Att: Brits - Opinions of Tony Blair

[duckattack]

It always bugs me that because I criticize Bush, people assume that I somehow have to support Clinton. I've got a LOT of problems with Clinton (and Gore). But the fact is, like Rainking pointed out, Clinton isn't the president anymore, Bush is.

As far as the 'innocuous' 16 words that everyone is choosing to focus on these days... I never thought I'd find myself in the position of feeling sorry for the CIA, yet that's where I'm at these days. I was reading articles during the buildup to the war that were saying basically the same things that are coming up now - that the administration was taking questionable intelligence and using it as justification for their war. That the war was going to happen was, at least for me, a foregone conclusion months beforehand, so it was kind of like watching a car wreck happening without being able to do anything about it. I'm not terribly interested in trying to prove those who supported the war wrong, since it's more subjective than objective at this point (ie the justification being a moral imperative to remove a tyrant from power, whether or not the stated reasons for the invasion proved true or false), and I realize it's pretty much an exercise in futility. That said, apparantly very little of the analysis coming out of the CIA (don't know what the DIA or other intelligence sources were saying) pointed to Iraq being a 'clear and present danger' to the US or 'US interests', and there was a lot of grumbling at how information was being 'cooked' for political reasons, and even Colin Powell was pissed off about it. There are a million reasons (from a geopolitical standpoint) to want to have US troops deployed in Iraq, so it strikes me as funny when people get indignant when it's suggested that the administration's motives may have been suspect. Maybe I'm being cynical in assuming that their motives were indeed other than ridding Saddam of his alleged weapons production capabilities, or even the dubiously honorable intention of 'ridding the Iraqi people of a dictator' (which Saddam Hussein no doubt was, and it annoys me to no end to have to put that disclaimer in somewhere every time this topic is discussed), but my belief is that what has followed has justified my cynicism. And to be honest, even if they had been forthright in explaining why they really (in my opinion) wanted to invade Iraq, I still wouldn't have supported the war.

As far as Wandrail's 'barbarians at the gates' worldview... I actually agree with it to a degree, but I think that forging alliances, rather than fracturing them, is a more effective strategy as far as maintaining a balance of power. I see the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan more as displays of desperation than of strength, and the current political battles over intelligence gathering (assuming that they're not completely stage-managed events) only serve to make the American government and the Bush administration look more like bumbling idiots than they really are.

 

[xenophobe]

Why is it that everytime a republican feels threatened they have to bring Clinton into the argument, as if that excuses the piss poor president in place right now?

It's like "Bush lied us into war but Clinton lied about having his dick sucked!". Wtf?

Also why did you ask a question about Blair and then start lecturing about how great Bush supposedly is? You seem very insecure, and rightly so I suppose if you are a blind Bush supporter.

Actually, I hate all politics, for the most part.

I like to bring up Clinton when people slam on Bush, because most of those people that slam Bush won't mention a word about Bill. Nice double standard that most people have... I certainly hope you would be able to acknowledge that fact.

Personally, I don't get into debates with people who can't agree on the basic fact that all politicans suck, even the ones that represent them. When I don't get it, obviously the person is too narrowminded or biased to have a real debate with.

 

[duckattack]

Actually, I hate all politics, for the most part.

I like to bring up Clinton when people slam on Bush, because most of those people that slam Bush won't mention a word about Bill. Nice double standard that most people have... I certainly hope you would be able to acknowledge that fact.

Personally, I don't get into debates with people who can't agree on the basic fact that all politicans suck, even the ones that represent them. When I don't get it, obviously the person is too narrowminded or biased to have a real debate with.

You've brought up a good point, which is the polarization that has come about here, and that more or less prevents meaningful political discussion/debate. This is good news for the Republicans and Democrats, but bad news for the rest of us, since we basically have no choice but to vote for whomever we deem as the lesser of two evils, and then sit back and watch the partisan circus that is American politics.

 

[Lee_B]

I'd like to see William Hague return as Tory leader. That man ran rings around Blair in every debate and forum going. Unfortunately he was Tory leader at a time when the Tories were as popular as a fart in a space suit.


