Blair the final denouement or the resurection of the darkness

I have copied this piece from an egroup since I am not keeping close enough to the news myself any more. This is important stuff. Are we coming to the final days of Blairy england as the police widen their investigation into his possible corruption.
If only it were possible to prosecute him for the death of 100,00 people in an unsanctioned unnecessary uninvited indefensible war of aggression.
Yet he is defending the indefensible and seemingly sanctioning further murderous invasions of peoples who are unlike him ( not us).

"Britain: Blair sets out ideological justification for new wars of

aggression

By Julie Hyland

24 March 2006

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author

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.

Once again, Blair made clear his indifference to domestic and

international popular opinion and his determination to continue his

political and military alliance with Washington. Rather than make

any accounting for the disastrous results of his previous actions,

he sought to set out a new ideological pretext for further military

adventures aimed at "regime change," whilst denouncing his critics

as apologists for global terrorism.

Blair presaged this section of his speech by praising the Koran and

attributing to it a historically progressive character in an earlier

era. But he went on to claim that what was at stake was not a

clash "of civilisations" but rather a "clash about civilisation"—

i.e., that his opponents should be regarded as barbarians and

enemies of civilised values.

He complained that ministers had been warned against using the

term "Islamic extremist" because it might cause offence. Given that

the government has made repeated reference to Islamic extremism, and

has justified all its encroachments on civil liberties on the basis

of combating this threat, Blair's claim is nonsensical.

But the implied criticism of an overzealous "political correctness"

was of a piece with the prime minister's adoption of a slightly more

sophisticated version of the reactionary anti-Muslim campaign being

waged by the right wing across Europe This reached its high point

with the publication of cartoons denigrating the prophet Mohammed

that were

justified on the grounds of free speech.

Blair echoed those who profess that Islam has fallen behind the

advanced Western world due to the impact of the Renaissance, the

Reformation, and the Enlightenment. His invocations of an

ideological crusade were backed up by reference to his own Christian

faith and his desire to safeguard "our way of life."

It was not simply a question of defeating terrorism, Blair said, but

defeating the "global ideology" that lay behind it, which had

become "embedded now in the culture of many nations and capable of

eruption at any time."

This ideology had to be taken on by "telling them their attitude to

America is absurd; their concept of governance pre-feudal; their

positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive."

The attempt to dress imperialist militarism in the mantle of

progress is Blair's particular ideological contribution to

Washington's war effort. The social base of the Blair government

constitutes a privileged section of the upper-middle class that

prides itself on combining a healthy respect for the benefits

of "free market" capitalism with progressive views, particularly on

questions relating to gender and sexual preference. Like the authors

of the cartoon provocation and their supposedly liberal apologists,

Blair seeks to exploit the position of Islam on women,

homosexuality, etc. in order to portray it as incompatible

with "Western" values.

What is the reality behind his claim to be waging an "ideological"

struggle in defence of civilisation? It is his lining up with the

world's strongest military power to inflict death and destruction on

defenceless peoples in order to seize control of their country and

its resources.

It is sanctioning the building of concentration camps such as at

Guantánamo Bay, where anyone deemed an opponent of the West can be

imprisoned without trial. It is an apologia for the sadistic

treatment of detainees, sanctioned by the highest echelons of

government and the state.

The tradition that Blair stands in is not that of the Enlightenment,

but the pious rhetoric of the "white man's burden" that was used to

justify the creation of the British Empire during the nineteenth

century.

Blair's proclamation that Islamic extremism is "embedded now in the

culture of many nations" constitutes a license to terrorise,

intimidate and even wage war in many of the nations of the Middle

East and Africa.

Just as with Iraq, this will be justified as a great civilising

mission

to safeguard world peace and liberate the native population through

regime change. Whatever forces offer their services as a proxy

government for the Western powers, regardless of their true

political character, will be proclaimed as representatives of

moderate Islam.

Worse crimes are to follow. Blair placed his speech in the context

of those on British foreign policy which he gave in Chicago in 1999

and Washington in 2003. It should be noted that both of these were

made with the immediate purpose of legitimising the wars against

Yugoslavia and Iraq.

Similarly, in his remarks this week Blair accused Tehran of

meddling "furiously in the stability of Iraq" and of supporting

terrorist attacks in the Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and

Beslan. "True," he said, "the conventional view is that, for

example, Iran is hostile to Al Qaeda and therefore would never

support its activities." But, he alleged, such divisions between

Sunni and Shia Muslims count for nothing as "fundamentally, for this

ideology [i.e., extreme Islam], we are the enemy."

There is a remarkable similarity between such spurious arguments

linking Iran and Al Qaeda to the earlier claims that the secular

Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. The

similarities do not end there. At one point in his speech Blair

responded to those who have pointed out that Iraq was not a threat

to world peace by citing the "fourteen UN resolutions" repeatedly

invoked by Washington and London in the run-up to the invasion to

provide themselves with a fig leaf of legality.

A letter leaked to the Times this week reveals that the Blair

government is engaged in a surreptitious campaign to create a

similar paper trail to provide a pretext for war against Iran. The

Times reports that a March 16 confidential note by John Sawers, a

leading British diplomat, addressed to his counterparts in France,

Germany and the US urges a united offensive to secure "a United

Nations resolution that would open the way for punitive sanctions

and even the use of force if Iran were

to refuse to halt its controversial nuclear programme."

Sawers sets out British proposals for upgrading the case against

Iran so as "to bind Russia and China into agreeing to further

measures that will be taken by the Security Council should the

Iranians fail to engage positively... We would not, at this stage,

want to be explicit about what would be involved then."