Not so long ago I was the focus of widespread anger (and abuse) for suggesting that the Boys’ Brigade might have a military element to it. More recently Jeremy Corbyn was hauled over the coals for saying that, as Jews should not be held responsible for the actions of Israel, Muslims should not be held responsible for the actions of ISIS.
Today the Chilcot Report came out, finding that the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and a country plunged into chaos, was unjustified. A great number of MPs at the time voted for the invasion, even though it didn’t have UN backing. The Labour Party’s Yvette Cooper, for example, voted for the invasion – and voted against investigation of the rights and wrongs of the invasion. The Labour Party’s Angela Eagle, who has threatened to stand in a Labour Party leadership contest against Jeremy Corbyn, voted for the invasion. The prominent Labour MP Hilary Benn voted for the invasion. Jeremy Corbyn did not vote for the invasion. Jeffrey Donaldson of the DUP voted for the invasion. Nigel Dodds of the DUP voted for the invasion. Ian Paisley of the DUP voted for the invasion.
I could go on but here’s the thing. Does anyone know what programmes on TV and/or radio will be hauling these people over the coals, demanding an explanation of the part they played in facilitating an illegal invasion and the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people? Or will it be confined to them being flayed by prominent columnists in the press?
Don’t hold your breath, Jude.
But Jude, you realise the only casualty statistics of interest to British politicians is the 179 of their military personnel who were killed during the Iraq killing fields.
No one has ever counted the number of innocent Iraqi men, women and children who were slaughtered in the deliberate ‘shock and awe’ perpetrated by the UK and US killers in uniform.
And this was deliberate policy, showing how inconsequential those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives were to the invaders!
Who gave Tony Blair the authority to police the planet ?
Those who voted in favour of invasion have the blood of thousands
on their hands ! Arlene’s party, I’m sure, would like to rewrite the history
of yet another glorious British military failure.
If there is a transatlantic trade deal and a united states of Europe closely allied to the US who is pressing for further advancement east, do you think the UN will survive Jude?
You have highlighted how the US has given the fingers up to the UN and did what it wants in the middle east anyway, Russia followed the lead of the US over Syria against ISIS and I think the seeds have been sewn on how future meddling in the middle east will be responded to by our super powers. It was certainly more effective from a Russian point of view to just mirror US aggression.
The five biggest arms exporters in 2010 to 2014 were the United States, Russia, China, Germany and France, and the five biggest importers were India, Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Pakistan.
Germany since then has almost doubled production and is promoting a new single army of the EU.
http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-arms-exports-rise-to-75-billion-euros/a-19061170
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry
I do indeed see your point Jude, that we focus more on the smaller wrongs around us and ignore the much greater wrongs which may be less in your face.
The EU is a perfect example of this in action.
Who would have thought after WW2 that Germany would control almost all of Europe and be one of the planets largest arms producers with Europe’s second largest army behind France and catching up?
You forgot to mention that the UK comes in a gallant sixth…
Not sure yet how the US / UK relationship will pan out after brexit though.
The US and Germany are certainly on the same page. It would not surprise me if the US brought them closer together again though for that very reason.
I should clarify though, I am not a supporter of the current UK and I hope it breaks apart.
If it does, I imagine England will have to reduce their arms budget considerably.
Unlikely the special relationship will be worth too much then.
The biggest threat to Ireland is from a massive influx of British army coming over to man the border. I wont be expecting any help from the EU or the republic if we let that happen.
guess what industry our tds,meps senators etc. have their massive pensions invested in.?
“guess what industry our tds,meps senators etc. have their massive pensions invested in.?”
I have no idea Martin?
I will guess that it is in the arms industry based on the conversation. And certainly it seems a safe bet for capital investment if not somewhat morally questionable.
Isn’t it funny, how a nation can be branded racist for refusing to employ someone from another country within the EU but if it throws hundreds of millions into arms production investments which go towards the daily slaughter of thousands of people in further away countries then no-one gives a damn.
