Tony Blair

[KateLMead]

When are they going to bring this criminal to book. 60,000 Iraqi's dead, men women and children sacrificed "for What"
"Oil and self promotion"? Afghanistan invaded to get rid of the poppy fields.B'Liar "The tough guy". This is man who said he was struggling to pay his mortgage when in power has amassed a fortune of over 100m. It is an insult and shame on our nation to call him a "Peace Envoy" he needs to be brought to justice. in the dock

[cromwell]

What has always amazed me about Blair is the easy ride the TV media has always given him, and continue to give him.

It is a myth that he is Teflon Tony, imo. For nothing to stick you have to be arrested and charged, etc before getting away with it. Blair will never be charged with anything.

[Workingman]

Looking at some of the things said about him I am surprised he is still walking the earth.

If I were rich enough I would investigate the possibility of taking out a civil lawsuit against him, purely and simply to force him to answer questions under oath in a court of law. The man has, so far, been able to bluff and bluster when giving evidence. He would run the risk of committing perjury if he did that in court and under oath.

[Aggers]

If I were rich enough I would investigate the possibility of taking out a civil lawsuit against him, purely and simply to force him to answer questions under oath in a court of law.

I've often thought that. But, no doubt there is something in the statute books
that makes that impossible.

[KateLMead]

The man is a sickening example of everything that is rotten, like Frank I would prosecute him, and the judge and jury would be Iraqi's. It was not difficult for us all to predict what would happen in the Middle East following his destruction of Iraq. Misery, death, poverty, sickness. Imagine if we were in the same position "taken over" by radicals, you wouldn't see three quarters of those in government "heels for the dust."

[Suff]

Sorry this is longer than I had intended but it is how I feel.

I must admit that I find this kind of amusing in a twisted and wry sort of way.

Blair is an excellent political animal. He knows how to manipulate people, how to say things without saying them and how to avoid saying things he does not want to say. He is very thorough and very ruthless. Pretty much the mark of a statesman.

Sadly he seems to be lacking in just about all moral standards. Which does not help to engender trust in our political "masters".

Where I am amused is the mess he had to get himself into and why. Ask yourself why nobody is actively chasing after Dubya in the US to harvest his head for an "illegal war"? After all they are far more litigation minded than we are. Simply put Bush did not go to war on a platform of WMD and threat. Bush went to war on a platform of regime change in a country which was clearly so far away from the Western Norm. He demonised the way Saddam treated his people.

So why, we ask ourselves, did not Blair do that?

This is the source of most of my wry humour on this one. You see Labour has been telling us, for more than half a century, that it is not the place of the UK to interfere in world affairs. Labour has been telling us that we had no right to have an empire and that we should not intervene in the affairs of others.

So whilst Bush could win on the platform of regime change, Blair could not. Because Americans do believe it is their place to control world security and that world security is also American security. You might think this breathtaking in it's arrogance but only so long as you don't remember that this is exactly what the UK believed before WWII. Well, actually, before Labour had it's first government and started telling the people of the UK that their money was best spent at home and to ignore the rest of the world. Effectively crippling the UK as a world superpower and handing over the Empire to their own home rule.

So this is where I start to smile. There is Blair, desperate to have his own "gulf war" to boost his popularity and keep him in power for another two terms at least. But how does he go about it? Regime change? How could he say that? His party has been telling us to keep our noses out for half a century, a bit rich to then say we need to go change a regime because it doesn't meet our standards of government..... So what else does he have? Well Saddam was under UN inspections because he did the relatively sensible thing (from an Iraqi point of view), in trying to upgrade his nation to nuclear power status and therefore make it immune from attack.

Now I'm starting to laugh. Because those chemical weapons we are trying to find were sold to him by western nations. He didn't need to make his own, he just needed to buy them. His nuclear had long been shut down because of the huge backlash of the western nations who did not trust him with it.

So now I'm howling. Bush has an easy ride. "Get rid of the heathen" he cries and the bible belt stands at his elbow and sings. "Fear the weapons" shouts Blair, to a sceptical and hard to win British public and British government.

Fear. A very potent weapon. However, Tony, did you forget that scared people are the most difficult to manage and very quick to anger if they are found to be made fools of and seen to be chasing shadows? Bush wanted Oil. Blair wanted Power. Who is the more corrupt?

You will never get what you want with Blair, to try Blair is to try Bush and the Americans simply won't go for it. Pressure will be brought to bear and Blair will not be indicted. It's a lesson we should all learn from. Beware where you put your trust and your vote, it may come back to bite you.

