THE BRITISH THREAD II

I thought I would hear a thousand voices cry "Who the hell is Steve Renouf?"

Well, he was remarkable at what he did.

Have you ever noticed, when you're driving quite slowly in your car, with the heater on. and you turn a tight corner say at a roundabout or something, that the air in the car swirls around?

The car turns, but the air tries to stay where it is due to inertia. I think it's quite odd. We think of air as having negligible weight or mass, but it still obeys the laws of science, as it must.

From a letter in The Guardian today:

Boxed in by years of the insistent drip of truth on the dynamic behind his decision to invade Iraq, Tony Blair has finally conceded that he would have removed Saddam even if there had been no evidence of WMD. It seems, then, that we went to war because Blair is under the misapprehension that British general elections give the winner a mandate to make international law on the fly, and to be the world's policeman, judge, jury and jailer. Or perhaps he believes that if Robert Mugabe, say, had considered Britain to be a destabilising influence a few years back, he would have been fully entitled to remove Blair and his cabinet by force. So generous of Blair to "sympathise" with those unsophisticates who thought and think he made a mistake.

Mr Blair and his cabinet were not murdering political opponents in circumstances too barbaric to relate, using poison gas on villages, making war against their neighbours and threatening to destabilise the middle-east after having reaped the rich rewards of the Grauniad's appeasment of Nasser.

And he and his cabinet were elected in a free vote of the UK population.

Spendy, that is a silly nonsequitur and I'm not going to dignify it with a reply.

OK I will. The answer is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/13/blair-crime-hubris-wmd-chilcot

"Tony Blair's boast that he would have sought to remove Saddam Hussein even if he knew Iraq's president no longer had weapons of mass destruction brings fresh evidence that he probably committed a crime in going along with George Bush's invasion."

"Blair claims Saddam was a dictator with an atrocious human rights record and this was enough to want to remove him from being "a threat to the region". In addition to its illegality, this argument begs the "Why now?" question that opponents of the war raised in 2003. A White House fact sheet published in April 2003 recalled that Saddam's greatest killing took place in the 1980s (when he was an ally of the west). Hundreds of thousands died. By the end of the 1990s, according to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, the annual death toll in his prisons and torture cells was in the hundreds. Grim though this still was, why the sudden urgency to stop it?"

" In cases brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, political leaders who plotted large-scale illegal violence were described as collaborating in a "joint criminal enterprise"."

"Why now?" can be answered by saying that two guys had enough guts and also had the tools ready.

And it was not a non-sequitur either.

And there's no such thing as illegality for leaders of nations. The Tories would have done the same things.

The task of the military is to force the policy of its masters when diplomacy fails if it can do and if you question the policy you are questioning the legitimacy of their election. And I don't care for Mr Blair much but I'll back him on this one.

But not North Korea? Not Zimbabwe?

I can still remember Blair and Bush playing at being Churchill are Roosevelt for the cameras and it makes me sick.

The Guardian is doing a good job of unpicking this and laying it bare, even if the Chilcott Inquiry is not, yet.

btw Tony Blair's statement of "I did it because I believed it was the right thing to do at the time" could equally well have been uttered by Jeffrey Dahmer or Peter Sutcliffe.

Blair had no right to engage Her Majesty's forces to support Bush's adventure, lying to Parliament to enable that as he did.

I think Mac that you are too emotionally involved to allow a reasonable discussion on these matters to take place. I can't see what policy you are suggesting should have been applied or what you think our military forces are for.

Policy? We had a policy. Only respond to a real and present danger. Prepare for the worst, while working for the best. Do not join an invasion of another sovereign country without a clear UN mandate to do so.

That should cover it.

I think if a few more Brits got suitably "emotionally involved" with something that doesn't involve football or Simon Cowell, we could yet achieve something good like handing out the Mussolini treatment to Mr Blair.

I seem to have convinced even Spendy that there is no good reason why our precious Mr Blair should not be brought before a judge to be tried, convicted and sentenced to be hanged, his body later to be cut down, quartered and the bits placed on pikes at the gates of the City.

Or they could tour them round the shopping malls in a popemobile.

Pour encourager les autres

The man is guilty of the highest treason, crimes against his office and the country, and is responsible for tens of thousands of needless and innocent deaths.

You have convinced me Mac that responding to your silly rants is a waste of time.

It's the elephant in the corner, Spendy. It's the crime of the century.

The 21st century perhaps. However, you haven't had much time yet. Consider British crimes of the 20th century - from Gallipoli to the Middle East, Malaya, East Africa, Egypt and Ireland.

Your dreckish rant has left you with a little fleck of spittle on your mouth, McT.

No shame there. Honest spittle is good.

On the other hand, we could pretend that nothing happened. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

I'm hopeful that our ongoing Chilcott Inquiry will prompt some serious soul-searching among our rulers. Trouble is, most of those who could make a difference were in the Commons vote to support Blair (after he concocted the lie that carried the debate).

What lie was that?

Worth remembering, thet treason is the only crime in Britain you can legally be killed for.

And what Blair did was worse than treasonous. So maybe justice can yet be done.

George, I know you like to hold me responsible for all British crimes back to Richard the Lionheart, but this one is the only one I have had any involvement in. In its attempted prevention, I mean.

Along with more than a million of my countrymen I went down to London, and later to Manchester, to demonstrate in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, when it was still a proposal. This was the first time in my long life I had ever taken part in a political demonstration.

It was plain at that time to the opponents, that military action would be
immoral
illegal
counter-productive and therefore stupid
leading to huge loss of life
expensive
arrogant
the act of a bully (attacking a weakened and impoverished country)

And nothing that has happened since has showed us to be wrong.

Tony Blair brought this about, disregarding wiser counsel, and using duplicitous means. He should be made to answer for this.

I don't fault your opinion or your conviction. However, a little review and contemplation of history suggests (to me at least) that there may be more to the matter than you have acknowledged. Would you have similarly objected to the Boer War, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the colonization and exploitation of continents?

I think your expressed desire for personal retribution against your political leader at the time should be considered in a much larger context.

Even the American Revolutionaries didn't call for George III's head. They were content to see him leave the scene of their lives.