Blair says 'time to heal divisions' (over Iraq) - BBC

Excuse me while I throw up. The man clearly has no shame.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3258325.stm

Well if Tony says so, I guess we'll all just stop arguing and settle down. Twat! King Twat!

When both your scrawny necks are hanging at the War Crimes Tribunal.

oh that they would be--never will happen

meeting in London this past Saturday to discuss his being tried for war crimes.

Mr Blair concluded that with Europe and America together, the world was a "darn sight safer".

DemEx

Yes, we pulled you into this war. Yes, our women and men are dying. No, there are no WMD's. No, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Yes, we lied our asses off and thousands died.

Now, it's time to heal this rift and all you whiners need to support us because this is harder than we thought and, quite frankly, you guys are a distraction.

He reminds me of a battered wife who is trying to explain
how her husband isn't Hitler:

"Mr Blair said it was people's democratic right to protest against Mr Bush's visit.

But he urged: "Accept that the task now is not to argue about what has been, but to make what is happening now work and work for the very Iraqis we all say we want to help."

BWAHAHAHAHAA! A small 'rump' of terrorists created this picture
of us!?!:

For that group, a democratic Iraq would mean "the death of the poisonous propaganda monster about America these extremists have created in the minds of much of the world".

This is an odd comment. He likes what ... war? peace? holding the
world hostage:

He went on: "The blunt conclusion is that like it or not, and I do, the EU and US must work with each other. Start from that point and a number of other things fall into place.

This is the primo comment:

Mr Blair concluded that with Europe and America together, the world was a "darn sight safer".

WHERE!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!

Because nothing could even theoretically be worse than for the Codpiece Strutter to see hundreds of thousands of pissed-off Brits getting right up in his face.

Yeah, Tony, THAT'LL work.

sit down and shut up about Iraq Invasion

grrrrrrrrrrr :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

eff himself. What's the matter, the heat getting too much for him?

Someone says it, and that means they are automatically a concerned and compassionate individual who wants to get past all the hurts and smooth the scars--no way--Blair uses it here to invoke an image of a Christ who healed--Blair has no idea of what "heal" means--all he knows is that if you say that word, people will become entranced with imaginary and ethereal images of a god who miraculously appears to fix things--but never appears to bring back to life those who are dead because of that same religion. Blair is using it to invoke a mesmerizing compliance.

all he knows is that if you say that word, people will become entranced with imaginary and ethereal images of a god who miraculously appears to fix things

And the god in this instance appears to be Tony Blair. :eyes: Here is a good article on the matter

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,545551,00.html

Private Eye beat its rivals cold by defining Tony Blair as the the vicar of St Albion's Parish; it's the image which has stuck. Admittedly, Ian Hislop, the editor, let out a despairing 'I take this as a personal insult' during the election campaign when he saw a casually jacketless Blair pose in front of a stained-glass window and lead hundreds of ecstatic schoolgirls into the hymn 'We are the Children of the Future', which the PM clearly was not. His understandable frustration at years of hard satirical work having no impact on the target was misplaced for all that.

He could equally have taken the pious photo-opportunity as a backhanded compliment. Private Eye had got Blair's measure, even if Blair hadn't got the joke. By playing with the stock caricature of the trendy vicar, it could claim to have captured his faults. The vicar is a power-mad egotist; he speaks English as if he learned it in an evangelical summer camp in Finland; he is meretricious, priggish, bossy, vacuous, simpering, dogmatic, vainglorious, saccharine, platitudinous and phoney to the core.

Every inch of the ground is covered except one. The trouble with the vicar parody is that the most militant atheists in Britain don't believe vicars are evil. The mild anti-clerical tradition doesn't go that far, even Richard Dawkins doesn't go that far. But you can't understand Blair unless you recognise the streaks of malevolence in his politics and cowardice in his character.

The audacity of this man is sickening. I can scarcely believe that he presumes the the entire world can disregard every concern, every illegality raised prior to this war's start and forgive one of the main villains during this odious period in our history.

I mean, we are still bombing, right? And the surgeon says to the patient 'time to heal' while his knife still cuts, while the operation continues??

