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Hello you. How are things? What have I missed?

I didn’t see much news in the last couple of weeks but the headlines from the Chilcot Inquiry managed to waft their way to my holiday bolthole. Claire Short and former Foreign Office lawyer Elizabeth Wilmhurst may have got the applause but for me the stars of the inquiry so far have been two other faces from the squalid past, namely Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

(more…)

Good to see that Tony Blair is still worth every penny* he receives for being Middle East peace envoy. I reckon he might be on to something here when it comes to a solution to the problem that has dogged the world since biblical times…

…if people really want to sort it out, they’ll sort it out…

Rejoice everybody, it’s all over bar the hanging of the bunting. It’s his laser-guided precision – thick with practical detail – that gets me every time. It’s how he managed to leave the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan strong and prepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

* He doesn’t get any.

Tony Blair is recruiting. Good luck, everybody.

(Ta to Mr E for the heads-up)

A visitor trying to follow the link to Tony Blair’s website in this blog post at the educational establishment where they work found the site blocked by the London Grid for Learning’s URL Filtering and Reporting service which…

…helps to ensure e-Safety for your pupils whilst Internet browsing and content viewing by filtering undesirable content.

The reason for Tony Blair’s site being blocked to protect Britain’s youth?

Dark forces. It looks like Tim Ireland was right all along…

(Thanks to James)

Iraq’s Marsh Arabs suffered long under Saddam Hussein. In punishment for the failed Shia uprising incited and then betrayed by the Western powers after the first Gulf War, Saddam diverted water away from the marshes. This destroyed food sources and the Marsh Arabs, the Ma’dan, were forced to flee.

After the second Gulf War in 2003, the marshes were re-irrigated. The Ma’dan could return. On February 21 2007, Tony Blair proudly told the House of Commons…

In an extraordinary development, the Marsh Arabs, driven from one of the world’s foremost ecological sites by Saddam, have been able to resettle there.

So, two years later, how are the Ma’dan faring, now that their homelands have been liberated from drought and despotism?

Experts say the rivers that flood the marshes today are too brackish and polluted to support life.

[A resident of the marshes, Ali Jassim al-] Battat sees the “undrinkable” water as a symptom of the official failure to rehabilitate the Marsh Arabs. As a father to 13 children, he says he wants better road and electricity links and improved access to education, healthcare and clean water.

“Water is the source of all our suffering,” he shouted angrily. “The water tankers do not get to us, we have no electricity. Our young men are crushed by destitution and our children grow up like savages, without schooling.”

[...]

Satellite images taken in 2006, three years after the overthrow of Saddam, showed the marshes had been restored to 70 per cent of their size in the early 1970s, before the major drainage projects began.

In 2009, environmental officials said the marshes were shrinking again, and now covered only 30 per cent of their spread in the 1970s. Dams built upstream in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey are blamed for reducing the volume of water feeding the wetlands. A prolonged drought in Iraq has only made matters worse.

According to Alaa al-Badran, head of the union of agricultural engineers in Basra, the marshlands will continue to shrink, reversing recent gains. “Salinity rates will keep rising,” he added. “Once absorbed by the soil, salts are very hard to eradicate.”

There’s currently no message of support for the Marsh Arabs on Tony Blair’s official website, a state of affairs that will no doubt be rectified as soon as he’s back from collecting his $1 million prize for leadership.

Renowned military strategist and humanitarian interventionist Tony Blair is in the news again. In a not-at-all-self-serving speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, to mark the 10th anniversary of the formal coagulation of his oh-so-successful ‘Blair Doctrine‘, he said if at first you don’t succeed, kill, kill again:

Tony Blair has said the case for using military force to topple oppressive regimes is as strong as it ever was – despite events in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said intervention was needed to tackle the growing “menace” of Islamic “extremism” across the Middle East.

But he also stressed the need for engagement with “progressive” Muslims.

