Halcyon days of the Special Relationship.
See this news today?
Britain, Belgium and Denmark on Friday joined the U.S.-led coalition of nations that are launching airstrikes on Islamic State group militants in Iraq, committing warplanes to the struggle against the extremists….
Good for them, but what took so long? The French have been with us from the outset. The French! Plus Saudi Arabia and other countries in the neighborhood.
Apparently, the PM had to do some heavy lifting to bring this about:
British Prime Minister David Cameron made a passionate plea that spelled out the consequences of inaction in drastic terms – noting that the militants had beheaded their victims, gouged out eyes and carried out crucifixions to promote goals “from the Dark Ages.”
“This is about psychopathic terrorists that are trying to kill us and we do have to realize that, whether we like it or not, they have already declared war on us,” he said. “There isn’t a ‘walk on by’ option. There isn’t an option of just hoping this will go away.”
Cameron told a tense House of Commons in a more than six-hour-long debate…
Why would debate have taken six minutes, much less six hours? Yeah, I know — Iraq. The same electorate that tossed out Churchill after WWII turned on my man Tony Blair over Iraq, and they’re still kind of cranky over it.
Sigh. All’s well that ends well. The vote was 524-43 for action, so that’s something.
And remember Kosovo?
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Because they were burned by the previous Iraq war disaster.
Yeah, I mentioned that. Except, of course, I didn’t (and won’t) use the words “burned” or “disaster.”
But they – and more importantly, the constituents of the politicians, would use those terms.
Yeah, they never did get it. Shame, really, because Tony Blair always explained it so well.
As Mike Fitts said right after 9/11, “If we have to have a war, can’t Tony Blair be in command?”
This discussion caused me to go back and reread one of my favorite David Brooks columns — this one, from 2007, about how Britain’s involvement in Iraq grew out of Blair’s communitarian values…
Here are some other appropriate words: deceived, catastrophe, cluster ****, calamity, humiliation, misguided, ludicrous, mistake. For sure the Brits were in on the Iraq mess from the get-go. Perhaps they are seeing the downside to these incursions. Frankly I don’t see a whole bunch of upside even if we do wipe out ISIS. There will always be more militants to take their place. It’s like trying to eradicate a hornets nest with a 50 caliber machine gun. Sure we’ll hit a few. But in the meantime we’ll probably hit the neighbor’s dog and they’ll get mad and shoot our cat. We’ll retaliate by shooting their goat. They’ll respond by squashing our hamster. At the end of the day the hornets will still be around but we’ll have even bigger problems to deal with. This is so obvious. I guess the neo-con brain just can’t imagine any negatives that will accrue from ANY military actions.
From a book I’m reading:
“It’s been a slow week for the war. All they’re doing is talkin’, Nothing but a bunch of old men talkin’. You know why old men like to pick a fight, Danny?”
Danny was slow to respond. “Why, Frank?”
“Because they aren’t in one.”
—-
If we don’t have an enemy to fight, our military will create one. Saw yesterday that defense contractor companies have seen their stocks rise by about 19% this year while the market has only been up 3% overall. War is about profit these days. Our economy depends on dropping bombs on innocent people.
“The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.
A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.”
I bet you Democrats didn’t know you voted for George W. Obama.
Lindsey Graham must get a goosebumps every time another civilian is killed.