The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation. The idea that further western bombing will make things better is so deluded as to beggar belief.
I was surprised to find during my Burnes research that the imperialist powers of Britain and Russia were explicitly exploiting Sunni and Shia divisions to further their conquests of Islamic lands as early as the 1830’s. This has been the major tool of the neo-con Middle Eastern gameplan for some time, spreading disunity and crippling war throughout the Middle East, with the hope that this will benefit the interests of Israel.
The peculiar result has been that in general the West is very actively supporting Sunni armies and miscellaneous forces, but in Iraq is supporting the Shia. ISIS – which is heavily backed by the Saudis, who hate al-Maliki – brings this paradox into sharp relief. The current US and UK strategy is to persuade Saudi Arabia to get ISIS to reconcentrate their efforts against Assad, on the understanding they will be allowed to keep the Sunni areas of Iraq (the old neo-con plan of dividing Iraq is firmly back on the agenda).
The BBC News this morning said that ISIS would not be capable of using the billions of dollars of sophisticated western armaments they have captured. I think you will find the Saudis remedy that one quite quickly. It is quite possible we will see some token airstrikes to kill civilians in Mosul, in order to appease Obama’s domestic backers who are never happy if Americans aren’t killing enough people, but only after agreement has been reached with the Saudis that no serious harm will be done – except to the ordinary people neither Obama, the Saudis or al-Maliki care in the least about.
Boris is certainly elitist. He’s managed quite well at making comedy of it, but it’s there. He just can’t bear oiks.
Remember that Blair is disliked not only for Iraq, but for NI too. There’s many a score yet to settle on that nasty business.
Boris, when he edited The Spectator, was majorly critising Blair’s settlement. Many others from the right too. Old Tories, not the new Right. And he was involved in pushing some spookie characters to that purpose. So, there’s history.
Anyone remember Darius Guppy. Stress on the “i”.
They’re so up’emselves.
Blair has managed to annoy left, right and centre. He’s about the only one who can unite the UK, across the board. They should wheel him out for the Better Together campaign.
I’m sure that much media coverage of late has not been to his liking, and there’s Chilcot to come. He’s just too much in the news for all the wrong reasons. And then there’s all that stuff about his houses and him swanning about the world’s largest yachts and all the rest of it. Even Wendi Deng has the hots for him. In earlier years there was the FI/Tobacco scandal, his first, then the Berlusconi stuff, and his love for rich friends and their holiday homes, when he was still relatively poor. Then there was all that stuff about Carole Caplin and her ex-boyfriend and weird birthing gloopiness and questioned property deals.
He’s not being presented as an elder statesman for sure.
But yeah certainly. It could all be wishful thinking.
‘Lately even his stoutest previous defenders are nowhere to be seen.’
FYI Herbie, Armchair General Aaronovitch surfaced on Newsnight earlier this evening as an ‘expert witness’ in Blair’s defence’.
An interesting interview; “It is cheaper to buy a congressman instead of a tank, the congressman will supply the tank with the US soldiers to fight the war they are ordered to”
The crushing of Lee Kaplan – a uniquely pathetic Hasbara mouthpiece.
What a tangled web;
Saddam Hussein’s Generals Fighting with Jihadist ISIS Insurgency
Fact that Izzat insulted the Saudis; “cursed, the moustaches of the lot of them” (highest insult to to a man among Arabs) as he did in his last appearance in the Arab League meeting before the fall of Iraq.
However the Saudis are still bank rolling him along with the ISIS/L in a last ditch attempt to push their preferred method of reactionary governance.
Billy fourteen pints keeping up with the events is droning on about Iranian Nukes no one faxed him the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) annual nuclear forces data,
‘I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the Government.’ RIP Robin Cook
He knew his life was in danger.. He told me so.
Well. OK. As an onlooker I do think that there’s an over-arching,as they say, narrative here, and it’s one in which Iraq stands alongside dentists, and the TPP, and GM. It’s the rule of corporate nonsense against sense; the rule of insanity against sanity. Of course bombing Iraq, again, makes no sense. The Guardian readership have shot that attempt down in flames already. Of course GM, and the arguments for it, in a world of waste, makes no sense. Of course the TPP is a destructive, rigged, anti-human stitch-up – by all the accounts which have managed to get out.
