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Britain: Blair sets out ideological justification for new wars of aggression
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s March 21 speech in London marking the third anniversary of the Iraq war coincided with President George W. Bush’s Washington press conference making clear that the occupation of Iraq will continue for years and threatening military attacks against any country deemed an obstacle to US interests.
As at the time of the invasion, Blair’s task today is to contrive a pseudo-moral justification for the illegal policy of preemptive war, which the prime minister euphemistically termed “active intervention.”
However, he does so under conditions in which the catastrophe wrought by the invasion of Iraq has stripped both his government and the White House of any political legitimacy in the eyes of tens of millions of people across the world. Thus, despite appearing before a friendly audience at the Foreign Policy Centre—a pro-New Labour think tank—the prime minister appeared harried and edgy, and his remarks bellicose and defensive by turns.
Three years on, the “majority view of a large part of Western opinion” was that the war should never have taken place, Blair said. He went on to acknowledge that “the precarious nature of Iraq today and . . . those who have died” had made the doctrine of “active intervention” the object of “scorn.”
Many had also concluded that “George Bush is as much if not more of a threat to world peace than Osama bin Laden,” Blair continued, “and what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Middle East is an entirely understandable consequence of US/UK imperialism or worse, of just plain stupidity.”
This admission is itself a damning self-indictment of his policy. That so many hold these views is not difficult to explain. All of Blair’s justifications for the war have been exposed as lies. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks on New York, and Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
More than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, and rather than being greeted as “liberators,” the US and Britain have been confronted with a popular insurgency, which they are seeking to extinguish through a combination of military action against entire towns and cities, and the deliberate cultivation of sectarian and ethnic conflict.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/blai-m24.shtml
However, he does so under conditions in which the catastrophe wrought by the invasion of Iraq has stripped both his government and the White House of any political legitimacy in the eyes of tens of millions of people across the world. Thus, despite appearing before a friendly audience at the Foreign Policy Centre—a pro-New Labour think tank—the prime minister appeared harried and edgy, and his remarks bellicose and defensive by turns.
Three years on, the “majority view of a large part of Western opinion” was that the war should never have taken place, Blair said. He went on to acknowledge that “the precarious nature of Iraq today and . . . those who have died” had made the doctrine of “active intervention” the object of “scorn.”
Many had also concluded that “George Bush is as much if not more of a threat to world peace than Osama bin Laden,” Blair continued, “and what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Middle East is an entirely understandable consequence of US/UK imperialism or worse, of just plain stupidity.”
This admission is itself a damning self-indictment of his policy. That so many hold these views is not difficult to explain. All of Blair’s justifications for the war have been exposed as lies. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks on New York, and Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
More than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, and rather than being greeted as “liberators,” the US and Britain have been confronted with a popular insurgency, which they are seeking to extinguish through a combination of military action against entire towns and cities, and the deliberate cultivation of sectarian and ethnic conflict.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/blai-m24.shtml
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