‘Back in April 1999,’ said God’s Comic, ‘I thought that removal of a despotic regime was almost sufficient in itself to create the conditions for progress.’ Well, you know what ‘thought’ did, Tony? It followed a muck cart and thought it was a wedding. But hey, what can you do? Hundreds of thousands of people died but Tony’s doctrine was ‘almost’ sufficient. ‘But this battle cannot so easily be won,’ he said. No shit? Took you a while Tony but it’s good you finally realised.

Really though, it’s the basis of any experimentation. Your theory not fitting the results? Revisit it and make changes. Blair’s refined his and wants someone else to have another crack with it now he’s not allowed to kill people any more.

Then again, maybe he knows something we don’t. Maybe at this very moment, on a secret weapons testing range somewhere, they’re putting the final touches to a bomb that can distinguish between progressive and extremist Muslims…

We’ll pass quickly over Blair’s latest iteration in fashioning of a get-out-of-Hell free card for himself (‘I do not pass a single day in which I do not reflect on this and think of the responsibility’ – define ‘responsibility’, Tony). Instead have a look at this story I’ve heard him tell more than once:

Blair also revealed his first spiritual experience, as he remembered praying with his headmaster at school when he was 10 years old.

His father – “a kind of militant atheist” – had just had a stroke and was rushed to hospital.

Blair said: “I remember actually praying with the headmaster of the school. I said to him: ‘Before we pray, I should tell you that my father, he doesn’t believe in God.’

“And I always remember the headmaster saying to me: ‘Well that doesn’t matter, because God believes in him.’

“I was in a great state of emotion, and then at the end of the day my father was clear, he was going to live. But what I know is it made a – as it would, on a 10-year-old child – tremendous impact on me.”

If I was lying in a hospital bed, my children not knowing whether I was going to live or die, and a teacher took it upon him or herself to take advantage of impressionable children in ‘a great state of emotion’ in order to push their own strand of belief, I’d have some very harsh words to say upon my recovery.

As the adult Blair looks back at his ten year-old self, it’s as if he sees an escape route for his soul being opened almost at that precise moment. He certainly regards it as a pivotal event in his life.

In the end you accept there is a higher power than yourself and that is both something that should make you fearful, but something that also is a source of comfort.

Well bully for you, Bomber. Someone should tell him that faith is a way of life not a warm-but-slightly-scary blanket. Who does he think he is, St Linus van Pelt?

Tony, I know you’re a busy man with all your money to count and everything but couldn’t you spare five minutes to pass on some of this comfort to the mothers of children with two heads or the men on death row, some there for the ‘crime’ of being homosexual? It’s shame you’re not a little more fearful of and a little less comforted by your spiritual duvet.

…for they shall be generously reimbursed:

[I]t falls to us to follow the various adventures of Mr Tony. Last week your utility world statesman was in the Philippines offering to assist President Arroyo with the peace process in Mindanao province. Ever the expert, the great triangulator delivered two lectures on his success “in dealing with Britain’s secessionist movement in Northern Ireland”. All faithfully reported in the Philippine Star (motto: Truth shall prevail). But what was missing was Blair’s fee for the half-hour lectures: £750,000, we hear, plus expenses. Tickets, it is said, were £400.

And why not? Got a skill for brokering peace? Then sell your ability to save people lives. Contract out your altruism. Sorry Sri Lanka, you can keep killing each other until I see 750 big ones. Here’s my business card and bank details.

Gandhi was an idiot. A bit of business acumen and he could have been out of that loin cloth and into a bespoke Italian suit toot sweet. That Jesus fella? A no-good, financially illiterate chump. No bloke ever got anywhere in sandals and a dress. Except Demis Roussos.

Anyone for justice?

It is necessary to make leaders hesitate before indulging in “the paramount war crime” to quote the judges of Nuremberg, of “unprovoked aggression against a defenceless country”. Unless leaders fear that they might be tried for their war crimes, we will live in an increasingly violent world, where The Geneva Conventions are treated as a joke, the UN is of no account, and death, destruction, torture, and repressive policing are commonplace. At the moment such leaders enjoy more and more trappings of power, and retire with vast sums of money, houses, medals and lucrative contracts. A group of UK Citizens have therefore set up an organisation, “The Blair War Crimes Foundation”, to initially bring one such leader to justice as an example.