If this blog is more than the thoughts of one person – which one assumes it is – then there’s surely space, as a current affairs commentary, for those reminders. They all seem quite urgent to me, anyway. And while the ridiculousness and horror of another attack on Iraq is getting quite a lot of coverage, the latest ruling on GM, and the TPP, are not.
It may well be that off topic posts are diluting the main message – and possibly preventing action. Are they?
Anyway, I do understand where the other posts are coming from, and I have noticed an increasing lack of focus (can you have an increasing lack of focus?) on Jewish connections, about which I am quite happy (understatement).
But I also think the questions asked about ISIS – who the hell are they? why are they all dressed the same? where is their equipment and funding coming from? – are the most interesting and intelligent I’ve seen asked about the whole affair.
Cheers!
Richard Alan Jones still has the final word for me, though:
So let me get this right. We support the Iraq government in the fight against ISIS. We don’t like ISIS, but ISIS is supported by Saudi Arabia who we do like. We don’t like Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but ISIS is also fighting against him. We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in its fight against ISIS. So some of our friends support our enemies, some enemies are now our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, who we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they could be replaced by people we like even less, and all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who were not actually there until we went in to drive them out. I think I’ve got it.
“(Reuters) – President Barack Obama told Congress on Monday the United States was deploying up to 275 military personnel to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the country’s embassy in Baghdad after militants seized control of the north of the country.
“This force is deploying for the purpose of protecting U.S. citizens and property, if necessary, and is equipped for combat,” Obama said in a letter to lawmakers. “This force will remain in Iraq until the security situation becomes such that it is no longer needed.”
“The president said he was notifying Congress under the War Powers Resolution.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/16/us-iraq-security-usa-warpowers-idUSKBN0ER2XU20140616
Only 275? John McCain will have a heart attack.
Yes, Richard Alan Jones deserves the “comment of the month” award.
Technicolour,
“It’s the rule of corporate nonsense against sense; the rule of insanity against sanity.”
Thats as succinct and accurate an assessment of this last woeful decade or so that ive read anywhere.
Thanks.
Thanks, OldMark.
That’ll be fun to watch.
My own view is that fatty acts the buffoon.
It’s just a gig.
He’s a comedian, of Shakespearian proportions.
Watch him and Andrew Neil with Alex Jones or watch him with George Galloway. It’s a performance.
I simply can’t see that Blair has had a good press of late, and not for quite some time. Remember that he’s negatively presented with regard to the Gadaffi “rehabilitation” too.
You just have to assess it from a marketing perspective. That’s what it’s all about, afterall.
When some Labour bod said recently that “Tony is toxic”, he meant that his brand is toxic.
That’s it!
Media is down on him. For all his good works and Catholic conversion and private meetings with the Pope, the media is presenting him in a negative light.
Why?
Oh yeah, and who is advising him on media strategy.
Not very good, are they.
The marketing of the Blairs was based very much on the Clintons, a clever husband and wife team that you suspected ran the country together, from their bedroom, passion and refection in equal measure, all real feeling human beings.
That’s how it began…
@Technicolor: LOL! To be delivered with a “John Fortune” voice…
The fog of war sometimes lifts a little so some sunshine gets through.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article184283.html
” Not only has Poland been complicit in training urban terrorists in the run-up to the EuroMaidan chaos, but it has also sent loads of mercenaries to forcibly put down the anti-coup protesters rising up against the junta. Now, photographic proof linking Poland to the Ukrainian madness has arisen. “
“In order for this Neo-conservative (mostly Jewish) strategy – to turn Israel into a world power not dependent on fickle of the US for its survival – to work, it is obvious that Iran has to be substantially weakened. Enter the latest Israeli noises that sound like an ultimatum to the US and the world to denuclearize Iran or else,” wrote Thomas Mysiewicz on October 2, 2005.
Now many Americans are waking up to the reality that like September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks the war on Afghanistan and Iraq was part of western powers agenda to destroy regional regimes which are considered threat to Israel.
http://rehmat1.com/2014/06/16/iraq-another-anti-iran-proxy-war-for-israel/
A bit late but to go back to Craig’s original posting:
“The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.”
