Lies, responsibilty and hypocrisy

So after all the buildup and hype, Tony Blair's appearance in front of the Chilcot inquiry turned out to be one great anti-climax. I'm not really sure what people expected - perhaps they thought he'd break down sobbing as he confessed to deliberate lying to parliament and the people. Was that really likely from "Teflon Tony"?

Personally, I always thought this inquiry was a monumental waste of time and money. We've learned nothing new and the only thing that has come out of it is that civil servants and politicians will say and do whatever they think is necessary for them to save their own skin. Having Blair appear in the dock was really nothing more than a stunt.

What it did do, however, was give those professional protesters a chance to come out on the streets again with their pre-prepared placards, slogans and chants to voice their "disapproval" of Blair's actions.

Which is fine - except .......

Well, how many of those protesting voted for Labour? I suspect that most of them did - and I suspect that most of them will do so again. I suspect that the majority of "anti-war" protesters are Labour supporters who celebrated with gusto when Blair walked into Number 10.

These people are convinced that Tony Blair and the Labour Party lied about going to war against Iraq. They are all convinced that Tony Blair and the Labour Party systematically deceived the people of Britain to pursue personal ambitions for their own ends.

And yet, these same people are prepared to accept that, apart from that, everything else Tony Blair and the Labour Party did was above board and scrupulously honest. Whether it's on the subject of health, education, economics, poverty, immigration or what have you - they all swallow the rhetoric, statistics and "evidence" as indisputable fact as long as it supports their own personal bias.

How can they be so stupid? If Blair and the Labour Party were prepared to lie about something as monumentally important as going to war, don't they realise that they are even more likely to be lying about issues that are less important?

The people who voted for Labour are the ones who elected Labour to power. They are the ones who put Tony Blair into Number 10. If there were warmongers in government, it is they - the Labour voters - who put them there and they are as guilty and as culpable as anyone. For them to then wave banners and chant slogans criticising the government that they chose reeks of hypocrisy.

Not in their name, but only with their help - and those self same people will do it all again on May 6th 2010.

Private investigations

I don't often find myself agreeing with Gordon Brown, but on the subject of the Iraq war inquiry I tend to feel that there is little to be gained by holding it in public.

First of all, the only reason we're having this inquiry in the first place is at the demand of those who've already made their minds up about the rights and wrongs of the war. Whether it is public or private, it the inquiry doesn't agree with their point of view then they'll claim it was a whitewash.

And like Brown, the only people I can see gaining anything from a pubic inquiry are lawyers - as with the Bloody Sunday inquiry debacle. There's no point in doing all that again when people have already made up their minds and will not be dissuaded one way or the other.

W is for well done

Earlier this week I referred to a quote by Ann Coulter about the respect conservatives should give Obama - about the same as they gave to Bush. In other words - absolutely none whatsoever. To be fair, though, over on the Opinion Journal there is a positive article about Bush by a former member of John Kerry's team in 2004, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

I tend to agree with that. The bare bones of the financial crisis which has engulfed the world were laid down during Clinton's tenure.

Whatever your views on global warming and Kyoto, the criticism of Bush for not signing the treaty should be balanced by the fact that Clinton didn't either - but at least the US rate of CO2 emissions declined under Bush, which is more than can be said for the majority of nations that did sign the treaty. It's one of the hallmarks of the Bush presidency - while everyone else talked the talk, he actually walked the walk.

Same with poverty. Our government and the UN did all the chat, but even Saint Bob Geldof was forced to concede that nobody - ever - has done more for Africa than George W Bush. All this while dealing with the biggest political issues in a generation. Once again, the soft lefties of Europe wrung their hands and delivered earnest platitudes - Bush just delivered.

And what about the foreign policies? Well, Iraq has been a success - even the most hardened left wing self-loathers are having to admit that now. Far from the "quagmire" they were predicting Iraq has been a significant achievement. I know it'll be a shit hole in no time at all once we're out of there, but you can't have everything. Afghanistan was always the "just" war for the lefties - probably the reason we decided to stay there - but now that is the quagmire. It was always going to be a fruitless exercise - you can't civilise people who don't want to be civilised. Afghanistan remains a 12th century feudal outpost and will stay that way until they decide they want to join the rest of the world.

I don't know much about US politics - the economy, standard of living or what have you - but I do know that millions of illegal immigrants can't be wrong. If the USA was really such a crap place under Bush, why did so many people flock there - including hundreds of thousands from the "enlightened" European nations? Germany, Italy and other EU nations have a population in free fall - the USA just keeps getting bigger. The "land of the free" appears to be a bigger draw than the "land of the freebie".

Bush was never as bad a President as the media would have you believe - just as JFK was never as good as they try to make out (hey, no one came closer to bringing nuclear holocaust down on us all). Bush's problem is that he was faced by a malevolent media from the outset. A media who, more often than not, sided with our enemies rather than be seen to support George W Bush.

I've no doubt that, eventually, someone, somewhere will sit down and write a proper unbiased review of the last eight years and find that, far from being the worst President ever, Bush responded to the worst attack on it's soil since Pearl Harbor in a decisive and correct manner and kept his country safe from harm for the next seven years while conducting a successful campaign against the enemy in their own lands.

Well done, Mr Bush.

Lost momentum

As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I am a supporter of our armed forces. That might seem obvious - aren't we all. Well - no, not really. A lot of people, especially politicians, will say that they support our armed forces, but they don't really. If they truly did they would ensure that they are armed, equipped and supplied as well as they possibly can be - but they'd rather spend billions on a sporting event then national defence.

I was also a supporter of our action in both Afghanistan and Iraq - but I've always had my doubts about the idea of nation building. My view was that taking military action post 9/11 was the right thing to do, but the way we did it was very wrong - and I don't believe it was a strategy that military leaders came up with or even endorsed. I believe we should have gone in hard and fast, deposed the regimes that were there, disabled the bulk of their military capability and then withdrawn just as quickly - leaving those nations with no doubt that should anything emanating from that region ever threaten our nation again we'd do the same.

I agree that there is some value to remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan - it gives us a battleground to fight Moslem terrorists well away from our own shores and our troops are becoming battle hardened veterans through contact with real action - but other than that it is pretty pointless us being there. The belief that we will create some sort of western style liberal democracy in the region is misguided - it won't. Both Iraq and Afghanistan - should they ever become stable enough for us to pull out - will rapidly descend into a despot ruled hell hole once we leave.

It would never be enough to make one or even two nations in that region even semi-democratic as long as they remain surrounded by the autocratic dictatorships and theocracies which dominate the region - and this is where I feel we have missed an opportunity following the initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As soon as we began these adventures the shock waves were felt throughout the Middle East. Previously belligerent nations - Libya and Syria for example - quickly made moves to placate the west and the people of Lebanon rose up against their own oppressors (Syria) and demanded they leave - but by hanging around and "nation building" that momentum was lost and with it the possibility of real progress in the region.

The "Cedar Revolution" of 2005 quickly evaporated and instead of improving prospects for that nation they were launched instead into the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war as Islamic insurgents, buoyed by the various "victories" in Iraq and armed by the Iranians, displayed their new found confidence.

This may sound callous, but I do not care about the people of Afghanistan or Iraq. If they want better lives it is their responsibility to do something about it other than flood into our country from their piss pot nations. Our only consideration for those nations should be how they effect our own - and they should have learned from a short, sharp but very resounding military action that if they try and mess with us they will pay for it very dearly. Again and again - until they stop.