The tide is starting to change, but lucky for Labour they have no real opposition with IDS at the Tory helm.

 

[Profanity]

Tony Blair is too young to be prime minister.

 

[Rosie1]

I have to agree he is quite eloquent when he speaks. I was very surprised, I guess I was expecting another retard like Bush.

 

[Profanity]

All American leaders are retar*s

 

[Rainking]

Woops Bush's approval rating is down to 55% this month.

 

[Wandrail]

Why is it that everytime a republican feels threatened they have to bring Clinton into the argument, as if that excuses the piss poor president in place right now?

Not to acknowledge any sort of 'threatened' feeling, which is silliness, but Clinton is brought up because as a majority of the opponents of Bush and the War's poster-boy and frequent reference point, it is important to remind them of their double standard. Which of course indicates their own penchant for disregarding ACTUAL lies and political wrong doing to support their own ideological views.

It's like "Bush lied us into war but Clinton lied about having his dick sucked!". Wtf?

One would have to show that Bush actually lied, (which won't happen) for that statement to be even halfway true.

Also why did you ask a question about Blair and then start lecturing about how great Bush supposedly is? You seem very insecure, and rightly so I suppose if you are a blind Bush supporter.

I asked a question about Blair, and got alot of responses that started mentioning Bush, if you care to use that bar at the right side of your screen and scroll up a ways. SO I was responding to that. I was actually enjoying a bit of going back and forth on the topic, liking debate myself, and I actually don't take offense at people's disagreeing with me, so I don't understand your sudden jump to petty insults. It seems a bit more insecure to insult someone rather than give a coherent, well founded response, but hey - what can you do? :Smug:

 

[Wandrail]

As far as being a 'blind Bush supporter' I am actually not. There are alot of things he has done and policies he has supported that I haven't liked. There are alot of things he hasn't said I had hoped he would, and alot of progress in key areas that hasn't been made that needs to be. Its not all his fault, there has been alot of blatant obstruction in the federal government, especially in terms of Supreme Court appointments. How the leftists get away with that without being called out on every news program for instigating gridlock and hamstringing the system unfairly is sure a curious thing. However, overall I support President Bush and approve of how he has handled a majority of things, especially in light of the fact that you HAVE to play the political game at this moment in our country. It personally makes me sick that a slick talker out for personal gain is likely to be received better than a more common man looking to get the job done. I want to see some people come onto the scene with some convictions, who have an agenda they wear on their sleeves. Liberals run to the right to get elected, then go back on much of what they were elected for, and alot of right wingers in the past have run to the left when it was expedient. I believe that if someone (not a flake like most of what has sadly come out of the libertarian party) could break through the political games and just say what he thinks, run on a real platform of personal ideas, it would be refreshing and a balm to the public's jaded opinion of the system, and if said person were on the side of true American principals and freedom that he would win in a landslide.

The whole thing of presidential approval numbers is a bit dubious, I was an analyst in a reasonably prominent Southern Research firm for a number of years, and I know all about that field and how subjective it is. Real results come from qaulitative data, not the quantitative kind we typically see, simply because, in a survey, especially on a political topic, there are no straight questions or answers. I believe that if we were to see some more open ended research into the matter, that this non-issue of Bush having "lied", is hardly the catalyst for the erratic quantitative figures. Remember that they fell like this not too long ago and rose again to quite astounding highs. I personally hope the President isn't paying any attention to this nonsense at all, and just following his convictions, standing beside our military. Peace is achieved through strength, pacifism in the face of dictators and terrorism is the biggest joke i've ever heard. I think all the people they've been digging out of mass graves in Iraq in recent weeks would agree.

 

[Wandrail]

All American leaders are retar*s

And Britain has sadly had hardly a lick of common sense since Churchill.

