Tony Blair Psychosis

His name is synonymous with death, destruction, lies and deceit.  Once it represented the future and the hope that comes with it.  Then that all changed.  In the House of Commons the Leader of the Opposition David Cameron looked at him in the face and mockingly jested “You use to be the future once.”  Who was he speaking to?  None other than former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.  I was only 11 when Blair lead New Labour to power in 1997.  My Mum was a traditional Labour supporter, fed up of years of Conservative rule.  I didn’t know much about politics then, but what made Mum happy made me happy.  So I became a de facto supporter too.  For several years the domestic scene looked pretty quiet apart from the odd fuel strike or Foot and Mouth outbreak here and there.  Internationally the UK intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, but no one made much noise about it.  Apart from the unique side shows of a horrific genocide and a rebel uprising in yet another African country, things internationally looked pretty stable and predictable.

9/11 changed that.  Such a horrific attack and our closeness to the US seemed to justify the war in Afghanistan to most people.  But after those events something seemed to change in how we perceived out Prime Minister.  He seemed much more serious somehow and more decisive.  Standing shoulder to shoulder with US President George W Bush he seemed to swallow Bush’s enemies list, the Axis of Evil, lock stock and barrel.  While he mercifully didn’t use Bush’s gung ho language, he didn’t make any effort to counter Bush’s suggestion that another confrontation was very close.  His silence was taken as automatic acceptance.  The British public who at first distrusted him, now feared him.  That fear soon turned to anger when he pointed towards the next venture: the 2003 Iraq War.
The 2003 Iraq War will be remembered in the UK for all the wrong reasons.  I often imagine telling a future child of mine about it and I struggle to think how I would do it.  It was a strange and fearful time.  It was one of sorrow for my family when my late grandma passed away.  The last time I saw her we were watching planes lift off from a US aircraft carrier.  She said she was afraid for the children in Iraq who would soon be threatened by the bombs on those planes screeching into the darkness.  At Christmas that year the family had a debate about the run up to war, fuelled by alcohol.  A the time I was strongly for the war.  I remember Mum telling me about Dad’s Iraqi friends from university, called up for military service on the eve of the Gulf War.  I imagined the arrogant dictator Saddam Hussein hiding in one of his palaces far away from the front lines while such good people were sent off to fight and die for him.  I didn’t very much care for what happened to the man in the palace.
The most bitter thing people remember now and will remember I think is the one infamous abbreviation “WMD”: Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Blair, Bush and their pressmen mentioned WMD daily and seemingly sometimes hourly in the run up to the war.  And then came the 45 minutes claim and the so called “Dodgy Dossier”, the latter of which seemed to be less of an intelligence brief and more of a cut and paste job.  With much doubt cast on this reason to go to war the government proliferated many others.  One of these was the claim that Saddam was hosting Al Qaeda in Iraq, which turned out to be bogus.  The multitude of reasons and the almost hysterical pushing of them on the British public made them confused, bewildered and then finally angry.  Huge anti war demonstrations took place in the UK and many other countries but to no avail.  We went to war.
Despite Bush presenting a “Mission Accomplished” banner the mission never seemed to be accomplished no matter how hard everyone tried.  Resentment towards the coalition’s occupation and it’s mismanagement of reconstruction fed a brewing insurgency.  For many years it seemed as though the country of Iraq would burn to the ground despite our effort.  Then it seemed to calm down and then we left.  That is it in a nutshell.

 But when the UK public thought they had got to the peak of their distrust for their former leader in war time, Blair turned around and seemed to pretend that everything had gone according to plan.  Quotes similar to ‘I would do the same again’ appeared, making some people question his memory if not his sanity.  This is what made people very bitter, but he didn’t seemed to notice and he doesn’t still.  But in not acknowledging any humility Blair, the liberal interventionist may already have done liberal intervention’s grave.

Before Iraq when we saw mass graves filled with men women and children we often asked “how do we stop this?”.  Such sights filled us with feelings of horror and justified anger at the perpetrators.  Now when we see this the question tragically seems to be “how do we avoid doing anything about this?”  The latter thinking has brought out the worst out of people.  Many people openly venerate overthrown dictators, making the Gadaffi’s and Saddam’s of this world look like President Eisenhower’s, albeit with 24/7 torture centres.  Others openly speak of people not being ready for moving towards democracy.  Most tragically many people look at genocides and say “so sad” and then change the channel and think about something else.

