[Closed] Chilcot Report, July 6th

ninfan - Member

"Can you think of anyone who defends and praises Tony Blair more than you ?"

Me for one

I would strongly dispute that.

Yes like jambalaya you obviously hold Tony Blair in very high esteem but you rarely defend him in any meaningful way.

In the same way that although you are clearly a huge supporter of the Tory Right unlike jambalaya you rarely actually defend the Tories and their policies.

What you do instead is attempt to deflect criticism through taunting and a massive overuse of the laughing emoticon.

Defending the Tories, and Tony Blair, isn't easy, in fact jambalaya has a helluva job doing so on here - but give him his credit he tries. So you don't bother and choose to taunt "lefties" instead.

An absolutely perfect example of this is in your last post when you say :

[i]"I remain strongly of the opinion that most of the people so loudly criticising him over Iraq fully supported his governments interventionist and unlawful interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and we're happy enough to vote Labour in 2005 to reelect him."[/i]

You are not actually defending Blair over his decision to go to war in Iraq, that would too difficult to do, so instead you are taunting his critics.

It is an absolutely classic ninfan tactic.

But it is not a tactit used by jambalaya.

You are not actually defending Blair over his decision to go to war in Iraq,

I can't, because I disagreed with the decision to do it at that time (they should have waited for the weapons inspectors)... However

What I can defend him for is that his approach was not only entirely consistent with his outlook and his openly discussed and established belief in interventionist military action, but also that he was 100% convinced that he was right to do so. You can't accuse Blair of inconsistency in any of this, interventionism and internationalism have been consistently accepted as Labour party beliefs for many yeas - notable exceptions such as Vietnam have to be balanced against Korea and Suez, and Blairs belief in this were clearly laid out by Kosovo and SL. Of course, the exercise of moralistic beliefs and that 'the ends justify the means' were also on display by Blair and those who came to power with him from day one. You can disagree with his decisions and processes all you like, but to pretend that you didn't know what you were getting with him would be ridiculous.

As I said, jambalaya shows a greater commitment to defend Blair than you do. And Anthony Eden was a Tory PM btw.

ninfan - Member
...interventionism and internationalism have been consistently accepted as Labour party beliefs for many yeas - notable exceptions such as Vietnam have to be balanced against Korea and Suez...

...but to pretend that you didn't know what you were getting with him would be ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure the reason Harold Wilson didn't take us into Vietnam was the party had learned from the experience of Korea and Suez. Too many families in the country had already given blood in the UKs imperial wars. When you think about it the Boer War generation was still alive, so that's a lot of major wars, one for each generation up to the Korean, and not forgetting the distaste for conscripts getting killed in the non-wars like Cyprus and the Yemen.

No one knew what they were getting with Blair. I was living in Oz at the time but I remember seeing some of his speeches and interviews and being impressed by his apparent willingness to accept mistakes and make things right. From that distance he seemed a decent guy who would try to avoid doing the wrong thing. People were conned.

I read somewhere recently that the NSA and GCHQ had monitored members of the UN in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, in order to gain leverage.

Struggling to find the link at the mo... wonder if it's mentioned in the Chilcot report

Like Angela Merkel ? Old news.

Ah, [url= https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/02/usa.iraq ]here[/url] we go:

seems the story first broke in 2003, shortly before the Invasion began...

[b]The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.

Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York[/b], are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.

The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency - the US body which intercepts communications around the world - and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.

The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations 'particularly directed at... UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)' to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.

Of course, that was long before Edward Snowden began to reveal the full extent of the surveillance program.

Remains to be seen if there will there be any mention of it in the Chilcot Report...

[url= http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tony-blair-and-president-bush-clinton-rushed-to-safety-in-tornado-scare-storms-hurricane-winds-a7139556.html ]Tony Blair in tornado scare[/url]

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