The number of people still prepared to defend the Iraq War in public is tiny. The interesting thing is the very strong correlation between those people, and those prepared to pretend to give credence to the farcical sexual allegations about Julian Assange. Zoe Williams Guardian piece about what a jolly good chap Blair is I find breathtaking. War crimes like Blair’s result in terrible anguish for millions. I am prepared for purposes of argument to believe that Williams’ anguish for female victims of crime is genuine; why she can’t extend that to the tens of thousands of women who were raped because of Blair’s Iraq War, or had the still worse agony of seeing their children killed and mutilated I don’t know. Nick Cohen is just very, very sad. I just hold up these two in the hope that those deceived by feminist political correctness into following their lead against Assange will see to what they are subscribing.
Rather a side issue, but even if we accept Zoe Williams view that dead Iraqi children don’t matter, she appears not to have noticed that Blair introduced tuition fees, academies, kick-started NHS privatization, allowed the banksters’ bonanza leading to worldwide economic crash and oversaw the greatest widening of the gap between rich and poor in British history.
Moral people agonies over the debate of abortion; but feminists [Gloria Steinem] urge women to celebrate the act.
Just another example of feminism being a cult of death.
Abortion comes in the category of those things to which I am strongly opposed, but which I do not think ought to be illegal. I think in general the state interferes rather too readily, particularly as the state itself is scarcely a persistently ethical actor.
It’s all in the gameplan.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/twenty-years-ago-rwanda-installing-a-us-proxy-state-in-central-africa-the-us-was-behind-the-genocide/5376742
‘The State’, which entered the war under the banner of democracy, utilizes ‘feminism’, of which there is no obvious mechanism of democracy.
Where does a woman go if she wishes to add to the feminist manifesto? Hence feminism is an anti-democratic tool for the State to effect policy through emotional propaganda.
Blair & Co. also sent British troops into Helmand province in Afghanistan in 2006, with dreadful results for the people of that area.
A new book by a former British army officer apparently sheds more light on our crimes there.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/army-historian-whose-book-on-helmand-was-blocked-by-the-mod-is-finally-cleared-to-publish-9249305.html
(Previous useful accounts include “Investment in Blood; The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War” by former advisor Frank Ledwidge and “Cables from Kabul; The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign” by former ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles).
The number of people still prepared to defend the Iraq War in public is tiny – yet 27% in the UK and 40% in the US still believe it was justified.
http://research.yougov.co.uk/news/iraq/
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx
And I saw another poll elsewhere identifying Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair as out two most popular ex Prime Ministers – although I daresay they both feature pretty highly on the unpopular lists as well.
I am glad you said this Craig. I posted your earlier piece about Willams on the previous thread.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/07/another-vicious-ugly-souled-feminist/
The Medialens contributors have wiped the floor with her too. She in inane but dangerous.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1396981230.html
and
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1396980508.html
On Tony Blair overeeing the greatest widening of the gap between rich and poor in British history – this is just not supported by the statistics
http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN03870.pdf
10 years after, 64% of Republicans still think Iraq and had WMD’s
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/iraq-wmd-poll-clueless-vast-majority-republicans_n_1616012.html
PS Mod The previous thread (Andy Myles) seems to have picked up the same title as this one. ???
Sorry to disappoint but I am very much of the opinion that the Iraq war was unjustified, I want to see Blair marched off to the ICC to face war crimes but also believe Assange should return to Sweden to face questions about alleged rape and face trial if that’s the way it goes. Both can plead not guilty and mount a defence in open court, just like anybody else.
In all honesty, that’s how most people I know seem to see things so I don’t recognise the correlation you suggest. I’d also suggest that if you’re reduced to blaming all ills on ‘feminist political correctness’ in the 21st century, purely on the basis of one feminist woman defending Blair, then maybe you’ve got some issues to deal with.
Williams’ article is nonsense and nowhere does she present a feminist argument in support of any of the points she makes. To conflate feminism with support for the Iraq war/blowing up children is therefore somewhat crass.
Blair has done to labour what Bill Clinton and Obomber has done to Democrats.
The Team of Rivals have coalesced or morphed into one group virtually indistinguishable with a few new window dressings.