Craig is usually a more clear sighted and even handed than this. Just because we loathe Blair and Bush for what they did and the reasons they did it, doesn’t mean we need to automatically ignore the sins of anybody on the opposite side. Beheadings, summary executions of prisoners, suicide bombings specifically aimed at civilian targets, religious law used to further their own business or political aims, utter disregard for the well-being of civilians (particularly women) in areas under their control. The murderous and, it must be said, savage tendencies of many of the home-grown players in the various middle-east conflicts must also be blamed for denying the people who live in these regions any kind of peace or stability in which they may build a better life for themselves.
A rummage through the memory hole, for some more half-forgotten background on Iraq.
I knew about Rumsfeld delivering maps and satellite imagery to Saddam for him to target Iranian forces inside Iran with chemical/biological weapons, largely from Britnat George Galloway’s theatrics before some farcical US ‘inquiry’. It seems that Saddam had mustard gas and nerve agent capabilities as early as 1984, and used them freely. How he obtained these capabilities, for artillery shell and air-launched delivery is still unclear.
http://www.commondreams.org/views.shtml?/views02/0802-01.htm (from 2002)
Even more astonishing is that Kuwait moved their border during the Iran-Iraq war (Iran were the home team, Iraq was playing away), not just shifting the border fence a few feet during the night, by annexed 900 square kilometres, growing Kuwait northwards into Iraq, and it was only by this means they could slant drill into the Rumalia oilfield. And amongst Saddam’s major creditors after the Iran-Iraq war were Saudi Arabia and …Kuwait, $80 billon, with interest and they were pressing for payment. Who knew that Kuwait invaded Iraq first, and how did they do it -practically and diplomatically; where were the UN? Without a murmur from the west. Even with what we know now it’s still an astonishing fact.
http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html (from 2003, link found on medialens board)
Herbie (17 Jun, 2014 – 12:47 am) scribbled:
The Margaret Cook article concerning Robin Cook, linked up thread, shows that Cherie Blair was most active in strong-arming and coercing Labour MPs resistant to letting party whips do their thinking for them, probably on anything generally, but on Iraq in particular, such recalcitrants were subject to a smarm offensive by T. Blair’s Learned Consort (no, not Falconer or Irvine, Cherie).
Presumably the report that the US embassy was to be evacuated was incorrect.
US deploys Iraq ‘military personnel’ Up to 275 US “military personnel” are to be sent to Iraq to provide support for the US embassy in Baghdad, the White House says.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27875053
Wow and no boots on the ground! Three US Navy ships have assembled in the Gulf and those are the three we are told about.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/u-s-aircraft-carrier-cruiser-destroyer-arrive-persian-gulf-n131596
~~
Last December the US supplied drones and Hellfire missiles supposedly ‘to Maliki’. The whole business gets murkier by the day.
‘Washington (CNN) — Two years after bringing home U.S. troops from Iraq, the Obama administration is sending Hellfire rockets and ScanEagle surveillance drones to help government forces fight al Qaeda affiliates growing in influence, a State Department official confirmed to CNN on Thursday.
As first reported by The New York Times, a shipment of 75 Hellfire rockets bought by Iraq arrived last week. Plans call for 10 ScanEagle drones to be sent in the early months of 2014.
“The recent delivery of Hellfire missiles and an upcoming delivery of ScanEagles are standard FMS (foreign military sales) cases that we have with Iraq to strengthen their capabilities to combat this threat,” the State Department official said on condition of not being identified. “We remain committed to supporting the government of Iraq in meeting its defense needs in the face of these challenges.”‘
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/26/politics/us-iraq-missiles/index.html
You can guess that there has been a good number of American operatives/contractors remained there since America ‘withdrew’ in 2012.
Meanwhile the terror continues for the Palestinian people. Note the presence of the German Shepherd in the photo of the IDF. Muslim people do not like dogs as a general rule and are actually afraid of them. The woofer is there to create a little extra terrrrr. In another video I saw last night, the IDF had placed charges on a door which, when they exploded, injured the family inside the house including a three year old child. What charmers the Occupiers are.
