Last Straw

Great piece by George Mon­biot on the cam­paign to arrest Tony Blair:

Already the cam­paign has borne fruit. Out­side the Chil­cot inquiry a woman called Grace McCann, inspired by the web­site, tried to appre­hend Mr Blair, before she was restrained and removed by the police. She qual­i­fies for the first bounty: one quarter of the total pot at the time of her attempt. She has pledged to give the money to rel­ev­ant char­it­ies. The fund will remain open until Blair is offi­cially pro­sec­uted, and we will keep pay­ing out to those who fol­low Grace’s example.

You can donate here.

Finally. Let’s hope this guy is good.

Ken Mac­Don­ald, Dir­ector of Pub­lic Pro­sec­u­tions between 2003 – 2008, writ­ing for the Times:

The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes stead­ily clearer. This was a for­eign policy dis­grace of epic pro­por­tions and play­ing foot­sie on Sunday morn­ing tele­vi­sion does noth­ing to repair the dam­age. It is now very dif­fi­cult to avoid the con­clu­sion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarm­ing sub­ter­fuge with his part­ner George Bush and went on to mis­lead and cajole the Brit­ish people into a deadly war they had made per­fectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increas­ingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.

Hind­sight is a great temp­tress. But we needn’t trouble her on the way to a con­fid­ent con­clu­sion that Mr Blair’s fun­da­mental flaw was his syco­phancy towards power.

Since those sorry days we have fre­quently heard him repeat­ing the self-regarding man­tra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to mis­judg­ment: it is cer­tainly no answer to death.

Obama accept­ing his Nobel prize:

… per­haps the most pro­found issue sur­round­ing my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is wind­ing down. The other is a con­flict that Amer­ica did not seek …

Except that Amer­ica did seek armed con­flict with Afgh­anistan.

In Octo­ber of 2001 the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks. Bush rejec­ted this, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001, and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

There have been a num­ber of inquir­ies into the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq but as someone com­ment­ing on the European Tribune web­site put it, they

… are not inten­ded to reach a find­ing that the pub­lic find cred­ible, they exist to provide a smokescreen for a few years to cover the estab­lish­ment for a few years in the hope every­one for­gets about it.

They invade and lay waste another coun­try, des­troy the lives of mil­lions of Iraqis for gen­er­a­tions to come, all on some trumped up drivel about “weapons of mass destruc­tion.”
Now they’re arguing over the real reason. Oil. It’s not enough that con­trol of Iraq’s crude is being div­vied up amongst the cap­it­al­ists of the world. Thomas […]

I was sur­prised today to find one of my favour­ite tech­no­logy com­ment­at­ors, John Gruber of Dar­ing Fire­ball, declar­ing that no doubt remains as to whether the elec­tion was fraudulent. Really, because a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment is crack­ing down on dis­sid­ents?
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my exper­i­ences in the Middle East it is that all is not what […]

Looks like Blair is run­ning scared he’ll end up in the dock for war crimes. Not sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the lengths he went to to help bring about the war of aggres­sion against Iraq.

If Gor­don Brown were to open the way for a truly inde­pend­ent and open inquiry into the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq he would quite likely find him­self in the dock for war crimes.

In a dev­ast­at­ing inter­view with George Mon­biot Hazel Blears pulls this lovely com­ment out of the bag, regard­ing the decision to invade Iraq:
Des­pite the fact that hun­dreds of thou­sands of people have died  —  and that is a tragedy  —  I still believe that it was the right thing to do.
If there was a hell Hazel Blears would surely burn […]