As the Frenchman said, Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.
Or was it Dave Mustaine?
Jessica the Uk is not your great white hope.
The British have the biggest share of the F -35 fighter jet disaster outside of Lockheed.
The New USA Trident submarines will have a shared missile compartment with the 4 x British submarines.
The USA is so bankrupt that it now depends on the poddle to help pay for it’s military boon dongles.
The difference between Britain and the Philipenes?
The Phillipenes get paid whereas the Uk pays; to be Americas B**** ( Female dog ).
Don’t expect any enlightenment coming from that quarter anytime soon.
I have no doubt you are right Oz, but hopefully it will be England and not the UK.
If the English did send troops back over here to control the border, I would be very upset if any Scottish troops came with them.
Would you say the US is so bankrupt that the only possible way it could get out of it, would be to encourage the EU to extend ever eastwards until another world war erupts once again not on their continent?
Jessica, Russia was asked by the Syrian government(whether we like it or not they are the sovereign rulers of that country under international law) to come to their aid in fighting ISIS. NATO etc went into overdrive to enter Syria without the Syrian govts invitation. They broke international law. Alas international law is a farce; Blair etc ignored it in Iraq and afterwards and to this day have engineered ways to ensure they are not held responsible. If one side(west) declares its their way or the highway then it’s only a matter of time before some nations call them to task.
Btw, NATO sure did go into panic mode and enter Syria conflict once Russia entered the fray. They knew Putin would not be working to overthrow the govt but tackling ISIS etc so why the panic? Because NATO didn’t want to fight ISIS, it was using ISIS to overthrow Assad. The muppets like Hilary benn etc who voted to bomb Syria know this. They just buttered it up to make it more digestible for the public. ISIS is a proxy for the west to destabilise the Middle East countries it does not like and to strike fear into Europeans that happen to waver and question NATO/EU/US violence in other countries.
“ISIS is a proxy for the west to destabilise the Middle East countries it does not like and to strike fear into Europeans that happen to waver and question NATO/EU/US violence in other countries.”
I believe you are right WT. Though Russia have been showing off their might in recent years, I always felt it was in response to what the US and its allies were doing in the middle east.
Not sure if the US actually created ISIS but they certainly arm them through their arms trade routes via Turkey and funded through Saudi.
They haven’t been hiding it very well that they were using them to cause disruption in the middle east which they have been trying to control but not always successfully, it was indeed obvious that things were no longer satisfactory when Russia came into the fray against ISIS as they also attacked the other groups the US were arming within Syria to overthrow Assad and evened things up.
Its like putting Cobras into a room and trying to get them to bite who you want them to. You risk getting bit yourself.
I would watch or listen to any programme featuring Donaldson, Dodds or even Willie Frazer(perhaps Willie would be too much) in relation to this issue.
The main assurances we were given on the subject of WMD were from Bush, Blair and Netenyahoo( deliberate spelling mistake). That immediately made me sure Iraq had no such weapons. Blair was so sure he said they could be released on the world in 45 minutes. How is that for accuracy? The three mentioned above are war criminals. No Jude not Jeffrey Nigel or Willie they are only extreme bigots.
A 2.6 Million word report.
That’s about one word for each Arab man, woman and child, butchered, maimed and destroyed since Blairs’ ‘massacre of the innocents’ began.
Blairs’ Corporate Masters: Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Thales, Northrup Grumman, and every Bank you can name, earned Trillions.
Blair earned Millions.
Modern Mesopotamia, an advanced and highly educated Arab nation was reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble.
The plan has always been to ‘wreck’ the Middle East in order that there would be one powerbase in control. It is a work in progress.
Madeline, Jana Korbel Albright- (US ambassador to UN) said ‘we think its worth it’, when asked about the murder of half a million Iraqi babies through US/UK sanctions.