Blair was clearly a lying scumbag. More than one election he simply said "Oh yeah, manifesto, we'll get around to that next term, look at what we've given you". People lapped it up. At more than one election he produced his manifesto late and every time the press said "what about this" to a Tory or Lib Dem policy, he simply said "Oh we'll do that too", even if it was totally contra to his manifesto or his parties aims. People lapped it up. It was all a lie. Brown was a perfect foil for Blair because he simply was too stupid to see what he was doing to the country and the world at large.

It's time to stop ranting about bringing Blair to book and start inspecting our own role in the affair. Had we seen through Blair at the start, had we made him accountable for his promises at the polls, he would never have been in a position to do what he did with Iraq.

So perhaps he did present a dodgy dossier. And perhaps he didn't. Perhaps he didn't look too closely at an intelligence document which, let's face it, was produced by foreign intelligence agencies as an "estimate" of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capability. Our government voted to go to war, Blair did not do it on his own.

So now we want to try him? He didn't do this unilaterally. We knew he was not trustworthy and our government could have done what they did with Syria and said NO. Then he would have been faced with a very painful decision, accept the decision or go to the Queen and make a case for direct action in the face of Government opposition. I have no doubt he would have folded under that pressure.

I see a lot of politicians with a huge amount of Ire at being "duped" by a very slick operator. Personally I think we needed to learn the lesson. But I don't see we learned very much. How to be more circumspect (Syria), yes. Had we agreed to go into Syria on the platform Obama was suggesting, we would have become embroiled in something we had no place in and we would have been badly burned. Iraq 2003 taught us that.

So when our politicians run around bleating about being duped and slavering to "get someone" for it. Do we learn our lesson? Or do we salivate all over again when they press our buttons. The place to wreak our vengeance on politicians is not in the courts, it is in the ballot box. I firmly believe that Blair would have exchanged every one of his millions for the power he so dearly craved. That power is gone forever because the voter will never trust him again. As far as I'm concerned that is a more lasting punishment than that the courts would mete out. It is also a stronger lesson to the politicians than trying to drag Blair into court a decade after the fact. Politicians fear the ballot box, not the courts.

Sorry I can empathise, regime change was enough for me. Saddam killed millions of his own people with wars, gas and good old fashioned bullets, bombs and knives. At least they are now free to determine their own fate, whatever that may be. It may eventually mean a breakup of Iraq into three parts, but if that is what is good for them then that is what should happen. In the long run they will have the support of the western world in whatever they choose until they decide to "stick it" to the west. Because we have a responsibility to them which will cost us lives an money over the next 40 or 50 years or so. It is the price we pay for the interference we did.

On another point I think that Iraq 2003 was a salient lesson. The "major" powers chose to act, supposedly, in their own defence, without the majority decision of the UN. It's about time that talking shop remembered that they can't just hold things up forever in their own vested interests to the detriment of the richer and more powerful nations. That I am fully in accord with because there will come a time again where we have to act in our interests otherwise the mosquito's will suck us dry.

It's time to get over ourselves. We, the United Kingdom, not Tony Blair, went to war. Ok we did it on evidence of a known shyster and in support or one of our NATO allies who was supposedly doing this to increase their security. So let's learn from the lesson and ensure that next time we do a lot more thinking and a lot less cheering. This self destructive introspective and obsessive attempt to get Blair into court is much more like America than the UK.

Yes I'd drop him down a deep dark hole and close the lid without too much of a qualm. But I'd rather we learned from our mistakes.

[KateLMead]

Interesting Suff as always. So do we just let this shyster carry on with that sickening grin on his face. Like a good few others I lived and worked in Iraq for a short time when Saddam was in power he was a monster, but people could walk the streets comparatively freedom fear

[Suff]

There is not a lot that we can do about it. Our best bet is to let our government know that keeping him in a visible position is a vote killer.

The biggest point here is to learn the lesson and never let such a scumbag in to power again. Outrage does have its place but it will get us nothing now.

[KateLMead]

And to think it was suggested he would make a wonderful president of the EU.

[Suff]

Well it was suggested by TB himself and backed by Merkel and Sarko. Of whom the only one surviving is Merkel....

To quote one of my Dutch colleagues. "Blair? For EU president? He's an idiot and we all know it, nobody will vote for him".

Astute guys these Dutch... Blair tried to sell Gibraltar and the Falklands for the Spanish vote on his EU presidency. Then there was a bombing in Madrid and the government changed. Funny how suddenly the offer of Gib went off the table and the Falklands again became of vital strategic interest. I wonder if he would have tried to give the Channel Islands back to the French???