Read the letter and become a signatory.

(Via RickB)

While Tony Blair was Prime Minister, Alastair Campbell once said that ‘we don’t do God’. Well, now he’s free of the shackles of high office, Blair has finally found the courage of his convictions. He’s now doing God. Lot’s of God. It’s a bit showy, to be honest. Ostentatious, over-compensating. He’s obviously forgotten his Matthew 6:1-6.

It’s a shame he’s still not doing nuance. It never was his strong point…

Here’s what he said to the National Prayer Breakfast in the US this week…

Today, religion is under attack from without and from within. From within, it is corroded by extremists who use their faith as a means of excluding the other. I am what I am in opposition to you. If you do not believe as I believe, you are a lesser human being.

From without, religious faith is assailed by an increasingly aggressive secularism, which derides faith as contrary to reason and defines faith by conflict. Thus do the extreme believers and the aggressive non-believers come together in unholy alliance.

Unholy alliance, Batman! How did I miss the news report about Richard Dawkins getting together with Osama bin Laden to form a team of supervillains? What’s that? There wasn’t one? It’s all in Blair’s head? You don’t say.

And I’m not sure you can describe religious extremists as ‘unholy’ either, can you? I’m pretty sure they’re famous for being the complete opposite. It’s the surplus of holiness that’s the problem with those chaps, isn’t it?

How about this:

It is that humbling of man’s vanity, that stirring of conscience through God’s prompting, that recognition of our limitations, that faith alone can bestow.

Where was the humbling of vanity and the stirring of conscience and the recognition of limitations in March 2003? Bound and gagged in the basement to stop them getting near a bible, presumably.

Did you know we let Tony Blair be the Prime Minister of Britain for ten years? I can scarcely believe it either.

Too much coffee:

Tony Blair believes that he may have triggered his heart scare by drinking too much strong continental coffee…

Too much coffee:

People who drank more than seven cups of instant coffee a day were three times more likely to hallucinate than those who took just one, a study found.

Too much coffee:

The dossier that we publish gives the answer. The reason is that his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programme is not an historic left-over from 1998. The inspectors are not needed to clean up the old remains. His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.

I see George Bush is spending the last precious seconds of his presidency giving out gongs:

In his last week in office, President Bush will award the [Presidential Medal of Freedom ] medal to Mr Blair, former Australian PM John Howard and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Bleurgh. Imagine being stuck in a room with that crew as they frottage each others’ egos. If only we could harness the abundant unctuous self-satisfaction produced by those four in order to generate electricity, the energy crisis would be over. Still, victor’s justice, eh? I wonder if Blair will freeze momentarily as the cord goes around his neck.

It’s also interesting to note that the Presidential Medal of Freedom doesn’t actually confer any power or privilege. Not even the right to pasture sheep on common ground. I bet Tony and his wife, with their love of a freebie, will be disappointed by that. Cherie will have to settle for filling her handbag with sausage rolls at the reception afterwards.

In this instance, the medal’s a meaningless bauble presented in a empty gesture when the time should be spent on more important matters. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Gordon Brown on Tony Blair’s job as peacemaker in the current crisis:

Have you spoken to Tony Blair in his role as Middle East peace envoy?

Tony’s on holiday at the moment.

Wherever he is, I hope it’s pissing down.

You have to admit that this, if it’s true, is great…

A former communications intercept operator says U.S. intelligence snooped on [...] British Prime Minister Tony Blair. David Murfee Faulk told ABCNews.com he saw and read a file on Blair’s “private life”…

It seems we may have underestimated Tony’s best mate, George. Even he didn’t trust the slippery little get.