And now the ‘presstitutes’ who have always deceived us, have mastered the art of ‘simultaneous ventriloquism’ from both sides of their mouths, with a press carnival intended to present a facade of justice.
And then the sheeple will settle for partial integrity.
Blair and his ‘gangster’ mates will go unpunished.
Blair will have no date with the ‘hangman’.
Because EVERYTHING is RIGGED.
Blair wanted to please his master Bush who treated him like a manservant anyway (yo! Blair…) in much the same way Monica Lewinski pampered Clinton. The British media are bleating on about the rubbish material their jeeps were made from, no odds about the thousands of innocent Muslims blasted into eternity. Any wonder we have Islamic Fascists running around butchering people, they learned their art from the west. Nobody in their right mind gave a fig when the yanks routed the Taliban, good riddance, but George W decided to get rid of Saddam because he had tried to kill his father. Those Texans don`t forget. The sight of Tony Blair strutting around with his fingers in his belt like a pathetic cowboy will live long in the memory and people like Angela Eagle and Hilary Benn are now exposed as the treacherous knaves we knew them to be. Jeremy Corbyn was right about Ireland and he was right about Iraq.As for the likes of Paisley, Dodds and co. they would do whatever their perceived betters tell them.
Awk it’s ok Jude, Blair trully believed he was doing the right thing, (bollocks btw) so it’s ok apparently, no matter if it cost the deaths of 1,000s of innocent men, women and children blown to oblivion by there tons of bombs, dropped by their top guns in the sky on a basically defenseless country, we will never know the names of their victims unlike their precious barely 200 military deaths. Oh and apparently we live in a safer world by the removal of Saddam, god has Blair been hiding in a hole like saddam the last 10 yrs.
Look no further than see
the Super Embassies and consulates that the USA is building in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanastan.
They are in those Countries and they mean to stay.
Shame our unionist moral brethern have a huge problem with Irish Nationalist violence.
But bank their paychecks for British poddle of American Empire.
Nuts.Morals?? Not on your life.
It is not universally known, Eststeemed Blogmeister, that ISIS has its own notorious version of Oscar Pistorius.
As recounted in ‘Black Flags: the Rise of ISIS’ by Joby Warrick :
-Their first efforts at jihad in Jordan had been anything but glorious. Indeed, one of the early attempts at a bombing had been a spectacular failure. A member of the group had volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema in Amman called the Salwa. After a few minutes in the theatre, the would-be assailant had become so engross in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No patrons were hurt , but the bomber lost both his legs.
Six years later, the double-amputee was among the inmates in the al-Jafr Prison…..where he came under the ever-loving care of Zarquawi’.
Zarquawi, of course, became the scowling, jowly Bogey Man of Al-Queda in the Most Wanted Posters in the Levant. That ended abruptly when two USA Air Force Jets dropped two 500 pound laser-guided bombs on his safe house (alleged) on June 7, 2006. Leaving five other ‘collaterals’ not only without their legs but their lives as well.
That most penal of prisons (al-Jafr) was built in 1953 under the supervision of (gulp) British military overseers in a part of the Jordanian desert where David Lean filmed ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. He described this Allah-forsaken spot as ‘the most desolate spot on earth, if not hell itself’.
So, how come this house of detention (its rancid food was never likely to attract the attention of Egon Ronay) came to be built under British military supervision ? Can there be possibly (gulp) a back-story to the Chilcot Report ?
Stretching even as far back as The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1917) iself ????
At first glance this might appear to be some class of a deal worked out between a pair of cross-channel comedians (one English, one French) not to plagiarise each other’s jokes. (Especially, the bits lost in translation).
This is only partly true: while both were indubitably of a comic disposition their business was about more than having their audiences rolling in the aisle for a one-night only shows. In fact, 99 years later, heads , if not complete torsos, continue to roll down the oil-rich sandlands.
They were in the business of celebrating the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by carving up the Levant into, erm, ‘spheres of affluence, oops, influence’.
