited above will all tell you it hasn’t changed one bit.

4 comments:

  1. The Shia and the Sunnis lived side by side for 1400 years without a problem
    The bombings now are done by Brit special forces the USA and
    Mossad, and each time they blame other muslim sects.
    while they do this they laugh at the death and the suffering, dont be fooled this is our people doing the bombing, i have servicemen freinds still out there at it

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  2. Nothing the powers-that-be in the West do, or are reputed to do, surprises me. They murdered our world in wartime, and in peacetime also.

    Moral slime leads the western world. They are capable of any evil.

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  3. OK so *why* is the "West" spending its blood and treasure in doing this including going into Iraq?
    Possibly several reasons, but likely all with one tap-root.
    For Iraq certainly, it was maintaining the petrodollar, after Saddam started preparations for selling oil for Euros and non-US currencies.
    Similar with Iran, their Oil Bourse and settlement in Euros.
    Kissinger brokered a deal with Saudi regime after US$ came off a partial gold standard whereby the (Wahaddi) Saudi Royals were guaranteed regime protection by USA Inc. in exchange for selling their oil only for US$.
    Result, US$ is backed by oil and US Government can export monetary inflation throughout the world or at least to everywhere that needs US$ to buy oil and (typically all other) commodities. This is good not only for the political elite in USA but also facilitates ongoing milking of USA, funds being sent to Israel and some returned to fund electoral campaigns.
    Wars also destabilise Israel's neighbours and facilitate its expansion from Nile to Euphrates.
    Tony Blair's family background is most interesting. Of course.

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    Replies
    1. "Tony Blair's family background is most interesting. Of course."
      I believe people like Blair and Bush were deliberately promoted into power.
      Bush because of his stupidity, hence ease of being manipulated and Blair because of his youthful indiscretions, which made him vulnerable to political blackmail. (Why was he nicknamed Miranda?)

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