More slow oozing of revelation about the greatest prime minister we ever had. I hope the historians who Blair says will be his judge are paying attention, I really do:

A newly disclosed Downing Street memo has revealed how Tony Blair helped Rupert Murdoch overcome an official investigation which was jeopardising one of his big investments. It shows that Blair, while prime minister, immediately ordered his top officials to help the tycoon who was frustrated that a potentially lucrative scheme was being blocked by a long-running European commission investigation.

We all knew it, of course, it’s just nice to see it in black and white. I can’t wait to see what comes out next.

Who knows, this might be the point where Tony Blair’s still seemingly good reputation amongst many finally starts to unravel and he’s finally judged by wider opinion. God knows its about the only consolation you can take from the wide and long trail of dead and shattered bodies he left behind him…

The documents – released to The Sunday Telegraph after a two-and-a-half year Freedom of Information battle – reveal that Mr Blair personally intervened to secure Formula One’s exemption from the tobacco advertising ban just hours after meeting Bernie Ecclestone, the motorsport’s billionaire boss.

The Government has always maintained that the meeting with Mr Ecclestone, a major new Labour donor at the time, did not influence the final decision to offer the exemption.
However the previously secret papers show that Mr Blair did order ministers to find ways to implement the “derogation” for Formula One after the meeting.

[...]

As the affair deepened with the revelation that Mr Ecclestone had donated £1 million to the Labour Party just months before the tobacco advertising climbdown Mr Blair faced calls to resign.
The Prime Minister appeared on the BBC’s On The Record Programme to defend the exemption and to insist he was “a pretty straight sort of guy.”

Hopefully this is the first of a steady drip of dirty water that will utterly soak his reputation. Like I said, it’s a small compensation – a slow motion vindication of what those of us with eyes to see have said all along. That and watching the faces of those who worked so hard continually telling us for ten years to give Blair the benefit of the doubt, him included.

(Via Blairwatch)

So how did he do? Even with Jon Stewart’s reputation it was never going to be the exercise in humiliation that those of us who think Blair should be in the Hague wanted to see. Watching him squirm a little just isn’t enough justice.

What did we learn? With Blair at his most guarded, not a lot. Mainly that he has continued to be one of the most insincere men ever given breath. Insincerity is under his skin like a tick. Blair’s fake I-don’t-find-you-amusing-but-must-play-along laugh is still one of the most unconvincing I’ve ever heard.

It’s a relief to see that the Israel-Palestine problem attracting the intellect of someone like Tony Blair. Yesterday he gave an update to Parliament of his progress in saving the Middle East single-handed. The Independent’s Simon Carr reports on Blair’s Occam’s Razor-sharp insight:

“Until we get a period of calm, we won’t get a chance for sensible dialogue.” Patience, then. “We need to show what the benefits are if people have a different attitude.” He’s put his finger on it there. “Israel could do more to help.” We’d all agree with that, or mostly agree. But then again, “Hamas is using the situation to provoke the Israeli government.” And many of the rest of us would agree with that. What to do?

Who couldn’t love a job requiring so little grasp of the details, so little finesse? The beauty of it is that, on this showing, should Blair get bored or fall ill or simply get a better offer, just about anybody could step in and fill the vacancy.

I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t know anybody less knowledgeable sounding about the Middle East as it stands than Blair. And even if they were, fifteen minutes with Wikipedia would allow them to blag it.

I wonder if that’s how Blair does it. I bet he used to do his homework on the bus to school as well. Who knew the whole damn shooting match was this simple? Surely he’s told the Israelis and Palestinians?

You have to say that Gordon’s a trier. The day before polling in the local and London mayoral elections and he’s spraying treats around for everybody.

It was a Blairite tactic to try and be all things to all people and, while it was all too transparent for those who could be bothered to look, there was at least a veneer of arrogant calm about it. Brown, while using the same methods, comes across as having an air of sweaty desperation.

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It has to be said that there is something in this:

Former prime minister Tony Blair is to call for faith to be given a central role in tackling the world’s problems.

