21 October 2007

Blair accuses Iran of fuelling 'deadly ideology' of militant Islam

What is this criminal doing as a Middle East 'peace envoy'? Along with George Bush, José María Aznar, former Spanish President, and Durão Barroso, former PM of Portugal now President of the EU, Tony Blair is co-author of the supreme crime, the war of aggression on Iraq, and as such is responsible for the deaths of over a million Iraqis, a genocide if ever there was one.

Now he's not pig ignorant (is he?), and considering his past modus operandi (MO) we must therefore assume that these utterances are pure spin in attributing this to Iran:

"Analogies especially with the rise of fascism can be misleading but, in pure chronology, I sometimes wonder if we're not in the 1920s, if not the 1930s, I fear ... This ideology now has a state - Iran that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace ... There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone. I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone...When terror opposes that which is right, we must commit to defeating it not with half a heart but whole-heartedly.".

As David Cox points out in the Guardian "Blair could have pointed out that a complex country like Iran with not much to gain from war has little in common with a heavily militarised fascist state intent on annexing the territory of its neighbours. He might have suggested that one of the few things capable of uniting Iran's disparate peoples behind militarism would be an attack by western forces...Western politicians who claim to understand Islamic theology better than the faith's own scholars seem likely only to encourage jihadist recruitment. Iran may well acquire nuclear weapons, as Pakistan, arguably a rather more dangerous place, has already done. The task of our politicians now is to work out how to live with these realities, not to whip up futile bellicosity."

Inayat Bunglawala, also in the Guardian, weighs in with a few facts, which unsurprisingly point away from Blair's hysterical rant:

"If any country can be said to be an ideological influence on al-Qaida, it would surely be the Saudi kingdom, not Iran. Bin Laden is a Saudi and Saudi Arabia was home, you will recall, to 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11. And by all accounts, al-Qaida still receives some support from individuals inside the Saudi kingdom, whereas Iran with its Shia government is despised vehemently by the avowedly anti-Shia al-Qaida. So why are Blair and his neo-con chums not gunning for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy?"

"Saudi Arabia is, of course, a loyal client state of the United States, whereas Iran's main sin is that since its 1979 Islamic revolution, for all its many failures and inadequacies, it has been a far more independent nation than most in the Middle East and dares to follow a foreign policy agenda which does not exactly conform to the US vision of how the Middle East should be."

"If Blair really believes it is wrong to destabilise other countries, why did he not utter a word about the millions of dollars the United States unashamedly spends in trying to destabilise the Iranian government? If Blair is so exercised by terrorism why did he - standing alone with Bush among world leaders - turn a blind eye to Israel's indiscriminate bombing and invasion of Lebanon last summer? Were the families of the hundreds of Lebanese killed by Israeli bombs not deserving of our sympathy and help every bit as much as those of the victims of 9/11? "

We also need to remember that Blair is personally implicated in the corruption case of British Aerospace and Saudi bribes...and that since May Swiss prosecutors have been investgating.

And lets not forget the export by the Saudis of their particular fundamentalist version of Islam, Wahhabism, to all corners of the world, especially Africa (including Morocco, Somalia,
Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Mauritania and Chad) and even into the heart of Europe (Bosnia, Kosovo). Some even consider that Wahhabism contributed to the development of the religious ideology of Al-Qaeda.

Talking of Kosovo, according to Dusan Prorokovic, spokesman of the DSS party of Premier Vojislav Kostunica in Serbia "NATO is pushing for an independent Kosovo chiefly so as to set up a "logistics base" for military operations."

On other fronts, Justin Raimondo's blog offers a word of advice: Follow the money, regarding the fact that "The military-industrial complex is clearly betting on the Democrats, who, for the first time, are beating out the GOP in raising money from the war profiteers. What’s more, they’ve clearly settled on Hillary as their horse in this race"

The NYT has a decent article on Guantanamo whistle-blower Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz, now languishing in prison in Charleston having been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and dismissal from the military for posting a list of Guantanamo inmates to Barbara Olshansky at the "New York offices of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a left-wing legal-advocacy group that counted itself among the most zealous opponents of the administration’s Guantanamo policy"

More tales in today's Observer about the nazi-style behaviour of the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, includes testimony like this: "'The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.'"

"The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: 'After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived... So we do a first patrol with him. It's 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn't so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers.
'He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock...
'The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing."

And then we have more on the Valerie Plame leak, which has turned out to be an important own goal as her job "was to keep nukes from Iran"! Or was it that people like Cheney want an ignorant CIA to blame for lack of intelligence once the US has attacked Iran?

More Murdoch propaganda on Iran that "SAS raiders enter Iran to kill gunrunners" with no mention whatsoever that these activities are not legal and could be interpreted as terrorism...but then who in the Murdock empire give a fuck?

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