This Sykes is not to be confused with another Sikes: same name, minus the y-front. The other Sikes was a fictional character, of course, in ‘Oliver Twist’. He had a ferocious pet dog, a bull-terrier called Bull’s Eye. He was not adverse to crying havoc, and letting slip his warrior dog.
It could well be 6 to 5 that both Sykes and Sikes were indeed related.
So we’ll just say that …Tony Blair, aided and abetted by the likes of Sammy, Jeffrey, Nigel ,Ian and the rest of the DUP sheeples, involved themselves in an illegal war which caused the deaths of thousands of men , women and small children …including those wonderful British boys who were sent out with equipment that was falling apart….etc …etc…Lovely… …lovely people….
…and Jeremy Corbyn and a lot of us ranting and raving to the moon , thought that they had got it completely wrong and they were actually criminals involved in a criminal act ..What else have we been right about? .
Then again , it’s a topsy -turvy old world out there . News has just come in that the “Bladerunner “Oscar has been handed down a six-year sentence for murdering his girlfriend. Six years for murder? That’s not a bad result , eh? You can see that a lfe hasn’t really much value in this modern world, so why wouldn’t a criminal and his buddies invade a country and kill lots of people? In Norneverland you’ll get fined a ransom for running a red -light but you can light a huge fire anywhere you fancy, burn the place down, burn racist effigies, bring out the fire-services at great expence… and that’s just Jim Dandy…no charge at all!
Sorry for harping on about it Harry, but I see the same inherent evil manipulating the direction of the EU, yet the majority of people including yourself are quite content with what is happening. Jeremy Corbyn is anti EU, has he got that one wrong do you think? You are certainly not on the same page with Corbyn on the EU.
I never realised myself what was going in either until the brexit opened my eyes to what the EU really is.
Here is an example of a war some experts believe the EU at least played a part in starting.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict
Are all these human lives lost really worth the freedom for you to live and travel around Europe hassle free?
Apparently many think it is.
I’m not on the same page as a hell of a lot of people , Jessica. …certainly not on every single topic.For example , I have a lot of time for Eamon McCann who did not support this war either, but I ‘m not a catchfart for his every squeak.That means I can simply pick and choose what I think is wrong or right. In this specific case I very surely thought that to invade Iraq was a very ill-considered thing to do at the time.I was convinced that Tony Blair’s tail was being wagged by Bush. I supposed that Blair wanted to do something BIG. It was much of the reason why he wanted to solve the Irish question too . Don’t get me wrong on that one …everyone wanted the Irish question solved at that time and we were glad for anyone …USA…the EU ..anyone who would provide some input ..an outsider’s viewpoint and cash..He saw himself as a player in a historical way.The hand of history and all that old crap. He was evangelical about it. The man before us now is much depleted and much older compared to the young gung-ho politician who argued his case with the women whose sons and husbands he sent them to their deaths . For a so-called rich country , their troops were ill-equipped which might mean thta they’re not as rich as they’d like us to believe or that they are penny-pinchers who wanted to play wargames on the cheap.
In the case of the EU. I still believe it was foolish to vote “Leave” . That’s my opinion in the round and when all the headless chickens who have no real idea what to do next, stop flapping about and knifing each other we’ll either be in the very same place or a poorer place. I don’t think we’ll gain too much from leaving balanced against what we have lost.I think that those who are unemployed will still be unemployed and I think immigrants will continue to arrive and live in the UK.
None of us know yet because nobody thought it would actually happen. I don’t think it will do any of us any good and has so far only exposed and fanned a nasty racism that is always there when people need scapegoats…but that’s done and dusted now. It’s now last week’s news, wrapping the fish and chips..We’ll all live with whatever results from it as we’ve always done before and not one of us really knows how that will pan out.
Maybe in twenty years when I’m 84 I’ll be able to tell you whether the choice was right or wrong.Tony Blair surely didn’t think that the price for getting rid of Saddam would result in the chaos that followed or the subsequent ruin of his own personal political narrative, some fourteen years later.