Palestinian Speaker Held Over Missing Israelis
Aziz Dweik, a Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament, is among 40 detained overnight over an alleged kidnapping.
http://news.sky.com/story/1283072/palestinian-speaker-held-over-missing-israelis
I have said before that our riot police let their dogs menace the crowd of protesters outside the Israeli Embassy in London in 2009 following Cast Lead. In the crowd were many young Muslims. Many were arrested, charged and sentenced, some to jail. They were actually ‘kettled’ and provoked. I saw it happen as I was there too. I saw dozens of police vans which were parked up in the side streets, suddenly unload their occupants all at once. It was very frightening. Police helicopters were flying overhead. That was in the time of Brown and Jacqui ‘Jackboots’ Smith, Home Secretary.
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/28169/seven-jailed-gaza-protest-violence
She is often on Sky News reviewing the papers, sometimes in the company of Ian Blair, ex Met CC. They chuckle away with one another, very pleased with themselves and life.
I see that in spite of her expenses scandal (she never had to repay any money incidentally), she landed a top post at Birmingham’s QEII Hospital. Her type always find niches.
‘She is to take over as Chair of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in December 2013. [62]’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Smith Incredible.
That’s the hospital that treated Malala (used for anti-Taliban propaganda) and where the injured troops were sent back from Afghanistan to a special high tech military unit within the hospital itself.
Read the comments under the Birminggam Post article link 62. People are disgusted by her.
Another report from Sky plus a video on the IDF activity in Hebron and the ‘West Bank’ as the remnant of Palestine is referred to. The BBC do NOT provide this on the spot reporting which comes across as pretty fair minded.
Israeli Arrests Risk Sparking Fresh Violence
Sky’s Tom Rayner says Israel sees a political opportunity as it detains Hamas officials over the disappearance of three teens.
http://news.sky.com/story/1283125/israeli-arrests-risk-sparking-fresh-violence
David @ 4;03 Am
“Just because we loathe Blair and Bush for what they did and the reasons they did it, doesn’t mean we need to automatically ignore the sins of anybody on the opposite side. Beheadings, summary executions of prisoners, suicide bombings specifically aimed at civilian targets,”
It’s Important to remember it was Bush, Bliar that caused most of these horrors… and not forgetting the vast terrorist crimes of Shock and Awe…What a Phrase that is.
And Also Not to Forget the use of illegal weapons ( DU ) and god knows what else in attempted genocide of some areas Fallujah for examlpe
“The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.”
AND 100% Lies –
Fresh evidence has been revealed about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”.
A special BBC Panorama programme aired on Monday night details how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.
It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.
Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”.
However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-
iraq-fresh-wmd-claims
Then We have bastards like these –
” I just don’t get it. Today when we should be hearing from Juan Cole and John Mearsheimer, leading intellectuals who were right about the Iraq war to begin with, the New York Times has chosen to run a fawning profile of neoconservative Robert Kagan. Some of this reads like the Onion:
And who better to lead a cast of assorted hawks back into intellectual — and they hope eventually political — influence than the congenial and well-respected scion of one of America’s first families of interventionism?
His father, Donald Kagan, a historian of ancient Greece, is a patriarch of neoconservatism. His brother, Fred… etc
Jason Horowitz’s profile uses as its peg a “a much-discussed essay” by Kagan in The New Republic called “Superpowers don’t get to retire.” Yes; neither do neoconservatives. Horowitz allows Kagan to both evade the neoconservative label (he prefers “liberal interventionist,” of course) and predict that Hillary Clinton would have a “neocon” foreign policy. Probably right about that.
The piece justifies itself on gossipy grounds because Kagan is part of a power couple (Victoria Nuland at the State Department). But the real power couple here is Kagan and Bill Kristol, leaders of the de-funct/bunked Project for a New American Century, which pushed a muscular foreign policy all over, including the catastrophic invasion of Iraq.
Horowitz informs us that they have now been vindicated:
Mr. Kristol said he, too, sensed “more willingness to rethink” neoconservatism, which he called “vindicated to some degree” by the fruits of Mr. Obama’s detached approach to Syria and Eastern Europe.
Horowitz fails to reflect any criticism of Kagan from the powerful coalition that neoconservatives fostered in opposition to its adventures: leftwingers and realists. Andrew Bacevich embodies this combination, and last week published an inspired attack on Kagan at Commonweal, saying that his essay is based on a “fictive past.”
Bacevich summarizes Kagan:
“If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring,” Kagan writes, “it is not because America’s power is declining.” The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is “an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose.” Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons.