In a speech at Westminster Cathedral, Mr Blair will say failure to engage with religious groups will drive believers to apathy or fundamentalism.

He’s right in the sense that we want those among us who have imaginary friends to be the nice and helpful sort, not the explodey and kiddie-fiddling kind.

As a bonus, here’s Britain’s foremost religious blind-eye turner, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor:

The role of faith in our society cannot be ignored…

Can’t it? Are you a betting man, Your Eminence?

But still, Tony Blair banging on about the power of faith, eh? Boo, what a knob. We’ve seen the damage his brand of faith can do. If only we could harness Tony Blair’s faith to do good – in a swords-to-ploughshares deal. It’d be a holy grail, like a theological cold fusion.

Tony Blair just announced he’s taking on his 73rd job since stepping down as Prime Minister. Sunny’s having a competition: LOL-blair.

Here’s my entry:

I’m drunk right now which is probably just as well. I also have a sneaking suspicion that someone has slipped me a massive dose of some kind of hallucinogen. How else to explain this:

Tony Blair is to teach students at Yale University in the US when he leads a seminar on faith and globalisation.

The former prime minister has been appointed as a fellow at Yale and will begin teaching next year.

Faith? Faith? Tony Blair provides concrete proof that God does not exist. The sooner that particle collider in Switzerland opens a door to an alternate reality the better. When it does, me and mine are out of here.

I mean, what next? Peter Sutcliffe to open an outreach programme for prostitutes? Gary Glitter to consult on child protection issues? In what kind of a morally mutilated reality is this shit allowed to happen?

I’m in two minds about blogging and signing this:

We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.

Sure, if he gets the job thousands will very probably die and the continent will be finally arrive back in the Dark Ages, a time to where it is already hurtling.

But think of the time bloggers, writers, columnists, poets and other assorted tragedians would have. It’d be a golden age for world literature.

…Because I know you’ve been worried about it. After a period of uncertainty, a ‘portrait of former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been put in place on the Grand Staircase of Number 10′.

From now on, the last thing Gordon will see each night as he toddles off to bed will be his nemesis. You can see why he might have resisted it for so long.

Needless to say, in his picture, Tony is gazing wistfully off to the right.

All together now – Because maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me:

Tony Blair has been holding discussions with some of his oldest allies on how he could mount a campaign later this year to become full-time president of the EU council, the prestigious new job characterised as “president of Europe”.

He’s going to get this, isn’t he? After all the death and destruction, lies and corruption, you just know he’s going to get it. How’s this for terrifying:

Blair, currently the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, EU and the UN, has told friends he has made no final decision, but is increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs.

Defence in this instance being the usual disgusting euphemism for attack, obviously. Him putting the words ‘defence’ and ‘intervene’ together has led to all kinds of scary places. And I like the tone of reluctance on Blair’s part that these reports are giving off, like he doesn’t really want to do it, but…

He’s ‘increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if…’ and he ‘recognises he would need to abandon his well-paid, private sector jobs if he won’. It’s as if he’s all, ‘For God’s SAKE! Give it me then if nobody else wants it.’

And of course, none of this is absolutely nothing to do with continuing to fluff his sagging ego. No sirree:

Some Blair allies also say that he now recognises that as envoy in the Middle East he is not going to be allowed to become the key player in furthering Israeli-Palestinian talks this year, and will be reduced to a role of supporting political development in Palestine and boosting its economy.

The poor sod. His job of bring peace to the Middle East turned out to be less thrusting and important and yes, dammit, fun than he was expecting. He’s going to be ‘reduced’ to a job looking after the Palestinians as if it were like looking after someone’s cat on a weekend when there’s a brilliant party going on somewhere else. Supporting Palestine’s political development and economy is just so dispiriting and unglamourous compared to having your photo taken with important dignitaries.

I fear that Tim Ireland might have been right on this all along. Have we finally found our anti-Christ? It’s a short hop from President of Europe to General Secretary of the UN. And then we’re all boned.