 

[duckattack]

Wandrail, maybe you're being too pedantic, or maybe I'm not being pedantic enough - when I say 'Bush lied', I'm including not only the W himself, I'm extending that to mean his whole administration, since they basically constitute one organism as far as I'm concerned. So when you've got the Secretary of State fuming that the 'evidence' that he's to present to the UN Security Council is 'bullshit', when you've got intelligence reports being discredited in the news media (liberal-controlled or otherwise), when you have analysts within our own intelligence-gathering agencies grumbling that their findings are being misrepresented in favor of the Administration's agenda (an agenda established well before Bush came into office), then yeah, I'm going to have some doubts as to the truthfulness of what said Administration is telling me.

'Peace Through Strength' is a nice sentiment (well, kind of...)... I hate to bring up all the US interventions that have occured since WW2, because that's when the 'anti-American' accusations really seem to start flying, but between the open and proxy warfare and covert support for various regimes and groups of 'unlawful combatants' in the past 50 years, this country has hardly been at peace... Not to justify flying airliners into buildings full of people, but after a half-century of playing one group against each other across the globe in order to contain communism, it's hardly surprising that we're going to have some folks pissed off at us... Or maybe it's just because we have 'too much freedom', I don't know... So anyway, I don't know. Maybe you're right, maybe the schisms between East and West are too deep to ever allow hope for anything besides constant low-level fighting as opposed to a third world war, as cynical as I am about our own government, I somehow hold out hope that the world isn't doomed to one war after another...

 

[lord667]

You've brought up a good point, which is the polarization that has come about here, and that more or less prevents meaningful political discussion/debate. This is good news for the Republicans and Democrats, but bad news for the rest of us, since we basically have no choice but to vote for whomever we deem as the lesser of two evils, and then sit back and watch the partisan circus that is American politics.

Why not vote for a third party? The only reason you have the "bipartisan" thing is that everyone assumes that everyone else will be voting Republican or Democrat, and people who don't want one of them just don't vote at all. If every American who thought their vote didn't count just decided - what the hell, let's go crazy and vote anyway, I pretty much guarantee you that both Houses would look a lot different.

That's what I like most about our politics; the role of Prime Minister is usually a two-horse race, granted, but there are always at least three parties with some solid clout, and plenty of vocal minnows like the BNP or the Socialist Alliance. There's always that little glimmer of hope that no vote is necessarily a wasted vote. The same is true in the rest of Europe as well, as shown with the big far-right shock not so long ago.

 

[Black Dragon]

 

[Profanity]

cool

 

[Rainking]

Wandrail, contrary to your weak suggestion that you aren't a blind Bush supporter, it's totally clear that you think the sun shines out of his posterior.

If the president didn't lie then maybe you can explain some of these apparent inconsistencies:

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." – President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." – President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."

"We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." – President Bush, Oct. 7.

No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.

"We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." – President Bush, Oct. 7.

Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline. Furthermore, Iraq's drone-building program wasn't much more advanced than your average model plane enthusiast. And isn't a "manned aerial vehicle" just a scary way to say "plane"?

"We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." – President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.

"Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." – President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003

This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers that the CIA claimed were potential mobile biological weapons lab. But British and American experts – including the State Department's intelligence wing in a report released this week – have since declared this to be untrue. According to the British, and much to Prime Minister Tony Blair's embarrassment, the trailers are actually exactly what Iraq said they were; facilities to fill weather balloons, sold to them by the British themselves.

I could go on. Obviously you have an explanation for these apparent misunderstandings with the truth. I, and the Iraqi civilians killed in the war who are currently loving their "liberation", will look forward to your answer.

 

[duckattack]

Why not vote for a third party? The only reason you have the "bipartisan" thing is that everyone assumes that everyone else will be voting Republican or Democrat, and people who don't want one of them just don't vote at all. If every American who thought their vote didn't count just decided - what the hell, let's go crazy and vote anyway, I pretty much guarantee you that both Houses would look a lot different.

That's what I like most about our politics; the role of Prime Minister is usually a two-horse race, granted, but there are always at least three parties with some solid clout, and plenty of vocal minnows like the BNP or the Socialist Alliance. There's always that little glimmer of hope that no vote is necessarily a wasted vote. The same is true in the rest of Europe as well, as shown with the big far-right shock not so long ago.