Writing in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks hails Kagan’s New Republic essay as “brilliant.” A more accurate appraisal would be slickly mendacious. Still, Kagan’s essay also qualifies as instructive: Here in some 12,700 carefully polished words the impoverished state of foreign-policy discourse is laid bare. If the problem hobbling U. S. policy is an intellectual one, then Kagan himself, purveyor of a fictive past, exhibits that problem in spades….
Bacevich points out that the great world order that Kagan adores was actually three spheres of self-interested powers. And– notice the reliance on leftwing thinking– the U.S. sphere was hardly enlightened:
much like the Soviets in Eastern Europe, Washington asserted the prerogative of policing its own sphere of influence. When it did so—overthrowing regimes not to its liking in Guatemala, Iran, and South Vietnam, for example—the “promotion of a liberal world order” did not rank high in the list of American motives.
So too with the roster of despots, dictators, and kleptocrats that the United States assiduously supported. From Batista and Somoza in the 1950s to Musharraf and Mubarak in the past decade, a regime’s adherence to liberal values seldom determined whether or not it was deemed a worthy American ally.
Such matters do not qualify for inclusion in Kagan’s celebration of American global leadership, however. Guatemala he simply ignores…
Notice Bacevich’s focus on ethnic cleansing in Palestine and on genocides in the American sphere of influence. Again, left-realism:
Other disruptions to a “world order” ostensibly founded on the principle of American “global responsibility” included the 1947 partition of India (estimated 500,000 to one million dead); the 1948 displacement of Palestinians (700,000 refugees); the exodus of Vietnamese from north to south in 1954 (between 600,000 and one million fled); the flight of the pied noir from Algeria (800,000 exiled); the deaths resulting directly from Mao Tse Tung’s quest for utopia (between 2 million and 5 million); the mass murder of Indonesians during the anti-Communist purges of the mid-1960s (500,000 slaughtered); the partition of Pakistan in 1971 (up to 3 million killed; millions more displaced); genocide in Cambodia (1.7 million dead); and war between Iran and Iraq (at least more 400,00 killed). Did I mention civil wars in Nigeria, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that killed millions? The list goes on.
Kagan mentions none of those episodes. Yet all occurred during the Cold War, when the United States was, in his words, “vigilant and ready to act, with force, anywhere in the world.”
More from these Lunatics… Kagan n Co @
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/06/neoconservatism-vindicated-fawning.html
Shit, i think i got that Guardian link Broken..try again
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-fresh-wmd-claims
BrianFujisan,
I’m not disputing all that. I’m just saying it’s not the whole story and it certainly doesn’t make the Islamist lunatics into good guys.
From Technicolour
“and I have noticed an increasing lack of focus (can you have an increasing lack of focus?) on Jewish connections, about which I am quite happy (understatement).”
_____________________
Yes indeed, and if you weren’t such a grudging so-and-so you could have paid tribute to my substantial contribution to bringing this about.
Fair’s fair, eh! 🙂
From faraway Californiyeah:
” Not only has Poland been complicit in training urban terrorists in the run-up to the EuroMaidan chaos, but it has also sent loads of mercenaries to forcibly put down the anti-coup protesters rising up against the junta. Now, photographic proof linking Poland to the Ukrainian madness has arisen. “
_______________________
The search for new “devils” is obviously on, now that the old “neo-Nazis in Kiev” lie has run out of puff following the poor showing of the neo-Nazis in the recent Presidential election.
The real fascists and their supporters on here (no names, no pack drill, eh, Ben!) are SUCH bad “losers”…..:)
*******************$
and now buzz off, you’re stoned again.
“The fog of war sometimes lifts a little so some sunshine gets through.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article184283.html”
_______________________
As regular readers know, I always take links extremely seriously – that is, in the sense of looking into them as best as I can to get some sense of their likely credibility.
I recommend readers to check out “Voltaire Net” for themselves, and I wish them better luck than I had in finding out very much about it (organisational structure, editorial policy, who are the people “in charge” and what is their precise role, how are they financed, even where it is based).
It seems to be even more opaque on the above respects than our old friend “Global Research” (and much, much more opaque than Counterpunch).