The only reason Bush (or Karl Rove) thinks this asinine comment might work is because the American public is so uninformed about what is happening in Iraq, they don't even know we are still bombing??

Reminds me of stories of the Japanese government propaganda while the U.S. was bombing Japan..they told their people all the time that Japan was close to victory..a Japanese friend's father then questioned it privately to his family..'if we are winning, why are all these American planes flying over our territory?'

HEAL?!!? Does that mean 'just learn to live with a permanent state of war' to Bush?

Sorry for the rant.

If they want healing why not use the cure of turning Iraq over to the UN?

murdering fascists!

Everybody in the whole world seems to rightfully hate us and our warmongering President -- which makes Tony Blair truly weird. Either he's smoking some real bad stuff or he's got so much hubris up his butt, it's coming out his mouth.

Admit you lied. Admit you conspired with the Pretzel-Dunce. Admit it was all a scam to control all the Mideast's oil and pocket the profits. Admit you were willing to subvert your country and your responsbility as its leader to make it all have. Beg the UN for forgiveness and help. And then resign. Let the healing begin!


rocknation

grrrrrrrr

Probably a good idea to have a bucket handy.

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page4799.asp

"engagement not isolation is therefore essential to further British interests; and that this should be on the basis of a broad agenda pursued with our key allies that seeks both to combat the 21st century security threat of terrorism and unstable states and to bring social justice to the world's poor and oppressed."

That sounds like something Clinton has been saying for a couple years now.

I want to re-affirm the twin pillars on which rest Britain's place in the world today: our alliance with America; our membership of the EU.  Both are necessary.  Both complement each other. Take either away and Britain is weaker for it.  At present, I accept, there is a fairly narrow constituency for this view.  The Eurosceptics deride the one.  Resurgent anti-Americanism corrodes the other.  Even objective commentary takes some delight in seeing each pillar becoming detached from the structure it is maintaining, with a Prime Minister caught underneath with rather tired arms.

Perceptive.

I say to those who will protest when President Bush comes.  Protest if you will.  That is your democratic right.  Attack the decision to go to war, though have the integrity to realise that without it, those Iraqis now tasting freedom would still be under the lash of Saddam, his sons and their henchmen.  But accept that the task now is not to argue about what has been, but to make what is happening now, work and work for the very Iraqis we all say we want to help. 

Encouraging protests. I like that.

It is at this point my civil service brief said "and you could add that Tottenham even have an American playing in goal".  That's the Foreign Office at its best.  And actually so do Manchester United and Blackburn.  What is it with the US and goalkeeping?  But I digress.

Off the cuff joke? Or is he implying something.

After 6½ years in office, let me express to you the British Prime Minister's European dilemma: do you hope that Europe develops of its own accord in Britain's direction before participating; or do you participate at the outset in the hope of moving Europe in Britain's direction? The risk of the first is that you forfeit influence; of the second, that you are tied to something you don't like.  And again on the basis of my experience, my view is clear.  You participate.  Sometimes, as with the single currency, there may be reasons of economics to hang back.  But never do it for the politics of Euro-Scepticism. 

I agree with this. New Labour is not afraid to lead.

And I would take the dire predictions more seriously were it not for the fact that the naysayers said exactly the same after the Anglo-French summit at St Malo began the process of European defence 5 years ago; since when we have done Kosovo through NATO, Afghanistan through the UN and NATO, Iraq with the US and Sierra Leone on our own.  It has not inhibited us one iota from acting exactly as we would wish.  Neither will it.  The fact is British participation on the right terms, will ensure that European defence does indeed develop in a way fully consistent with NATO. 

Good point.

And where he is defines what team he "supports".

More charlatan lies, though I wish he'd keep it on this kind of scale.

If you were reading British newspapers, you'd know that little nugget.

But I digress:

Attack the decision to go to war, though have the integrity to realise that without it, those Iraqis now tasting freedom would still be under the lash of Saddam, his sons and their henchmen

I'd really love for somebody to point to Bliar making this point over and over again in back-to-back speeches, say, oh I dunno,before the US decided to attack Iraq.