I've actually voted third-party in every election since I turned 18 (a lllooonnnggg time ago!), but generally the two big parties have things sewn up pretty tight, especially on the national level. They have the money and clout to marginalize just about any third-party interlopers that come long, not that Ross Perot or Ralph Nader necessarily needed any help in that respect...

 

[Wandrail]

'Peace Through Strength' is a nice sentiment (well, kind of...)... I hate to bring up all the US interventions that have occured since WW2... Not to justify flying airliners into buildings full of people...Maybe you're right, maybe the schisms between East and West are too deep to ever allow hope for anything besides constant low-level fighting as opposed to a third world war, as cynical as I am about our own government, I somehow hold out hope that the world isn't doomed to one war after another...

I can't answer all of the other stuff from this post much less Rainking's because I have to go to bed, its damn near 3am. HOWEVER - I had to throw this in. When we talk about 'peace', I think you have to think in terms of the world outside the USA. Our CIVILIAN population has been at EXTREME peace, to the point where while the rest of the world wonders where the next meal will come from, or whether they will be locked up or killed for attending an underground church not controlled by the state, or just trying to stay alive in a brutal place like Africa, our big concerns are ATM fees and recycled paper. We're concerned with meaningless minutia, and alot of us are lazy and complacent, bitter, jaded, whiny, damn annoying. Its the curse of a peaceful, prosperous society to forget how they got all they have in the first place. SO I say we have been at peace. I think it is good policy to support foreign uprisings if they aid in our cause and especially if they spread democracy. We have not always made wise decisions in that area, but I think the generalizations of people like Chomsky who would basically claim we have made a career out of establishing dictators and killing civilians are exaggerations of the worst and most irresponsible kind. These actions of ours have often been for the greater good, and I believe that even most of our leaders who I have disagreements with have good intentions...usually.

If we had simply been engaging in a more proactive anti-terrorist campaign since the 80's (the sort which Ollie North often said we needed) and 90's, we wouldn't worry about the fact that we gave bin Laden weaponry decades ago. We weren't giving him license to kill our people, we were not befriending him, although he at that time was not who he is today. Much like how we partnered with Russia in WW2, we were allowing a potential threat to help us defeat a common enemy. Its a gamble, but the stakes would be lower if we didn't have people like McGovern, Daschle and Gore always looking to thwart and emasculate military efforts and even intelligence systems (the CIA was basically neutered in the early 90's).

I respect how you put your thoughts out there, I can tell you're not just a reactionist. I'm not either, if you can believe it. I'm someone obsessed with history, and am aware of its cyclical nature. I have no desire to delude myself. I don't know if the East and West will ever be able to find peace, but I think a free Iraq that has a chance to prosper could be a start. I believe at SOME point conflict is inevitable somewhere, though. However, it is through vigilance that potential threats do not become the next great enemy. Churchill was ridiculed openly in Britain for his call to try and stop Germany in their tracks during Hitler's early days. Churchill was a joke. Its just that he was right, and 6 million jews and plenty of others were murdered. Society, a meaningless thing resulting from people just being around each other cannot solve the fact that evil men (I know thats a no-no to say around here -how naive of me!) with a lust for power and personal gain will always be around, and that many will be driven or lucky enough to find both. Its all history as far as I'm concerned, and it is MY hope that we do not HAVE to repeat it, though like you I can't be too optimistic about the future.

 

[Rainking]

Convenient that you don't have time to answer the points I made which, to anyone who isn't a blind bush follower, show that Bush is full of shit yet you have time to make a huge post full of fluff.

 

[Nightwing]

The only decent and right thing that could possibly happen to Blair, Bush and Howard is that their lying, self righteous, warmongering asses be thrown out of government and their names forever scorned.

I feel almost physically ill these days when I see any of their smug, self satisfied statements about no regrets, or the 'new Iraq'.

They are all guilty of undermining international conventions regarding war, of intentionally murdering civilians, and using their positions to pursue an unjust and illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation.
The only possible thing that makes me feel any better about that lying, smug weasel Blair is looking at the woman he has to fuck.