 Consider the following scenario.  After nearly decades of his father ruling the country the son steps in and is hastily sworn in as President.  He goes through the motions of confirming himself in power.  The military swears their loyalty to him and the schools pass on his personality cult.  But try as he might he doesn’t fill the big shoes of his father.  Slowly but surely events start to run away with him.  Grumbles in the population get louder and then turn into protests.  The protests then turn in to mini risings and then serious and coordinated uprisings.  The son hides in the Presidential Palace thinking he is safe.  Then the military starts to grumble too and he decides to throw in the towel.  This is a rough outline of the events that lead to the dictator of Haiti Jean-Claude Duvalier aka Baby Doc (son of Papa Doc) fleeing from power in Haiti.  If one of Saddam’s sons Uday or  Qusay Hussein had to take over from their father it is likely that similar events would have played out.  But such hypothetical scenarios are scorned in the post-Blair era.  The hangover of Iraq has made all of it’s critics act like foreign policy experts, and they have no time for people answering back.

 This is my coming out as an ardent liberal interventionist.  Why?  Because I believe that all life is sacred.  Because I believe in helping your neighbours when they are in dire need, despite my lack of spiritual leaning.  Because we cant rightfully shout about the virtues of freedom and democracy and decide who deserves it.  But mostly because I know that past experience, including the Iraq War, can never dictate the future.  This country needs to exorcise the demon of the Iraq War from it’s soul or it will turn us into uncaring, cynical and ultimately hypocritical people.  There is evil in the world and if we profess to be a beacon of freedom we should be prepared to stand up to it.  Yes we won’t always be able to help in the form of active intervention.  But those that lecture about the power of diplomacy and talk must recognise it’s limits.  Sending angry letters to certain evil doers won’t make them desist because of their fear of paper cuts.

But as it is Tony Blair’s aloof and arrogant attitude has pushed this country away from intervention.  He has filled our hearts full of bitterness and cynicism instead of determination and hope.  For that I can never forgive him.

 "The wicked flee when no one is pursuing"

Proverbs 28:1

 

My Great Escape from the Far Left

About 6 years ago I was at the Freshers’ Fair at the University of the West of England helping out at a club.  I was wondering around when a smiley man walked up to me, said something about a meeting very quickly when I was only half listening and left.  I look down in my right hand and found that the smiley man had very expertly slipped off a flyer for the said meeting in my hand.  It was a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) meeting on the subject of solving the impending credit crunch.  Right then I could vaguely describe myself as a socialist and I was extremely bored that day, so I decided to attend the meeting.  The meeting was at the end of the day anyway and I had time to kill before the bus arrived.

 I walked into the small meeting room in the Students Union somewhat reluctantly and smiled and said “hello” politely to the others attending.  There were about 3 other attendees, I assumed the organisers had been expecting a few more.  Yet despite the turnout the same man who handed me the leaflet bounced into the room with the same smile.  He looked around the room and nodded in greeting and then started the meeting.  The table was a rectangular conference table running length ways left to right.  I sat on the side closest to the door next to the head, he sat opposite me.  I did wonder after I left the meeting whether he regretted that decision later.

 For the first 10 minutes a so myself and the participants listened as we would listen to a lecture.  Now and then keeping eye contact with the speaker and looking out of the window at other times.  The speech sounded predictably enough.  “Capitalism is in a worldwide crisis”, “this system of greed can’t last any longer” blah blah blah!  I found myself starting to get more and more impatient.  Paradoxes and inconvenient truths in far leftist ideology started to swirl around in my head.  If they hated this system so much why did the speaker in front of me rely on the fruits of that system?  If the contradictions of capitalism so obvious why hasn’t the SWP come up with a persuasive alternative?  If the SWP believe in a system based on sharing, couldn’t they have started within their own party?  But by bit I felt myself getting more and more irritable.  And then I had a road to Damascus moment.  A moment of complete realisation of the truth, that I didn’t believe anything that was being said.  I took advantage of the informal nature of the talk and started to challenge the speaker.  I started subtly at first and then sunk in the knife as I became more and more unsatisfied with the answers to my challenges.  It came to a head when the speaker praised the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.  His face fell when I asked the question “Can you really call someone a ‘man of peace’ if they tried to take over the government by force? (or words to that effect), and I knew I had crossed a personal Rubicon.  