Somebody with integrity would surely mention it lots of times from 1997-2003?

Or, maybe when bills in Parliament were being tabled by the current human rights envoy to Iraq in the 80/90's his name would be on them, pledging wholehearted opposition to the Beast of Baghdad? :shrug:

-- BLIAR OUT, BUSH GO HOME --

Apparently Blair supprts Newcastle United, although he's not exactly a noted football fan in the same way that say, Roy Hattersley is. (Mind you, as a fellow Wednesdayite I would say that :evilgrin: ) Blair just uses the analogies because they sound good, not because he has any real passion for the game.

"Protest if you will. That is your democratic right. Attack the decision to go to war, though have the integrity to realise that without it, those Iraqis now tasting freedom would still be under the lash of Saddam, his sons and their henchmen."


1. Blair means:

Protesting against illegal war of aggression = siding with Saddam

This is a lie and a disingenuous distortion of that comes straight
from the extreme-right playbook. Blair uses extreme-right methods to
defend an extreme-right policy. Make of that what you will.


2. Occupation phase with Bremer pressuring clerics, shutting down
non-compliant papers, shooting of reporters, quarantine of complete
villages and punitive air-strikes (which are collective punishments
forbidden by the Geneva conventions) are a "taste of freedom"...

And the thousands of innocent civilians that got killed by the US/UK
forces also got a jolly good taste of "freedom". Who will "heal" them,
Tony?

Freedom, yeah...


Healing will only come the day when Tony Blair is tried in the Hague.

The Saddam is a brutal dictator argument is one Bliar always uses when cornered on Iraq. However, it is an argument that shows Blair to be a massive hypocrite, as this article demonstrates.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1072313,00.html

There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

His crime, like that of many of the country's prisoners, was practising his religion. Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, learned his politics in the Soviet Union. He was appointed under the old system, and its collapse in 1991 did not interrupt his rule. An Islamist terrorist network has been operating there, but Karimov makes no distinction between peaceful Muslims and terrorists: anyone who worships privately, who does not praise the president during his prayers or who joins an organisation which has not been approved by the state can be imprisoned. Political dissidents, human rights activists and homosexuals receive the same treatment. Some of them, like in the old Soviet Union, are sent to psychiatric hospitals.

So what of Tony Blair, the man who claims that human rights are so important that they justify going to war? Well, at the beginning of this year, he granted Uzbekistan an open licence to import whatever weapons from the United Kingdom Mr Karimov fancies. But his support goes far beyond that. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has repeatedly criticised Karimov's crushing of democracy movements and his use of torture to silence his opponents. Like Roger Casement, the foreign office envoy who exposed the atrocities in the Congo a century ago, Murray has been sending home dossiers which could scarcely fail to move anyone who cares about human rights.

Blair has been moved all right: moved to do everything he could to silence our ambassador. Mr Murray has been threatened with the sack, investigated for a series of plainly trumped-up charges and persecuted so relentlessly by his superiors that he had to spend some time, like many of Karimov's critics, in a psychiatric ward, though in this case for sound clinical reasons. This pressure, according to a senior government source, was partly "exercised on the orders of No 10".

"Indeed the irony is that Euroscepticism is vocal just at the very point when it makes least sense in terms of Britain's relations with Europe. The most fundamental change in Europe for decades is taking place: enlargement to a Europe of 25, with Bulgaria and Romania to come in 2007 and Turkey now rightly pressing to enter accession negotiations. Europe is already the largest economic market and political alliance in the world. It will become bigger and the symbolism of Turkey, a Moslem nation and American ally, joining the EU could not be more epochal. But even with the 10 new members joining now, the change is extraordinary, not just in its scope but in its character. For these 10, by and large, share the same outlook, an outlook both familiar and welcome to Britain: in favour of economic reform, wedded, after their history of oppression and struggle, to a Europe of nation states; and for the same reason, unequivocally committed to the transatlantic alliance. They will not just be our political partners but our spiritual allies. The EU itself is for the first time pursuing a robust Security Strategy which recognises the threats we face and advocates the need for European action in partnership with the United States. Now is the very moment for Britain to participate fully in the Europe of the future. Now is the least propitious time for delusions of semi-detachment."

