I watched Christiane "Still A Babe!" Amanpour interview Tony Bliar on
This Week yesterday. Once a poodle, always a poodle, this time yipping mightily with a book to sell. Look in 'fiction' next to Bush's book.
MoDoHe says he does not regret serving as the voice for W.’s gut when the inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for “the nightmare that unfolded” — giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib promises — Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.
So do the families of the hundreds of thousands whom you enabled to become dead and injured, arsehole.
There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.
He concedes that the invasion of Iraq was more about symbols than immediate security, about sending “a message of total clarity to the world,” after 9/11, that defying the will of the international community would no longer be tolerated.
Unless, like us, you're big enough to get away with it. How's
that workin' out?
Blair did not want to be W.’s peripheral poodle. He wanted to “stand tall internationally” with Britain’s main ally and not “wet our knickers,” to use a Blair phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).
You don't always get what you want. Blair and Bush were
both Cheney's little fixed poodles. Either one of them could have stopped it before it happened.
It is criminally naïve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W. muffed the postwar planning because they never perceived what Blair now acknowledges as “the true threat”: outside interference by Al Qaeda and Iran. So the reasoning of the man known in England as Phony Tony or Bliar amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq because Saddam could hypothetically hook up with Al Qaeda. But they didn’t properly prepare for the insurgency because they knew that Saddam had no link to Al Qaeda.
He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience for “namby-pamby peacenikery.”
“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran,” as well as “Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair writes of Cheney, adding: “He was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”
The religious Blair fancied himself a conviction politician who had intervened for good in Kosovo and Sierra Leone and would do so again in Iraq. So he did not, as he said others did, “reach for the garlic and crucifixes” when Dick hatched his sulfurous schemes.
Fuck the garlic and crucifixes. Someone shoulda reached for a big pointy wooden stake and driven it through where The Dick's heart would be in a human being and at least pinned him to the ground so he couldn't move.
If he had challenged W. and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might have stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a weaker Iraq that is no longer a counterweight to Iran — which actually is a nuclear threat — and that seems doomed to be run one day by another brutal strongman.
Yep, did the wrong thing, then did the thing wrong, and all for naught. Countless lives and money and Iran wins and we lose when we didn't have to even go and shouldn't have gone in the first place. And the best part? We will be paying for the failed* neocon wet dream for generations.
You fucked up right along with Bush and Congress, Blair, and all the spin and smoke and mirrors in the world won't change that.
*Actually, the neocons may have succeeded all too well. They always really wanted to make war on Iran. When Iran claims Iraq as its spoils, that might make it easier for them to beat the war drum to retaliate against Iran for undoing all 'our brave troops' and contractors did in Iraq.
Our only defense is to not let the Repugs hijack the country again.
You want to go to war with Iran? Don't vote.
Update:From MoDo to
MoJo. Heh.
In his new book, the former British prime minister asks for a fair hearing on the Iraq war. But he ignores a key meeting where George Bush suggested they con their way to an invasion.
Gotta leave out the inconvenient parts of history that would make him look like the poodle and war criminal he is. It's his own memoir after all.