As I stood up at the end of the meeting I felt strangely relieved.  I shook the speaker’s hand, much in the way boxers do after knocking each other’s brains in.  He spoke first thanking me for coming and for my “contributions”.  I murmured a thank you.  Then while still shaking my hand he invited me for a drink downstairs at the bar with his Army of the Proletariat.  I was just about to seize the opportunity for a free drink before I scurried to my bus when I heard the man say something I will never forget.  “At the end of the day you need to pick a side.”  I am not sure if it was just what he said but the way he said it. With the enthusiasm and glazed look of a fanatic who has not considered for one microsecond that they may be wrong.  That put the nail in the coffin for that encounter and the previous 7 years as a “wacko commie” as a good friend colourfully described me.

No matter where I looked I started to feel cheated and annoyed by the causes and campaigns and the cynical and arrogant people who pushed them.  I went to an anti-nuclear weapons rally in London, only to find that the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had cheerfully folded it in with a march larger Anti War demonstration.  I was furious.  I was undecided on Iraq or Afghanistan, yet here I was counted among the Anti War numbers when I was here for something else. Much later I got leaflets from the CND cheerfully informing me that they are also against nuclear power, which I agreed with, and fully expected us to support this campaign seemingly without question. I spoke out against Kate Hudson when she appeared at a Liberal Democrat Conference’s fringe event, ignoring the wrath of one of her heavies.  It was daunting at first to confront my far leftist demons, but it eventually felt liberating to prevail over them.

My views like many other peoples’ were and still are influenced by events.  My political awakening took place during the most extreme event of our times, the 9/11 attacks in the US.  This event and the political and emotional fallout from it convinced me that I had to learn more.  And so I did, hovering up knowledge about current affairs domestic and foreign.  My family, most notably my maternal side were Labour leaning so I guess it is no surprise that I started from the left side of the fence.  In many ways the War on Terror early years were the perfect environment for a generation of socialists and other assorted lefties.  The left in the UK were just starting to come to the realisation that centre leftist Tony Blair could be just as slippery and untrustworthy as his centre right counterparts.  The US had an almost cartoonish US President, none other than George W Bush.  A tense international situation was made worse by lightning invasions of entire countries.  After Afghanistan and Iraq there were serious concerns about other dominoes falling on the Axis of Evil map, with god knows what following after.  Michael Moore was chirping along with his books and films.  Outbursts of racism towards Muslims excited the conscience of many leftists.  My long held affection for the US was shaken and nearly shredded by ongoing railing by the far left against my former adoptive country.  Constant propaganda followed by an extremely biased documentary about Israel made me start to look at the US with real suspicion.

 So what changed this far leftist trend?  In a nutshell I grew up.  That isn’t to say that in my view all people are destined to go rightwards until they hit Sarah Palin-ville.  I know several far leftist people that are older than me and seem to be travelling the other way.  For better or worse I changed as a person and this was my personal journey.  I no longer trusted the almost zealot like disregarding of other people’s views that characterised the circles I followed.  I have a natural curiosity for alternative views and have a knack of making friends whose views differ from my own.  I no longer saw conservatives as somehow intrinsically evil, even if I still didn’t agree with them and wanted to find out more about them.  Besides Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ speaks about knowing the opposition as much as you know yourself.  And finally I had enough of the bare faced lies of the extremist left.  In Cuba I listened to a tour guide talking to myself and my family.  He made it sound as though the entire CIA had invaded the country, when I knew many Cubans themselves had fought against a suffocating regime.  Later on he confided with us that he was desperate to leave.  I argued endlessly with Communists online whitewashing the human rights abuses of the Soviet Union.

 

Ultimately I felt staying in the far left would turn me into someone I didn’t want to be: someone who was constantly angry, convinced they had nothing to learn and ultimately very lonely.  I think I am a passionate person when it comes to injustice and certain causes, which may have contributed to my near embrace of Communism.  But in the end I came to the conclusion that truth has to come with passion.  If you turn your back on the truth you are completely lost.

