The people shouting "war criminal" are absolutely correct. (Hat Tip: Let Freedom Rain)



Americans have plenty of reasons to hate Tony Blair too. His lies and Bush butt kissing played an instrumental role in getting us into Iraq and keeping us there.

Blair was at a book signing event. I've heard that his book is sellilng a lot of copies. I wonder if rich rightist are buying copies by the thousands. Most rightist books that get on the US bestseller lists do so because of this kind of bulk buying.

 

British Petroleum certainly isn't Beyond Profiteering.

We have seen how British Petroleum's irresponsible and greedy behavior already has devastated a major portion of the Gulf of Mexico. Well, British Petroleum's evil behavior is global. Iraq is a country where this heinous oil corporation has made an enormous amount of blood money and is likely to continue to do so. (From the Telegraph 6/30/09):

A BP-led consortium on Tuesday won a deal to develop Iraq's largest oilfield – the only successful foreign bid in a historic televised auction.

International oil companies were put off by the Iraqi oil ministry's demands that they cut the fee they collect on every barrel extracted over 20-year contracts.

The BP-Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) deal was only secured when the consortium agreed to cut its fee per barrel from £3.99 to $2.

That's right. Those poor babies will spend very little of their own money to extract the oil (and none to find the oil), and they are guaranteed hefty profits, but not as hefty as they thought they would get.

Of course, this isn't the only way that British Petroleum has made money off of an illegal and genocidal war in Iraq and the endless quagmire in Afghanistan. (Asia Times 6/19/10)

The Pentagon's foreign wars have left it particularly heavily dependent on oil services, energy and petroleum companies. An analysis published at Foreign Policy in Focus found that, in 2005, 145 such companies had contracts with the Pentagon. That year, the DoD paid out more than $1.5 billion to BP alone and a total of $8 billion taxpayer dollars, in total, to energy-related firms on what is a far-from-complete list of companies.

That's right. British Petroleum has been making over $1 billion in fuels sales, the vast majority of which would be completely unnecessary if not for those two wars.

British Petroleum doesn't just have oil on its hands. They also have blood on their hands. The pressured both the British and US governments, along with other Big Oil corporations, to get us into the Iraq War in the first place. Now, you can see why.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's involvement has been particularly interesting. For the especially gullible, he claimed that his decision to get involved in the war on Iraq was based on fears of WMDs, knowing full well that Iraq didn't have WMDs. He let other people think that he was Bush's poodle, going to extremes to preserve the "special relationship" between the US and Britain that almost always benefits the elites at the expense of the general populations of both countries.

Knowledge and perspective is often clearer with time and larger bodies of information. Now, we know that Tony Blair was a poodle, but the owner of that groveling dog was British Petroleum.

 

Remember former UK Prime Minister, known worldwide as "Bush's Poodle" for going along with the war on Iraq and yipping in favor of it? He's been making some money (Scotsman 3/20/10 - Hat Tip Ten Percent)

It finally emerged this week that Mr Blair had been paid for advising UI Energy, a South Korean oil firm with extensive interests in the US and Iraq.

...

It also disclosed Mr Blair had been acting as a "governance adviser" to the Kuwaiti government since June 2008 in a deal reportedly worth £1 million.

Mr Blair's spokesman was quoted as saying the agreement with UI Energy related to a "one-off piece of advice" and was not related to Iraq.

The last paragraph from the quoted text should be worth a giggle or two.

After all, we know that the Iraq War had nothing to do with oil. It couldn't. It just couldn't. I'll let The Church Lady respond to this news.



Tony Blair is the world's wealthiest poodle.

Photo: World Economic Forum

 

A lot of people on the right are so stubborn or gullible that they still want to pretend that the Bush regime went into Iraq because of the 911 attacks. Never mind the facts that the Iraqi government was not involved; Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda were mortal enemies; and no individual Iraqis were involved with the attacks.

Now, we know that the Bush regime and its poodle, Tony Blair, worked to overthrow the Iraqi government before the 911 attacks even happened. From The Independent 2/1/10: (Hat Tip: Citizens for Legitimate Government)

A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal.

Whitehall officials drafted the "contract with the Iraqi people" as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the dictator had been removed. Tony Blair's team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York.

The document, headed "confidential UK/US eyes", was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today. It states: "We want to work with an Iraq which respects the rights of its people, lives at peace with its neighbours and which observes international law.

"The Iraqi people have the right to live in a society based on the rule of law, free from repression, torture and arbitrary arrest; to enjoy respect for human rights, economic freedom and prosperity," the contract reads. "The record of the current regime in Iraq suggests that its priorities remain elsewhere.

