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A. Pedant

 
So it’s all Bliar’s fault…

In the wake of the mid-term election results from the US, it is interesting to note the reaction of Kenneth Adelman, “…a lifelong hawk and neocon icon…” According to this article, in Monday 6th November’s Grauniad “The idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world is dead, [at least for a generation]”. The article continues:

[Adelman], too, is scathing about administration incompetence and Mr Bush’s security advisers - “these are not serious people…"

Bloody hell! He’s dead right: if they’d been serious, they’d have invaded Burma instead and restored democracy there. Burma is a naturally democratic country and the last elections there (1989/90) were trumped by the army. Now there’s a place where the general populace would have danced in the street to welcome a UN or US invasion. To understand why the "wrong" country was chosen, we only have to ask: where’s Burma’s oil and how did the country humiliate Bush Senior?

Adelman is one of the simplistic PNAC idiots, too. I read an article this morning quoting him as saying that it was all Tony Blair’s fault for not pointing out the many errors being made by the Bush camp over Iraq, post-invasion.

I haven’t been able to find the article but my memory isn’t playing tricks: I watched Adelman being interviewed by Jon Snow on Channel Four’s News at Seven last night and he said the same old nonsense. Adelman said that it was sometimes necessary to hit an American with a bit of “two by four” - I’m not completely sure he was being figurative (that should have been “four by two” for Airstrip One readers) - to get his attention. Can you imagine our Tony being that pushy? And with the closed minds of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney & Co opposite, would he have got anywhere?

What still puzzles me is why Bliar got involved in the first place. As the whole strategy falls apart, we’re all saying “I told you so”. (See Josh ad nauseam, going back to before the invasion). As the Irishman said: “I wouldn’t start from here”.

So, laying the blame for the tragedy on Bliar is unfair; we can blame him for getting Airstrip One involved and that’s a subject about which I’ve got a lot more to say. It won’t be more than a few days before I say it.
posted by josh at 4:33 pm