Backing Blair IV - Drawing The Line
Our fourth video is now live. Please share it with someone who cares.. Or, even better, share it with someone who doesn't.
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9 Comments:
I'm interested - of the photos of injured Iraqi civilians, can you guarantee to us that they're all the direct casualties of Coalition action and non have been killed by insurgents?
I don't think that's really the point, Pete. Politicians make bad decisions and a chain of events follow. We don't know how many people have died. Often we don't know why or how. Nevertheless that short video represents in a straightforward way what we know about the results of the Blair/Bush policy.
Simon's made a good point. If the invasion didn't occur there wouldn't have been any casualties.
Incidentally, I really liked the video. Good work!
Excellent work, as always Tim, I'll be spreading this as best as I can.
And Peter, that is one of the daftest questions I've heard since ' Are their weapons of mass destruction?'
Powerful, moving, necessary, and informative.
Of course, on the other hand, if there had NOT been an invasion nobody would have ever been able to take any pictures of the people Saddam had killed. Just a thought. Not trying to pick a fight.
I also believe the video is an excellent way of desanitising a war that was filmed by people shacking up with the military. These are the images we NEED to brace ourselves and look full in the face every time we think about military action. Bravo Tim.
Last Tory, I completely agree with you.
Saddam was an evil tyrant who should have been toppled by the West after the gassing of his own people in Halabja in 1988. Like most atrocities, we sat on our hands. The Human Rights aspect looks more like a vehicle for justifying the invasion.
I'm delighted that his atrocities were halted and have been brought to public view but where on earth were the West during the previous 20-odd years of his regime?
If you recall the sequence of events, the Bush speech on the first anniversary of the WTC attack, misdirected the blame from al-Qaeda on to Iraq. The recent Panorama Doc on this expresssly states that US intel on Iraqi WMD's were at best thin and quote: "The facts and the intelligence were being fixed round the policy by the Bush administration."
You can read it from the transcript yourself.
Think about it for a moment. If it was a genuine attempt to deal with human rights violations, there are a myriad of countries we should have invaded since. For example, I don't see Bush or Blair beating a path to deal with Robert Mugabe. After all, he came to power about the year after Saddam did.
However went to war for both the wrong reasons and under false pretences. It was also handled extremely badly. That is in part what this campaign is about. It doesn't deny Saddam's atrocities but focuses on the entire way the war (and associated issues like David Kelly, WMD-45mins, the UN decision, etc) questions Blair's competence to be PM.
That's what baffles me about Michael Howard's campaign strategy. Wouldn't it be much more appropriate to have attacked Blair as an incomptetent on critical international issues?
I half supported the US/UK position before the war started - in the belief that it was all a giant bluff to get rid of Saddam Hussein without actually fighting. I didn't think that they would be mad enough to actually invade and occupy Iraq. How wrong I was!
Saddam Hussein was a problem that needed addressing, however two principles should have been applied: (1) that any suffering by the Iraqi people should be absolutely minimal, and (2) any action should be applicable to other countries with human rights issues.
By going outside the international community, the US/UK have made it more difficult to deal with abuses in North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and other countries. The implicit American message is that if you stay away from al-Qaeda, and you don't have oil, then you will be left alone.
In my view the basic way to deal with mad and vicious dictatorships is to strengthen international law and institutions and limit the powers of states to deny human rights.We need to raise the threshold. If force has to used it should only be through the United Nations.
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