“Ah, Love!
Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!”
The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam
Following Tony
Blair’s non-apology, apology I thought back to when I first realised that he
was mad. It was at the Labour party conference, after nine eleven, in Brighton in 2001 and the speech
when he said, “This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The
pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us
re-order this world around us.”
When I heard
this I thought this bloke is a megalomaniac and my legs refused to draw me into
an upright position and I was left the only person in my row not joining in the
standing ovation.
Upon leaving
the hall I was asked by a journalist what I thought about the speech I said
that it reminded of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam written in the eleventh century
and bought to Victorian English readers by Edward Fitzgerald, the speech had a
similar rhythm to its quatrains and it contained the same moral ambiguity.
Needless to say he gave me a funny look.
This speech
was essentially a version of one Blair had given in Chicago in 1999, labelled
the ‘Blair Doctrine’ by US commentators; it was as Gore Vidal so clearly
articulated the case of “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace”.
That speech
in Chicago was a game-changer because it completely cut the ground from under
the democrats in opposing George W. Bush and his later adventures in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Blair gave Bush the language he himself did not have.
Brighton was
Blair at the very peak of his oratorical powers in the previous paragraph, he
had said, “The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those
living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of
Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.”
Now his
follower David Cameron is not so keen on welcoming those huddled masses to our
shores. What should have been a job for the police to arrest Bin Laden, who it
now appears, was hiding in plain sight, has turned in to a thirty years war
that covers the entire area Blair so poetically described.
What amazes
me about many contemporary politicians especially those who talk about “abroad”
is how ignorant they are. Something has
gone badly wrong here. We used to govern a fair chunk of the world’s surface
and yes it may well have been for the wrong reasons but we knew what was going
on in the world.
Now we hear politicians of all colours talking
complete nonsense about international relations in a way that is symptomatic of
the neo-conservative world view. International relations should not be decided
upon using mere facts. We must first shape the facts and then the world to our
hearts desire.
The greatest
exponent of this shape shifting before Blair and the Dodgy Dossier was George W
Bush’s head of Strategy Karl Rove. In an interview with Ron Suskind of the New
York Times he said that guys like Ron were
"in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as
people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality." .... "That's not the way the world really works
anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as
you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study
too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all
of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Now
initially David Cameron was not a Neo-Con he was from an earlier school of
conservative political realism. He had been a reluctant supporter of the Iraq
war and had been critical of Israel. On achieving the top job however it did
not take long, he too became a Neo-Con, and with French President Sarkozy,
leading the way in the intervention in Libya and only two years ago he would
have intervened militarily against President Assad if parliamentary had not
stopped him.
Mr Cameron
regularly seeks advice from Blair who was one of those urging him to bomb
Libya. In foreign policy Cameron can be seen as Blair’s protégé. They are both solid supporters of the Gulf
dictatorships, of Netanyahu’s Israel, and are totally hostile to democratic
movements within Islam, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood. Now not a week
seems to go by without some dictator crossing the Number 10 threshold.
Then there
is Chilcott, Cameron has clearly protected Tony Blair. This inquiry was meant
to publish its conclusions within 18 months of the British withdrawal from Iraq
in 2007 and we are still waiting and what happened to the investigation into
British complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition during the Blair
premiership?
Listening to
many Labour MP’s including sad to say Mike Gapes and John Woodcock recently
they have clearly been bitten by the Neo-Con bug. To his credit Ed Miliband was
trying to move Labour away from this position. By opposing intervention in
Syria and by whipping Labour MP’s in support of a Palestinian state.
In a foreign
policy speech before the election he made the case for the rule of law,
international institutions and diplomatic engagement, and against the idea of American
exceptionalism.
This work is
now being carried on by Jeremy Corbyn who is now Britain’s finest advocate for
human rights and we must not let him standalone against this empire of lies. On
hearing Tony Blair back in 1999, that old hawk Henry Kissinger had said he “felt
a little bit uneasy” about the inference that this was a good moment to solve
every problem in the world.
We should
all be uneasy if the world continues to be shaped by people with a wanton lack
of concern for the truth, human rights, and life itself.
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