There are moments when the irony of a situation just leaves you breathless. One such was when Henry Kissinger, a war-monger if ever there was one, received the Nobel Peace Prize. Then there was the moment in 2003 when George W Bush stood on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with a huge banner behind him stating ”Mission Accomplished”. But oxygen devouring as those two moments there, neither can compare with Tony Blair’s recent statement, when he told the BBC that to have Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister would be “a very dangerous experiment”. Portraying Corbyn as the far left version of Trump’s far-right, Blair added: “These guys aren’t providing answers, not on the economy, not on foreign policy”.
Tell me when you’ve picked yourself up from the floor and I’ll go on.
Let’s pass lightly over the economy question and focus on foreign policy. Blair, the man who insisted that Iraq had the nuclear capacity to strike Britain inside forty-five minutes. The man who ignored the millions who marched against Britain’s involvement in the Iraq invastion. The man who schmoozed up to the unspeakable George W Bush and hadn’t sufficient self-awareness to hold up his hands and say “OK, I got it wrong – no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”. This man, with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis on his hands, believes that Jeremy Corbyn would be “a dangerous experiment”.
There’s a bright side to everything, however, and I’m focusing on the fact that thousands, maybe millions of British people will react to Blair’s words by deciding that Jeremy Corbyn can’t possibly be as bad and mad as the media portray him – not if he’s got a critic like Blair.
Pass the oxygen tank, Virginia.
Very well said Jude
Great stuff.jude.
If you actually read Jeremy Corbyn’s policies, I don’t consider them far left.
Britain have had a right wing government for some time now, and his policies to increase the tax rate on the top 1% of earners would help those outside the south of England.
The 100 billion saved from scrapping trident could allow the scrapping of education fees and help the NHS.
It is this that upsets Tony Blair the most who is a militant and knows very well that should Jeremy Corbyn come to power, the British army will step in once again as they did with Harold Wilson and oust him.
Capping housing benefit and controlling profit margins on private landlords is something I support and possibly bigger issue in Ireland.
I don’t think the people know too much about his actual policies, the media highlight far left and it puts people off. If they did, the vast majority would agree with his policies.
Who says the media doesn’t control states any more?
When you look back at the Blair and Bush tag-team, you really do wonder how they got away with any of it . Bush seemed like a stilted puppet and Blair’s happy,smiley persona obviously disguised a personality brimming with ambiguity. These two guys really wanted a war and were prepared to commit the youth of both countries on the strength of some half-assed observations that were finally proven false …no Weapons Of Mass Destruction anywhere ….just Gadaffi beating his chest and bluffing to beat the band. i ask myself , if most of us thought it was a bullshit idea to invade a country on such thin threads, how did we allow them to push it through. I remember Blair on television trying to convince unbelieving mothers whose sons were about to be sent out on this mad adventure. It really is frightening to think how nations can be engineered into wars like this….then again look what’s happening in America with Trump…..frightening or what?…Look at the amplified state of terror in the world now…and some of these fools want it to get worse again.
Funny all the same, Esteemed Blogmeister, the link between a particular Donegal town and ducks.
The town being Ballyshannon, one of the tranquil sights of which prompted its poet laureate, William Allingham, to pen this deathless verse:
Four Ducks
Four ducks in a pond
A grass-bank beyond
A blue-sky of spring
White clouds on the wing;
What a little thing
To remember for years –
To remember with tears.
Now, Tony Blair’s mammy hailed from the same town. While his granddaddy was an Orangeman and a, erm, butcher by profession, it is not recorded if duck a l’orange featured regularly on the family dinner table. Or indeed, yellowcake uranium, for that matter.
Nonetheless, Tones had all his, erm, desert-dwelling ducks in a row in 2003 when he gave the go-ahead for the riled up and oily Brits with the following coded message:
-Quack , Quack ! Quack , Quack !
Crack military code-breakers some tortuous years later finally managed to decode that camouflaged message, thus:
-Attack, Iraq ! Attack, Iraq !
PS
A Pity
In bandit c. he so liked his bow to resin
While keeping oiled his Smith ‘n Wesson
A pity Captain Nairac
Didn’t make it to Iraq
If only to hear him sing like the Muezzin
The heavy bloodthirsty hands of history must weigh heavily on Mr Blair’s shoulders. There was Operation Vigilant Resolve on Fallujah in April 2004 followed by the joint Operation Al-Fajr and Operation Phantom Fury in December 2004. Today we learn that Fallujah is surrounded once more with the potential for yet another humanitarian disaster. It is estimated that more than 50,000 people are trapped in the city. In order to secure Baghdad, it is deemed necessary to secure Fallujah, a predominantly Sunni city.
Robert Fisk noted that the Iraqi army operated one of the world’s largest mortuaries in Fallujah. It had space for two thousand bodies at a time,following the slaughter in the Howeiza marshes in 1985 and in 2016 the slaughter goes on. (Fisk 2005:342) Mr Blair should contemplate the death toll associated with his support for dangerous experiments in Iraq.
Tony Blair’s statements may seem seem breathtakingly arrogant to us but that is because we have categorised Mr Blair as a fairly typical ordinary human being.
There is very little ordinary about Tony Blair. He is documented as being extremely intelligent and my own thoughts are that he probably has Narcissistic personality disorder. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
Four dimensions of narcissism as a personality variable have been delineated: leadership/authority, superiority/arrogance, self-absorption/self-admiration, and exploitativeness/entitlement.
If Mr Blair does have Narcissistic personality disorder then it puts his attack on Jeremy Corbyn in context. Mr Corbyn’s standing and huge support is a repudiation of everything Tony Blair stood for in the Labour Party and as you will see if you read into the disorder that fact alone would justify a very critical and personal response from a repudiated narcissist designed to undermine the threat and inflate their own ego.
The reality is Tony Blair, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, etc were never in charge of the USA/UK. Do you honestly believe that George Bush was in charge of the most powerful country in the world?? The man is an idiot and a recovering alcoholic. Do you really believe that the World’s powers would allow the normal people to elect who controls the world?? Come on, Grow up. You might accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, which is often used to disparage people and their opinions, but its the truth: the World is under the control of very small, elite groups of people who use Presidents, Dictators and Prime Ministers like puppets on strings, exactly like a mafia would. These people use their vast power and wealth to buy people off. If some cant be bought then they are killed. Simple. President John F Kennedy was one.
Henry Kissinger is maybe one of the most powerful Zionists in the World. President Obama’s staff is full of Zionists and their supporters. Out of all the presidential candidates only 1 hasn’t sworn devout loyalty to modern day Israel and that’s Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man, who said he will stand up for the Palestinian people and I think he has proved he’s genuine and means what he says by the letter he wrote to Margaret Thatcher condemning her for her treatment of Irish POW’s in the North, which was revealed a few weeks ago. All the others, from Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump, are prostituting themselves to Israel and the Zionist Lobby in the White House.
Blair, like Bush, served his masters and was very handsomely paid for it. His net worth is estimated to be over £50 million according to one source and his wife is a wealthy barrister who runs her own chambers in London.
Its important people learn to question absolutely everything the media says. Why the media? because that’s possibly the most powerful tool on the Earth at the minute, its everywhere, its even now in our mobile phones so it is even apart of us in many ways…..