Like with “Global Research”, one of the few things we are allowed to know is who founded and runs it. This is someone called Thierry Meyssan, a middle-aged Frenchman. I invite readers to read his biography on Wikipedia, where they will learn – inter alia – that he is the author of “The Big Lie”, one of the better-known 9/11 conspiracy theories. He also believes that the Beslan massacre was a put-up job by the CIA.
Not surprising that someone who claims that 9/11 was a conspiracy should also believe that Ukraine is also overrun by Little Green Men, aka “Polish mercenaries”.
************************
La vita è bella, life is crazy!
Actually, the Poles have always had a bad press in Russia.
In the last century, they were portrayed as capitalist bloodsuckers at the time of the Polish-Russian War (1920) and during the Great Terror on the 1930s it was quite the thing to add “spying for Polish intelligence” to the charge sheets of sundry victims.
And I did notice that the anti-Polish article on “Voltairenet” to which California Ben linked was written by…..a Russian 🙂
A Moscow-based Russian, to boot.
@Tony. Only now are we appreciating the extent to which we have been lied to since our government, with the US government decided that Saddam was the enemy. Robin Cook was better informed than us and would have been aware of the hypocrisy. I knew that Kuwait was using angular drilling through various media sources, but didn’t know that they had extended their borders to make this possible.
I used to, very naively, assume that the sequence of events presented by our media must be correct, otherwise the other side would refute that story also via our media. Quite shocking for me to have to accept that our media are controlled.
Is Blair being set up to take a fall.
It’s hard to see how anyone could destroy his credibility as efficiently as he does himself. I don’t think anyone needs to set him up: the evidence, barring the details of his convoluted finances, is abundant.
Mainstream media coverage of him over the past few years has been very negative, including highlighting his dosh, and the peeps increasingly encouraged to bay at him at will.
Not enhanced by the Wendi Deng business, eh? I think Murdoch has an interest in taking him down a peg, and the other Tory outlets really don’t want Blair attracting the Tory undecideds back to Labour, as he did in ’98. Also, he’s an oik of the first water, and the Eton crowd would like to flush his head down the toilet. Not much original research has been done on his dosh since 2011. That is because the setup was designed to be hard to examine without a warrant. Anything published since is recycled material.
Lately even his stoutest previous defenders are nowhere to be seen.
He never attracted loyal friends. Too manipulative. Nice to see Straw reneging and redacting, btw.
…Any withdrawal of lucrative contracts would be very indicative of his future, and anyway, having a leader from our own side appearing at The Hague would show that we’re still the good guys, right.
I imagine his utility to JP Morgan, Zurich, BP, etc, is waning naturally as time passes. Hero or villain, he’ll have no trouble securing speaking engagements, and don’t mistake increased nervousness about his location being known in advance for withdrawal of contracts.
Is it really true he uses that same jet all the time.
The Bombardier Global Express 7000, registration G-CEYL, owned by Aravco (which no longer exists, having merged with another charter outfit owned by the same people) – does seem to be in pretty constant use, and very often its movements coincide with Blair’s. It may be reserved for his exclusive use; I think his inner plutocrat would insist on extensive adaptation of the interior to suit the needs of himself and his entourage, and this would be difficult to change at short notice for other customers. Fragmentary information suggests that earlier this month it flew to Cork in order to drop Cherie off before doing a swift about-turn and heading to China, for a meeting which, if the Italian press hadn’t got hold of it would have been secret. He uses it as a taxi.
Peripherally, G-CEYL seems to have been previously owned by International Clothing Design, prop. Richard Caring, a friend of ‘Lord’ Levy and former Labour mega-donor – switched to the Tories in 2009. Possibly some arrangement was made.
Dear, oh dear. I think a bit of lower profile and varying of movements might be in order during this difficult time.
That would conflict with his desire to be famous. However, his security does seem to have improved over the last few months. Actually, he would be justified in becoming totally paranoid; they really are out to get him. Good.
🙂
They are such shallow and hollow, the pocket politicians. You could not have any more feeble types running our country.
‘David is that you? William Jefferson Hague here. John Kerry says that we have to re-establish good relations with Iran so I am opening up our Embassy there pronto’.
UK is set to re-open Iran embassy
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani
Foreign Secretary William Hague is set to announce the UK will re-open its embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27882932
~~
Ba’al I could not get on to the blog. Your previous post has appeared three times over 8 minutes up to 9am?!