I suppose none of us are Harry, which is why I enjoy this site so much and learn a lot from it, including from yourself even though I often disagree with you as I am sure you are aware.
I would agree with a lot of your points.
Blair did want his name in history and felt the US was going to do something big in response to 9/11 and didn’t want to be left out.
In terms of the EU, I believe the EU have made most of the mistakes.
They were wrong not to do more to reform which would have avoided the vote altogether or ensured everyone stayed together,
I don’t know why they didn’t, but they are now talking about making the reforms Britain wanted in the first place as many other nations wanted them also and other net contributors will be stuffed without England in the free market, plus they need the cash and have threatened immediate action if it isn’t maintained during this period.
I think both sides gambled and neither thought the vote would go the way it did.
I also think many nations if they held a referendum would go the same way which is why these reforms will now happen, including changes on immigration.
So things are not going to stay the same regardless, everything has changed and yes no one seems to know what to do about it.
I think Boris wlll be the lead negotiator and that England will be negotiating its own trade deals with the rest of the world including the EU and will not be tied to the EU as before, another change.
It isn’t the leave vote that is fanning the flames of racism, the Nazi party is on the rise in Germany and the AfD want Germany out of the EU
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36722818
Their popularity was not down to the UK leaving.
The National Front in France and right wing groups in a range of EU countries has been on the rise.
It the Tories had not allowed the referendum a right wing party would have ended up with a majority in England, just as it will in Austria first, then a range of other EU nations including Germany.
Racism and Bigotry is an end product of denial of or threat to national identity, we should know that in NI better than anyone.
In his eve-of-battle speech, Tim Collins stated,
“…Iraq is steeped in history…It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham…There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly…Wipe them out if that is what they choose…let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.”
The deaths in Iraq in the past week suggest an absence of stability and that it is not a better place as a result of military intervention.
Where now for the serial critics of Mr Corbyn and Mr Blair’s spin doctors? Mr Blair’s leadership resulted in death and destruction in one of the cradles of civilization and questions remain about a death in Oxfordshire. There are many unanswered questions about the role of Mr Blair in facilitating the war in Iraq and many questions remain unanswered about the death of Dr David Kelly, scientist and authority on biological warfare. Dr Kelly used evidence to support conclusions and suspended judgement in the absence of evidence. A war could have been avoided had Mr Blair taken heed of public opinion and based his judgement on evidence available in 2002.
Why do I feel a bit queasy when I read Col. Collins’s (no relation) oration? Is it that it has a sense of being too highly polished?And how fortunate that this address, intended he says only for his soldiers in the RIR, got out to the world. Personally, if I were scripting a Hollywood movie, I’d reject it as just too schmaltzy for weak stomachs…
Antaine de Brun
I winced after I read, what I thought was text from a UDR recruitment pamphlet, – introducing your comment.
To even include a quote, from such a vile creature – whose purpose was to encourage ‘butchery’ of the innocents, to a bunch of brain-dead repulsive British Army zombies, – is beyond my comprehension.
Well it sure ain’t no f***ing ‘Garden of Eden’ now ,- thanks to Mr ‘Eve of Battle’ and his murdering criminal speeches.
Your affectionately so called ‘Colonel’ should be at the gallows now with his ‘Commander in Chief’ Blair.
And his nauseating speeches should be where they belong – in the gutter !
He should be jailed for war crimes and locked up for good.
Perhaps that would make future administrations think twice before ordering troops into foreign soil. Any attempt to send troops back to Ireland to man the border should also be considered a declaration of war.
rich mans war.
poormans blood.
Jude, I listened to Tim Collins on tv earlier and it seems that his favourite affectation ( apart from revving people up to kill other people) is to speak with an anglicised accent. He appears singularly intent on pretending to be British, even though I’m sure his ‘fellow solidiers’ just see him as an eccentric paddy. All very depressing.
Well said, excellent!