-----------------------------------
OK so the voting rights are weighted in favour of the most senior countries I think, but even so by 2007 it is u.s./british stooges 15 (10 + 2 + britain, spain, italy), Franco/German bloc 12.

Even now it is 13-12.

will influence profoundly the development of Arab States and the
Middle East. It will have far-reaching implications for the future
conduct of American and Western diplomacy."

He's right on that point, but perhaps not quite the way he thinks.


This whole speech shows either a man in deep denial, or a man who
thinks everybody else is stupid.

...camps?

And, by the way, something Edwards said on Meet the Whores strikes me as relevant:

MR. RUSSERT: Will you recommend that the president go to the French and apologize for the way he’s treated them?

SEN. EDWARDS: No. No. What I would recommend is that we as a nation go to the French, the Germans, all of our friends and say, “This is important. It’s important to the security of the world. It’s important for that region of the world’s success over the long term. We have the real potential of having a foothold for democracy in a part of the world where one’s desperately needed where the only democracy now is Israel. We have the chance for having democracy in an Arab country which is obviously important for precedence purposes.” So what I would say to them is, “We need you. We need your help. And we’re not asking you just to participate and follow our lead. We’re asking you to sit at the table, have a decision-making authority and take responsibility with us for moving this forward.”
MR. RUSSERT: And if they say “no,” we are there alone.
SEN. EDWARDS: Yeah, but I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that they’ll say “no” if, in fact, we give them some decision-making authority and give them a seat at the table.

I don't think Europe is going to enter a retroactive protest vote on anything that will come up with relation to Iraq. The region is too vital to Europe's future. From now on they're going to work with what they got, and they're going to vote to build a democracy, and to prevent chaos. If we have a Republican in the WH the battle is to prevent chaos. If we have a Democrat, there is no battle.

"Let me begin with Iraq. In eight days time, President Bush makes his State Visit to the United Kingdom. For many, the script of the visit has already been written. There will be demonstrations. His friends wonder at the timing. His enemies rub their hands at what they see as the potential embarrassment."


His friends wonder at the "timing?" Why would they wonder? He's visiting a country where the majority despise him.

:puke:

Jazzgirl

It so reminds me of a guy telling his wife that he cheated on her for years, and then a few weeks later, telling her it's time to "get over it"..:eyes:

I think it's, "Over? Over? It's not over until WE say it's over."

Your head on a platter is what we want!

I'll post a few of Phoney B:liar's quotes

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,1082435,00.html

"I believe this is exactly the right time for him to come."

Only if you really want Bush to have a big re-election photo opportunity. Blair really is 100% complicit in all that Bush has done.

"But accept that the task now is not to argue about what has been, but to make what is happening now work, and work for the very Iraqis we all say we want to help."

We who opposed war have been mulling very seriously over what should happen to Iraq Bliar, and I have yet to see you debate the issue of a UN takeover seriously, let alone make any atempt to put right that which is going wrong at present.

Mr Blair acknowledged the confrontation with France over Iraq and the continuing fall-out from it. "It is true also that there is an antipathy in parts of the French political es tablishment to America. But don't exaggerate it."

Do not try and brush legitamate concerns about an out of control US junta aside either. And capitiulating to the PNAC over the protests willonly make things worse.

:hurts:

We have so many singers interpreting it! It beats "Yesterday"!

has driven Blair insane. 9/11 drove Bushie, the already weak minded idiot son of a skank old rag of a woman MAD! The combination of those two is truely a spectacle of shame to behold and an example to the world, "Proverbs 29:2 But when a wicked man rules, people groan."

that no one will play these trump cards to get him booted out.

it's to (part of) a poem, commonly spoken at British Remembrance Day (today) services:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

He is so loyal to his Corporate Masters,

of Michael Moore's remark:

"Bush is an idiot. What's Blair's excuse?"