"Those who wish to promote change in Iraq deserve our support," it concludes. "We look forward to the day when Iraq rejoins the international community." A new regime was to be offered "debt rescheduling" through the Paris Club, an informal group of the richest 19 economies, given help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and handed an EU aid and trade deal. Companies were to be invited to invest in its oil fields. A "comprehensive retraining programme" was to be offered to Iraqi professionals.

There is an investigation into the Iraq War going on in the UK which is revealing all sorts of things. There really needs to be a similar investigation here in the US to reveal all the lies and fraud that got us into the illegal war on Iraq that goes against all American values.

 

The US corporate media seems to be portraying Gordon Brown's problems as having to do with insufficient political skills. Yet, Brown replaced Tony Blair, who was wildly unpopular, before the financial crisis took place.

Looking at American television when Tony Blair was usually shown licking the boots of George W. Bush, it is easy to forget how Blair usually projected himself to domestic audiences in the UK on the BBC. Instead of sniveling and humiliating himself, on domestic matters, Blair was charismatic and forceful. He was clever, and his handlers always had just the sound bite to keep the opposition at bay.

The problem was that charisma, a strong personality, and great sound bites war thin after years of Thatcherite policies. It wasn't bad enough that he humiliated the UK by genuflecting and appeasing an unelected tyrant like George W. Bush on the international stage. Blair also favored watered down versions of Tory policies that disposed the majority of the British population. Sugar coating dispossession can't work indefinitely.

Once Blair wore out of his welcome, Labor replaced him with the seemingly earnest Gordon Brown. However, Brown favored the same Thatcher-lite policies that he helped implement as a member of Blair's cabinet. This contributed to the depth of despair when the global economic crises arrived, and it also contributed to Brown's inability to act in a forceful way to intervene in the economy that both major parties had been moving in a laissez faire direction for decades.

The Conservative Party is winning the local and EU elections by not losing ground in the polling while Labor is losing a tremendous amount of votes to third parties. Neither party would be close to a majority of seats in the more significant House of Commons if not for the winner take all system in Britain that inevitably gives bizarre results when there are third parties. Proportional representation is a much more reasonable electoral system, yet the British seem to dislike it as much as we do. The upshot is that the Tories are gaining power without gaining support.

The media are focused on the improved performance of far right parties, but they are ignoring the improved performance of the Greens. The main lesson to be learned is that people in the UK want a real alternative to the Pepsi vs. Coke politics of the Conservative and Labor Parties.

Sound familiar?

It should. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is governing more like a Republican than a Democrat, to put it mildly. He has more time politically than Brown because the GOP is in a state of disarray, ceding much of its leadership to gargantuan loudmouth whose mind seems to still be terribly altered by Oxycontin. Gopper rhetoric reminds one of the British National Party. While sentiments like that have more adherents here than in the UK, it isn't a strategy to build a majority or to even put up a strong national fight.

American liberals could easily start electing Green or independent liberal candidates in certain House Districts. However, these American liberals, like the British left, seem to be too beaten down by the atrocities of Bush (or Thatcher in the UK) and corporate media propaganda to mount serious political challenges where the opportunities exist (e.g. in Nancy Pelosi's district or in several districts here in NYC).

The danger of a gutless left adrift with a sense of helplessness is that the only real alternatives to the Crest vs. Colgate politics we are getting here in the US are coming from the far right.

 

Blair’s bungling, flailing approach to fighting terrorism in England just shows how incapable he and Bush are of taking productive action to protect their respective nations from terrorist attacks.

Blair still is claiming that there are no links between the London attacks and the war in Iraq. One obvious link is that the occupation and killings in Iraq are infuriating the Muslim world, helping Al Queda recruit terrorists worldwide.

Instead of reevaluating the Iraq war, and its role in aiding and abetting Al Queda, Blair is pushing a shoot-to-kill policy against people who randomly seem suspicious. This isn’t helping protect Britain, but it is alienating Brazilians. Hundreds of Brazilian friends and relatives of the victim have marched and demanded the arrests of the British officers who fired the fatal shots.

Protest Articles:

Scotsman

Los Angeles Times

Terrorists certainly have made it more dangerous to travel to England. But, now there is another danger: police given orders to shoot to kill anyone who they think might be a terrorist. The killing of an innocent Brazilian man is extremely disturbing. All he did was to do something completely normal on a subway system: running to catch a train.

Tony Blair, a rather wimpy man, is rushing to outdo the macho talk of another wimpy man, George W. Bush. In the process, civil liberties and basic safety have been severely compromised. I am unwilling to let terrorists dictate where I travel, but I also am unwilling to be killed because of insane orders of the government of the travel destination. I’m not willing to take a stray bullet because Tony Blair has lost it.

Even if the policy was limited to those who really are terrorists fleeing from the police, it needs to be reconsidered. Dead terrorists provide no information about other terrorists.

Meanwhile, I’m not traveling to England until this policy is revoked.