Here’s a quick one, as I’m ready to call it a day:
- In Libya, rebel strongholds under heavy assault (WashPost) — There apparently have been civilian casualties, as the rebels are pounded on two fronts. The outcome remains in doubt. Meanwhile, here in the comfortable West, we think about doing something about it. But our intentions are good. We’re nice people.
- Libya: We cannot stand aside – Cameron (BBC) — OK, so some Western leaders are at least talking tougher… I would like to have listened in to the conversation between the PM and the president. For that matter, I’d like to have listened in to some of the conversations between the PM and the president several years ago — I’d like to hear how Tony explained it all to W.
- House approves change in way SC pays for education (thestate.com) — Sure wish I knew more about this so I could share it with you, but I don’t. Boy, I miss the good ol’ MSM, which might have thoroughly explained this BEFORE now… I see something about merit pay for teachers, which is something I’ve always been for, but I don’t even know if I’m for this way of doing it. More as I know more.
- Nikki Haley writing a “memoir” (AP) — Really. I already told you about it. Yeah, it kinda freaked me out, too.
- Undercover video sting targets NPR (WashPost) — Yeah, I know, I already told you about this, too. And this kind of back-and-forth “gotcha” stuff between the partisans and culture warriors usually bores me. Slow news day.
- New 9/11 helicopter video emerges (BBC) — Lest we forget.
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Yeah, I’d also like to have heard “how Tony explained it all to W” a few years ago…because the whole thing, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., was so obviously handled according to Blair’s specifications and not Cheney/Bush’s.
Re #6: “lest we forget”? You’re kidding, right?
Boy, I miss the good ol’ MSM, which might have thoroughly explained this BEFORE now …
-Brad
Just give the Free Times a week and they’ll fill us in.
The war in Libya is not our fight. Once we go down the path of a “no fly zone” we will invariably get sucked in. The predictable result will be that our armed forces kill innocent civilians which we will callously describe as “collateral damage”. Let the Libyan people resolve this fight themselves without our intervention.
Ummm, Bud — my point was that filling us in next week, after it’s passed the House, is a bit late.
And Phillip, you apparently never listened to Tony Blair explain the war, and then listen to Bush. But you’re not alone — the British people didn’t listen, either. Or else they have a comprehension problem.
Tony always explained it all beautifully. W. was just going by gut, and much of the time you could tell that. There was occasionally a speech — a biggie, such as a State of the Union — in which he pulled the threads together fairly well, but he usually fell short.
To understand the war, you had to listen to Tony.
It’s not whether I listened to Tony or the British people listened to Tony. It’s about who Bush was listening to, and that certainly was not Tony, at least not nearly so much as listening to Dick “Are you going to take care of this guy or what?” Cheney and the assorted neocons who saw the “opportunity” 9/11 presented.
Just saw where David Broder had died. Sad, didn’t know he was ill.
Brad, you are correct. Mr. Blair has been much more eloquent at whitewashing the Iraq war than Mr. Bush.
And if it weren’t for that extremely inconvenient Downing Street memo, I’m sure Mr. Blair’s own people might actually believe his silver-tongued foppery.
Well, jfx, I hate to say it, but that comment is illustrative of the kind of emotional responses one gets from the left, which I was talking about over here…
@brad
Yeah, it’s a shame people get so emotional about thousands of American soldiers killed in a war driven by faulty (or fabricated) evidence. Blair really believed there were WMD’s and the world was on the brink of an all out attack from Iraq.
Oh, you needn’t have apologized in that other thread. It IS true…I gave an emotional response, because it’s an emotional issue, which has nothing to do with my being on the “left”.
Are the people of Britain part of the “emotional left”?
You made a sweeping claim that those folks have a “listening comprehension” problem.
But they don’t have a “reading comprehension” problem. They read very well what’s in that super-secret memo that was leaked (the authenticity of which has not been denied), and see plain as day that they were sold a turkey dressed up as an eagle.
Tony Blair seems a decent fellow, extremely articulate and congenial, but in light of the once-private conversations essentially saying “this is a turkey”, it’s not hard to comprehend why he has very little purchase on the matter now with the British public. And I imagine it’s hard for many Brits to avoid getting emotional when this very affable man keeps telling them “Who’re you gonna believe? Me? Or your lyin’ eyes reading that memo?”
It’s a fine mess when the intelligence is fixed to suit the policy. And that was the word used: “Fix”. If there are ghosts in England, Orwell’s haunts Blair.
From your link:
“In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat”
Key words being “sometimes” and “global values” with the former being based around how much oil a country exports and the latter based on some undefinable morality that is different for every nation.
If Blair or Bush REALLY believed in that theory, we would be attacking North Korea and Iran. We wouldn’t be propping up dictators.
It’s pure fantasy to think that U.S. can somehow enforce its will upon other nations and export our version of morality (the one that includes a track record of slavery, genocide, killing civilians, etc.)
That’s why people get emotional about war… it’s scary that some people get so UNEMOTIONAL about it.
Wait, Brad–jfx has a very legitimate point–Tony Blair is indubitably far more eloquent than either President Bush. You don’t have to be a frothy partisan to know that!
Actually, Doug, it was a bit more complex than that. Blair’s reasoning was closer to my own — something that went far beyond WMD, and for that matter beyond the War on Terror.
Without going off on a tangent on a day in which I haven’t even had time to start a new post, here’s a post from my old blog that goes a little bit into what informed Blair’s decision-making, and here’s a 1999 speech that further sets it out. And take particular note of that date — 1999. Long before 9/11, long before the Iraq/WMD debate, long before W. or the return to power of Cheney.
JFX and Doug have made valid points on this issue but it gets my dander up every time I hear this thing defended I just can’t stay silent. Anyone who thinks that if the WMD threat was proven false and STILL believes the Iraq invasion was justifiable is just plain delusional. Hell yes I get emotional about the needless death and maiming of 40,000 American soldiers, the waste of at least $1 trillion in treasure and of course the carnage to the Iraqi people. Those of us who have fought tooth and nail to end this fiasco don’t need a lecture about getting “too emotional”. The pro-war folks could use a bit of emotion.
I agree with Doug 100%. Blair at least in that 1999 speech seemed to understand the importance of multilateralism: he speaks of the UN as a “central pillar” including matters of global security. The tragedy of the decade to come was that Bush/Cheney only agreed with part of Blair’s doctrine but made him somehow think they were all in it together.
Even with the (as always) eloquently argued points of Blair’s 1999 speech, there is something grotesquely Wilsonian about its patronizing focus on the Anglo-American alliance being the ones primarily determining when intervention will occur, determining exactly what these global values are (going back to Doug’s point); the speech (and the whole Bush-Blair relationship) may someday be seen as the last gasp of the old Anglo-American axis trying to hang on to its 20th- century gloried role as prime determiner of the course of global events. Could it be any more appropriate that the Blair speech was given at the very tail end of the twentieth century, at the transition to a century whose story will undoubtedly be much more written by and about Asia, Africa, Latin America?