printTony Blair has belatedly apologized for helping launch, with buddy Bush, an aggressive, baseless war on Iraq that saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents killed, uprooted and displaced from their ancient homeland. More so than ISIS had those two war criminals guaranteed the decimation of the ancient christian communities in the region. (Don’t worry; a decade from now, y’all will have reached that realization and will apologize to us libertarians). “Blair’s apology,” notes a surprisingly mellow Justin Raimondo, “sounds more like an apologia.”
Idi Amin was considered a war criminal for lesser offenses (plus/minus 300,000 killed). Ditto Bashar Assad. “Iraq war liars,” like former British Prime Minister Blair, “knew then what we know now,” so the man’s flippant, expedient apologies are not to be accepted. People (like this writer and others, many of them in the intelligence community) who sounded the alarm were mocked, derided and worse: fired, libeled, maligned.
Prime Minister Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, July 17, 2003. Etched all over Blair’s address to Congress was the devotion to the “mystic [and, might I add, malevolent] idea of national destiny.” One particularly chilling dictate was this: “I know out there there’s a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, ‘Why me? And why us? And why America?’ And the only answer is, ‘Because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.'”
The tyranny implied in Blair’s maudlin grandiosity should be obvious.
First, the little guy back home ought to be the one calling the shots, not Messrs. Messiah and Company. Second, before Blair joins Bush in rousing the “visionless” middle-class American from his uninspired slumber—The Great Redeemer thinks it’s below contempt to harbor a civilized desire to mind one’s own business and live in peace—he ought to take a look at the little guy back in England. (August 6, 2003)
Had Tony Blair even heard about his British philosophical forerunner, Gertrude Bell?
“Her writings [in the 1920s or thereabouts] about her experiences in the Middle East—particularly in Iraq—continue to be studied and referenced by policy experts in the 21st century.”
She portrays Iraqis who loathe foreign occupation yet worry about the alternative. She knows that the occupation is unsustainable and ineffective but she cannot contemplate total withdrawal. She recognizes that British colonial control is unworkable and that there must be an Arab government, but she finds the sacrifices and uncertainties hard to stomach. The situation, she concludes, is “strange and bewildering.”
In fact, the West knew in the 1920s what it knows now about Iraq and its propensity for democracy.
UPDATE: U2 Zakaria Plagiarizer. Do they ever get fired? Fareed Zakaria Serial Plagiarizer supported the war in Iraq, like most of America’s punditocracy, has never said a word worth heeding, and now he’s back to speak to the horrors of that invasion. When will the booboisie defect from Fox, CNN, MSNBC (which was not so bad on Iraq but lost the edge with Barack and Hillary’s wars)?
CNN boasts that Zakaria Serial Plagiarizer “asks tough questions of many of the key architects of America’s military intervention in Iraq over the last dozen years. Yes, 13 years after we libertarians were tearing our hair out over the war. Perhaps this useless bore (and his Republican counterparts) will get a Pulitzer.