The New Appeasers

Steven Seagal and Tony Blair walk into bar.  If that unusual event happened they would probably have more to talk about than you would first think.  Recently Seagal has started to sound more and more political especially about recent troubles over in Ukraine allegedly involving Russia.  In an interview with the Big Issue magazine he stated that in his view the west and Russia should not be at odds with each other since we after all have a common enemy; Islamist extremists.  To illustrate this world view he expressed his desire to make a film showing US  and Russians joining forces to destroy militant Islam in a giant Seagal style kill fest.  While stating this view he waved off people portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as a bully and a thug, contrasting it with him as a hard man and a strong leader.

Tony Blair in his implausible role as UN Middle East Peace Envoy suddenly came up with a similar brainwave.  Recently he came back into the media spotlight to come up with a way of solving the Syrian Civil War.  Acknowledging that Russia was the main backer of the Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad, Blair suggested the west should settle our differences with Russia with regards to the conflict quickly.  After this settlement which would presumably have to leave Bashar Al Assad in power, the west could start to cooperate in a broader counter-terrorist alliance with the Russians. 

The policy of making the enemy of our enemy our friends has regularly been used in world politics.  Indeed the emergence of militant Islam itself was helped by generous western (and other countries) aid to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, with the purpose of dealing the Soviet Union a bloody nose.  This laid the foundations for Al Qaeda which as well all know lead to the West’s chickens coming back to roost so to speak.  Almost exactly 200 years before that Britain in its war with Napoleonic France made common cause with the deposed Bourbon royal family.  Upon the French royalty’s return to power in 1815 they exacted their so called “White Terror” to exact their revenge on the beneficiaries of the revolution.  But ironically the people who should know well the dangers of making common cause with the enemy  are the Russians.  Under the direction of Stalin the Soviet Union conspired with Hitler’s Nazi Germany to share resources and redraw the map
of Eastern Europe to their mutual liking.  This lead Stalin to believe that Hitler could be dealt with and that he was on some level reasonable, thus creating an almost fatally false sense of security.  Even more ironically the resources the Soviet Union sent over to Nazi Germany fuelled the latter’s war effort, hastening the inevitable clash between them.

The lesson to draw from here is not that we shouldn’t cooperate with countries who have common causes with ourselves, of course we should.  But when it comes to players who play for as high stakes as Putin we can’t let our guard down.  Furthermore the kind of deal Blair would propose and Seagal would back would involve a complete turnaround.  We would be supporting the Syrian rebels one minute and then telling them the game is up just after.  One has to wonder what encouragement that would lend to potential rebels living under other odious regimes, such as Zimbabwe and North Korea for one.  Indeed the latter’s propaganda carries the same message, ‘you can’t trust the west’.  If we abandon commitments we have made so readily, why should they?

To avoid confusion the UK should state clearly the rules of the game which should be the following.  The UK should separate counter terrorist matters from all other dealings with Russia.  Russia should be told in no uncertain terms that it will not get special treatment to elicit it’s cooperation in combating terrorism.  If the UK suggests to Russia (or gives signals) that this kind of cooperation could be an incentive for the UK to change its policy with regards to other areas, we may find ourselves continuously giving with little in return.  Putin would then rely on the counter terrorist card as a kind of carrot to dangle over us every time we have a problem with his conduct.  Furthermore we are already a part of a vast network of countries that oppose militant Islam, so why bend over for Russia?  Secondly we can say with some confidence that Russia will want mutual cooperation with regards to combating terrorism, regardless of what else is
happening with West-Russian relations, short of open war of course.  Russia needs Western intelligence’s help more than we need theirs, so we should act like it.

The Blair and Seagal initiative bears much resemblance to the bright idea Churchill once had of uniting with Fascist Italy to combat Communism.  History proved this idea to be unworkable as it will with this proposed alliance.  If cooperation is to come about, it can’t be with an attitude to completely ignore what our partner is doing .  Putin is a bully.  He is responsible for bomber flights probing our airspace, killing dissidents on our soil, Russian oligarchs in Britain mysteriously being blown up and two ongoing civil wars.  When bullies are given an inch they will take a mile.  The diplomatic channels should always be open, but not so appeasement will be the only option.  Our attitude to be Putin should reflect Jose Broz Tito’s the former leader of Yugoslavia.  After refusing to take orders from Stalin a Soviet assassin was sent to kill him.  The assassin was captured by Yugoslavian security and taken to Tito to deliver a message to Stalin.
Tito told he would-be assassin to tell Stalin that if this happens again Tito would send an assassin in return, and he would not have to send a second one.