9/11. 3/11. Then 7/7. On July 7th, 2005, 4 bombers murdered 52 Britons (and themselves) and injured over 700 hundred more. In response, British Prime Minister Tony appeared on television, pledging to defend "our values" and "our way of life," saying "It is important that the terrorists realize our determination to defend our values and our way of life… It is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we have here in this country and in other civilized countries around the world," and offered the typical Bushian mantra of "us vs. them" — a perverted world-view that is indistinguishable from Bush’s and a steady recipe for perpetual conflict and misunderstanding.
As one blogger said it best, "Even by Blair’s standards, it was a performance of nauseating hypocrisy, as he sought to seize the moral high ground in relation to [the] violence and destruction that he himself helped unleash."
On Monday, July 11, Blair refused the lickspittle Conservative "opposition’s" demands for a government inquiry into the bombings, insisting, following Dick Cheney’s lead, that an investigation into his regime’s failures would distract from the task of catching the perpetrators, and announced that he believed an inquiry into the bombings would be a "ludicrous diversion."
In response to the bombings, several people drew the obvious link between Blair’s participation in the war crime of invading Iraq and the blowback of revenge killings in Britain, just as it had in Spain. George Galloway, who brought both barrels to his appearance before the sham investigation into the embargo on Iraq and allegations of bribery with illegal oil sales, issued a statement that in part read:
"We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the Security Services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings. We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East."
Liberal Democratic party leader Charles Kennedy made the obvious observation when he remarked: "Those, like President Bush and Tony Blair, who have sought to link Iraq with the so-called ‘war on terror’ can hardly be surprised when members of the public draw the same link when acts of terrorism occur here in the United Kingdom."
Charles Kennedy spoke for many when he stated the obvious, that the Iraq War gave Jihadists a popular recruiting cause, a training ground and further reasons to try to strike the West.
Even Blair’s former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, saw the link: "There may be room for debate over whether there is a connection between the war in Iraq and the London bombings, but there is no escaping the hard truth that the chain in that country is a direct result of the decision to invade it," he told the Guardian.
London Mayor Red Ken Livingston offered these uncharacteristically wise for him, comments on the bombings, when asked what he thought motivated the attacks:
"I think you’ve just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil. We’ve propped up unsavory governments, we’ve overthrown ones we didn’t consider sympathetic. And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s … the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he’d done that he might turn on his creators … If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn’t have arisen."
However, to admit that his actions precipitated the events would be a repudiation of Tony Blair’s entire post 9-11 career. So, naturally, he did what comes naturally to every politician. He ignored reality. Unfortunately for the fatuous Blair, along came the ICM poll published in the Guardian newspaper. With a margin of error of 3 percentage points, the poll found that 33 percent of Britons said that Tony Blair himself bore "a lot of responsibility" for the bombings, and 31 percent thought he had "a little" responsibility.
In response to the poll Blair snorted: "Of course these terrorists will use Iraq as an excuse. They will use Afghanistan. Sept. 11 happened of course before both of these things, and then the excuse was American policy, or Israel. They will always have their reasons for acting. But we have got to be really careful of almost giving in to the perverted and twisted logic with which they argue."
Perverted and twisted logic. Yes, let’s not give into that. Let’s deny all the evidence. Like the repeated claims by Al-Qaeda and it’s imitators that they are acting to frustrate and repulse the decades long Anglo-American imperialism in the Arab world and now the installation of a new Anglo-American condominium over the Muslim world under the cover of "democratically-elected" puppet regimes to deflect widespread and rising hostility to their allied military despots and domestic sympathizers. Let’s ignore cause and effect and continue to insist on illogical and perverted explanations that purely by coincidence, I’m sure, continue to justify continued imperialism and it’s expansion into new lands in the futile search for a military solution to a political tactic.
If as Tony Blair and George W. Bush say, the terrorists strike out to destroy Western values and societies, why have they not bombed Portugal, which is very similar to Spain? Why not Switzerland and Sweden? Austria and Germany? Canada, Brazil, France, Mexico, Greece and any other Western countries? Why do they continue to attack countries that are occupied by inhumane regimes that participated in the invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of the Arab world through proxy despotisms? Unfortunately, for Blair, he conveniently forgets that Al-Qaeda has repeatedly cited the pre-9/11 U.S. occupation of Arabia and the embargo of Iraq as the reason for their attacks on 9/11 and the Madrid bombers openly cited Spanish participation in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Did the IRA commit their bombings, including an attack on Downing Street itself, because they hated the English way of life and English values or did they hate the government’s policy of occupying Northern Ireland? Could it be that just as one earlier occupation of a neighboring land produced terror on British soil, another occupation of a distant land has produced terror again.
I suspect Tony Blair is fully aware of how his policies have brought terror to Londoners, and disaster to Iraq, but such is the contempt for humanity and honesty by politicians in general and Tony Blair in particular, who has a long career behind him of deceit, that he refuses to acknowledge his complicity in this enormous crime he has committed in partnership with his confederate in state terror George W. Bush. Their joint project of bringing (Western managed) "democracy" to the brown-skinned peoples of the Earth riding a wave of aerial bombs is an insult to any pretence of morality. With their doctrine of "Shock and Awe" they have demonstrated their contempt for any sense of moral legitimacy. After all, who is being shocked and awed by the display of mass destruction? What is the purpose of Shock and Awe? Isn’t the audience the general public — both here and in the Arab world? Doesn’t it announce that this is the death we can bring if you oppose us? This is a doctrine of terror. The purpose for this doctrine is to terrorize.
The occupation of Iraq goes on and on, long after even the criminals involved have abandoned their original pretenses for invading in the first place, yet has this intellectually dishonest man and his Dark Master in the White House shown a single instance of regret? Have they shown a single iota of remorse for the tens of thousands of dead and thousands more maimed — for all they destruction they’ve caused and the tens thousands they have killed and injured?
Quite possibly Tony Blair rightly fears the real eventual possibility of impeachment and arraignment as a war criminal if he were ever to show even the hint of uncertainty over the rightness of his war crimes. But this is the route chosen by a coward. By choosing to hold to the facile and puerile defense of his actions, and to continue to claim that their actions and those of their predecessors in Arab lands have no bearing on Arab and Muslim terrorism, Tony Blair and George W. Bush have chosen imperialism over withdrawal. By claiming that it is an "ideology of evil," a set of beliefs that must be eradicated through warfare, that they fully intend to kill ideas by killing people, Blair and Bush announce their desire for perpetual warfare that can only end in ever more acts of mass murder and the eventual genocide of an entire people.
Tony Blair is a disgrace to the people of England.