Andy
You don’t disappoint – people are supposed to discuss, and they can’t do that very usefully if they don’t have differing views
Perhaps those who think the Iraq war was justified (above @ 9.12pm) contributed to this poll which John Pilger referred to in his piece dated 7 February 2014 from which this is an extract.
‘On Harvey’s Today programme I referred to a poll conducted by ComRes last year that asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion. A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed: a figure so shockingly low it was a profanity.
I compared this with scientific estimates of “up to a million men, women and children [who] had died in the inferno lit by Britain and the US”. In fact, academic estimates range from less than half a million to more than a million. John Tirman, the principal research scientist at the MIT Centre for International Studies, has examined all the credible estimates; he told me that an average figure “suggests roughly 700,000”. Tirman pointed out that this excluded deaths among the millions of displaced Iraqis, up to 20% of the population.’
/..
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/07/west-criminal-bloodbath-iraq-media-cover-up
I think people believe what they do about Iraq because of a perception about terrorism created in the US/UK/corporatist media during 2002 and relentlessly maintained to present day. Why? I think in the UK this has become all about saving Tony Blair’s neck, but it probably started with Tony’s visit to the ranch in Texas.
Brilliant click bait.
Of course Zoe Williams is a woman and therefore her tarnished view deserves to be tarnished with the tarnished word ‘feminist’ (spit) – despite the fact that the piece contains not a single mention of those pesky women, or of feminism.
Tech; I think Craig’s point is that feminist issues have a friendly ally..(same in US with Obomber) and gratitude for incremental advances in social evolution is what drives their support.
It’s thin gruel but they wish to keep the pot on the fire.
If that is indeed Craig’s point then he should make it. However, since I believe I saw you quoting RAWA earlier you will know that this is in any case a lame and midstream reading of the real facts.
It would be unfair to say he is pandering to a sector of the electorate, but what genuine convictions has he shown?
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/28/3219231/obama-feminist-mad-men/
Tech; I think you are misreading it as Paternalism, but whatevs.
Surely you are not actively trying to divert attention from the original post.
What you think I am ‘reading it as’ is irrelevant. It is what it is and the fact is that Zoe Williams is – good grief – being used to berate and deride ‘feminism’ (spit) because she is a woman.
As i said, great click bait. Well done, Craig.
Why don’t you email Craig? I mean, if that’s the only solution to your pique.
But yes, Ben, of course, things get twisted into supporting the status quo – I remember the ‘black’ community being delighted about the election of Obama because they really believed this was someone who would stand up for universal human rights.
Oh, or perhaps I should just bitch about him on another blog. But I think enough interaction – I hope the perpipatectic mods delete this one.
A propos the ‘sad’ Nick Cohen, this is what I e-mailed to his sadness on 26 January 2014 (Nick hasn’t replied so far):
Dear Nick,
In your July 2004 tribute to Paul Foot, you mention that Foot “burst out laughing when he discovered that the sacked civil servant he was defending admired Margaret Thatcher more than any other politician.”
I should like to point out that the “The Iron Lady” has never been my favourite politician.
Cheers,
Patrick Haseldine
Emeritus Professor of Lockerbie Studies
(https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Paul_Foot)
Of course the Iraqi war wasn’t justified. It was horrible, homicidal, obscenely destructive, completely insane and ultimately just disgusting.
But do we not, somehow, get the leaders we deserve?
You can, for example, still read either explicit or implicit suggestions that the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” (and I still don’t know exactly how those are defined, but I did note that the Boston bombers were charged with using them, so it seems that they can be small enough to fit in a back-pack) would have justified the war. In other words, had Bliar been telling the truth about those and not lying through his bridgework it would all have been ok. No, it wouldn’t! The possession of weapons is a state’s sovereign right. If possession of weapons of mass destruction were a cause for war, we could have attacked France – it’s closer. Actually, we could have attacked ourselves. People who claim to have been duped by Blair & Co. into supporting the war by the false W.M.D. claim – including many in Parliament who really should have known better – are merely trying to obfuscate their own wilful credulity.
Overnight (7th April) hundreds of comments on the Williams piece were removed.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/03/andy-myles/comment-page-6/#comment-451288
The number now is 2328 which is probably a fraction of those submitted.