петък, ноември 10
Should Blair Hang?
A rather flustered looking Mr Blair struggled recently to answer a question about whether Saddam Hussein should go to the gallows. It made the lobster wonder whether the Prime Minister's thoughts were a little closer to home when he tried to answer the question.Back in 1998 an international legal precedent was set in Britain when Augusto Pinochet was arrested. Pinochet claimed immunity from prosecution as a former head of state. After a 16 month battle, the international arrest warrant was ruled to be legal, and the extradition to send the former dictator to Spain for trial proceeded (he was to eventually evade justice on medical grounds). Could this legal precedent come back to haunt the Labour leader?
More recently, Democratic politicians in the US had been calling for George Bush's impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanours" over the war in Iraq. But in the run up to the 2006 mid-term elections, incoming House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi said:
"I have said, and I say again, that impeachment is off the table"And then the Democrats won. In the post-election aftermath Donald Rumsfeld was resigned. Doesn't it look just a little bit like the Democrats, now in the majority in both houses of the US government, might have done a doing deal with Mr Bush?
So if Mr Bush is not guilty of initiating a war of aggression in Iraq, who is? The Democrats in Washington are working hard to build a consensus with the Republican President; who are they now going to blame for the disaster that is Iraq? For a long time now we have had the image of Tony Blair being Bush's poodle. How long before someone over the other side of the pond suggests that the decisions leading to the Iraq war was really a case of the tail wagging the dog?
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I think the notion that Blair led the neocons into war is risible. The US simply used Blair as a front to give the impression the 'international community' were supporting the war. The holier-than-thou don't have a lot of high ground either. The Clinton administration oversaw the almost daily bombing of Iraq and helped soften the country up for invasion with 'UN' sanctions which were estimated to have cost the lives of half a million Iraqi children... supported by British foreign secretaries including the now canonised St. Robin Cook... rather conveniently overlooked these days.
Hi Bob. Not so much risible as plausible when you consider that Blair said in 1998:
"If he [Saddam] will not, through reason and diplomacy, abandon his weapons of mass destruction program, it must be degraded and diminished by military force."
Blair was calling for military force in Iraq over WMDs a full year before Bush was even president. Bush wasn't converted to intervention until post 9/11 (in 2001) and who was the "international statesman" who popped in to see him so quickly afterwards?
Blair's position hasn't changed since 1998. It took a change of US president and the horrors of 9/11 before US foreign policy changed.
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"If he [Saddam] will not, through reason and diplomacy, abandon his weapons of mass destruction program, it must be degraded and diminished by military force."
Blair was calling for military force in Iraq over WMDs a full year before Bush was even president. Bush wasn't converted to intervention until post 9/11 (in 2001) and who was the "international statesman" who popped in to see him so quickly afterwards?
Blair's position hasn't changed since 1998. It took a change of US president and the horrors of 9/11 before US foreign policy changed.
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