I can see what you’re getting it, but the reason it’s flawed is that if you’re going to make an analogy between a little kid and Iraq, then you can’t talk about beating up the kid and putting him in the hospital because Iraq is composed of a lot of people. Maybe you could talk about a radiation treatment for the kid, in which the attempt was made to kill cancerous cells in the hopes of saving good cells. Maybe Blaire thought Bush wasn’t a sufficiently skilled surgeon.
Hmm, okay.
I could go with that analogy.
So, Blair assists Bush with the radiation against the advice of the other radiologists. Knowing full well the treatment is wrong, he doesn’t try to stop it but does it so that hopefully this operations, and others in the future, won’t be such complete fuck-ups.
Pretty much, yeah.
actually on reflection I was wrong to cast Tony as a socialist :smack:
He believes more in private than state ownership - but also believes that a nannying state is the best way to oversee it.
From Cook’s speech:
‘‘For four years as foreign secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment.
Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long-range missiles programmes.
Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war.’
…
Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.
…
Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?’
Bear in mind this is a senior member of the cabinet with direct responsibility for Iraq. He’s seen all the relevant documentation. And he states all the above in public before the war starts. (And of course he’s been proved completely correct.)
What information do you think Blair had that Cook didn’t?!
Certainly Cook and Blair were reading exactly the same documents.
Firstly Blair moved the Labour party away from socialism:
Tony Blair’s plan to remove Clause Four from Labour’s constitution is an attack on the left.
Clause 4: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.’
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr180/jenkins.htm
Secondly you use vague and meaningless phrases: ‘Blair has the mentality that the best way to fix things in society is to meddle’ ‘I feel Blair has the same attitude to foreign affairs’ and slurs: ‘Blair has a socialist (Stalinist?) mentality’.
You are comparing Blair to Stalin?
Have you got any facts to back up these allegations?
Try googling ‘Gordon Brown debt relief’. I found 81,000 pages, including this one:
‘Gordon Brown and Clare Short have proposed new measures to add to the Mauritius Mandate targets outlined in September 1997 and extended in September 1998.’
This thread is about why Blair backed Bush in the war.
From your quote Blair states “Democracy is the meeting point for Europe and America. I am not, repeat not, advocating a series of military solutions to achieve it.”
You were indeed way off base - but thanks for having the courage to admit it. 
Now you’re backsliding again! What is your definition of ‘a nannying state’? How do you know what Blair believes?
You use a lot of right-wing jargon - are you perchance … a Conservative?
You think Blair was trying to position himself to be Bush’s Jiminy Cricket? That sounds ridiculously optimistic for a man as ordinarily level-headed (at least, that’s my impression from this side of the ocean) as Blair. A conscience’s job is to say things that, by definition, will make his subject uncomfortable; and when has Bush ever listened to anyone who told him things he didn’t want to hear?
Why does the UK need a military alliance with the US? For purely defensive purposes – and I can’t see how the Brits have or will have any military needs that are not purely defensive – doesn’t it make more sense for them to ally themselves with Europe?
-
try googling “tony blair debt relief” I got 281,000 hits. Not sure what either of that proves. Your cite was interesting, but I think that was Claire Short’s baby rather than Gordon Browns. Claire has always been very internationally minded.
-
Robin Cooks speech again at the time expressed his PERSONAL opinion. He was not supported by the any of the cabinet, (Claire Short perhaps excepted later) who were therefore either collectively mislead or dishonest. The key question is not Robin Cook, but Blair. What did he believe and why. While the latest leaked Downing St memo links are interesting, I would agree with Kaplan’s assesment http://slate.msn.com/id/2120886/ that they prove little, and if anything confirm that people in the cabinet and number 10 did actually think that Saddam had WMDs that could be used on the battlefield (indeed Robin Cook thought it more than possible in his speech) and perhaps beyond . Whether that was enough to invade is a different question.
-
You asked for a cite where Tony talked about introducing democracy into the middle east. I gave you one. What exactly do you want?
-
I am comparing the micromanagement of the present labour government with the micromanagement during the stalinist regime. I am comparing the excited release of glorious projects by the labour party (anyone remember Prescott’s tranport plan, Blairs announcment on NHS dentistry to name but two) with the 5 year plans released by the USSR. My wife is a doctor who is seriously considering leaving the profession. The government has forced changes upon changes into the Health Service, pointless targets that are easily got around, endless contract wrangles and renegotiations. That is a nannying state.
As an experiment, you might try comparing it instead to the micromanagement, Health Service changes, target setting etc of the right-wing, monetarist, free market economy Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher.
Quite and I speak as a person in an NHS Region during the Thatcher/Major regime directly responsible for monitoring and reporting on these targets and on occasion directly ordered to falsify returns to paint a better picture.
All governments of all hues make plans and set targets.
Can we talk a little more about the WMD that the cabinet and number 10 Downing Street thought he had? What type of WMD were they? Chemical? Biological? Nuclear? How many of them were there? When were they manufactured? What is the difference between WMDs configured as “battlefield munitions” and the description Cook used of WMD “namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.” What is the difference between active programs to develop WMD versus leftover WMDs? Should we treat this difference as significant at all, or are any WMD, no matter how old or what they might be suited for (battlefield/city) sufficient?
The question isn’t binary. It isn’t just a yes/no on the WMD and the only courses of action being invade/not invade based on a yes/no. If there was a yes to the question of WMD, but it was qualified with “but they’re 15 year-old leftovers in a nearly forgotten storage bunker in the middle of the desert”, does that still justify invasion?
Enjoy,
Steven
I still find it hard to believe that Blair didn’t know about the difference when he made the 45 min claim.
A minister without portfolio?
Why?