Author: R J Adams

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” bemoaned Henry Higgins in the musical, “My Fair Lady.”

It seems he may have got his way, judging by the women we find in politics today. One could, perhaps, wish he hadn’t.

Once again Britain finds itself with a female prime minister. Most Tory supporters will be delighted with Theresa May. On the surface, she’s an admirable choice to take-over from the weak-chinned Cameron, whose antics over the European Union have thrown the world into a turmoil serving only to bring every ‘Armageddon’ freak from out the wilderness.

Further back in time than the writer cares to remember, when a woman entering politics was considered an ‘oddity’, and male-only governments ran high on testosterone, one often heard talk (mainly from women) of how one day the female sex would run the world and we’d all be better off, safer, and more peaceable.

The created image was of a Parliament or Senate festooned with half-knitted sweaters and winter-woollies; the clicketty-clack of myriad knitting needles mingled with the chink of teacups, clearly audible over a gossipy chit-chat interwoven between how to keep the price of wool from fluctuating violently, and what in the world was Mrs Johnson, the Leader of the House, going to give hubby for his dinner that evening.

It was a charming, fairytale, notion of governments too concerned with such minor domestic problems as the price of washing powder to ever wage war or threaten nuclear annihilation.

Sadly, this Disney-esque dream turned to nightmare with the arrival on the scene of Margaret Thatcher. For a few, fleeting moments, as Maggie stood on the threshold of Number 10 and tried to emulate Saint Francis of Assisi…

‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope’.

…we all dared to hope she’d brought her knitting.

Alas, the next time she appeared through the door of 10, Downing Street, the saintliness was gone and horns had sprouted through the blue rinse and permanent wave.

Now, it seems likely the U.S.A. may have its first female president. Given the hawkish history of Hillary Clinton, it’s doubtful she’ll bring her knitting either.

It all begs the question: why do women turn into men when handed the reins of power? No sooner had Argentina planted their flag on the Falklands Islands than Maggie was declaring war.

During Britain’s economic chaos of the 1980s Thatcher, in full male tradition, stood firm against the coal minors and their union leader, Arthur Scargill, refusing any attempt at reconciliation.

Why couldn’t these issues have all been resolved over a nice cup of tea and a cream scone?

Is Theresa May likely to metamorphose into a reincarnation of Maggie Thatcher?

It’s difficult to say, but she’s held the unenviably tough job of Home Secretary for longer than anyone in fifty years, and during that tenure no-one’s heard so much as the clicketty-clack of a knitting needle emanating through her office door.

Whether that would be pleasing to Henry Higgins is open to conjecture.

The Chilcot report ran to two million six hundred thousand words. That’s the equivalent of three and a third Bibles, or nearly four and a half volumes of War and Peace. If we’re brutally honest all 2.6 million words were about Tony Blair.

In practice, that’s probably not quite true, but so far as the British public are concerned, the Chilcot report was all about whether Tony Blair did the right thing, or not; whether he was guilty of taking Britain to war illegally, or not.

The report was fairly damning on both questions. No, he wasn’t right, and probably he went to war illegally. The Chilcot inquiry wasn’t about gathering evidence for prosecution, so that was as far as Sir John Chilcot could go in his condemnation.

On Wednesday, after the report was published, Tony Blair spent two hours defending his position over Iraq. He apologised profusely for what he did wrong, while insisting everything he did was right. You’d have thought that would be sufficient. He’d said his piece, the report was out, now it was time to hide away and keep one’s head down for six months, or so, until the heat’s off.

That’s what any sane person would do. Not so Blair. One day later and he’s back on the radio – BBC, no less – telling everyone the world would be in a much worse position today had he not decided to invade Iraq.

“I can regret the mistakes and I can regret many things about it – but I genuinely believe not just that we acted out of good motives and I did what I did out of good faith, but I sincerely believe that we would be in a worse position if we hadn’t acted that way. I may be completely wrong about that.”

He argued that had Saddam Hussein been left in power, “he would have gone back to his [weapons of mass destruction] programmes again”.
And if he had been in power during the Arab Spring in 2011, “I believe he would have tried to keep power” in the way that Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, had done.”^[1]

It seems that Blair is forgetting that the “Arab Spring” fomented as a direct result of the toppling of Saddam Hussein. There would have been no “Arab Spring” had the invasion of Iraq not taken place.

Neither Blair, nor the U.S. administration, had any idea of the violent Muslim factions that would be unleashed by removing the strong, dictatorial, powerbases of Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad.

America makes much of ‘spreading democracy and freedoms’ throughout the Middle East. Its politicians need to read Middle Eastern history. Then they might just comprehend why these nations were governed dictatorially. Saddam Hussein may not have been a very nice man, but he knew how to control his countrymen and prevent the violent, tribal, warfare that has been tearing Iraq apart since his forced removal.

Similarly with Gaddafi, and now the sickening mess that is Syria. Overlording them all is the devil-child spawn of the British/U.S. occupation of Iraq – ISIS.

There was no al Qaeda in Iraq when Saddam was in control. ISIS didn’t exist. Neither was al Qaeda in Libya when Gaddafi was in control, nor in Syria under Assad. All have been created from the warmongering antics of one superpower and a deluded egocentric British politician who loved to be seen hobnobbing with the president of the United States.

Democracy is not for everyone. Some cultures aren’t ready for it. Iraq, Libya, and Syria are fine examples of what can happen when strong leadership is removed, or rendered powerless.

Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeld, have the blood of many thousands of innocents on their hands. They were ignorant of those they were dealing with. But ignorance is no excuse in law.

Blair is, of course, horribly wrong to suggest the world is better off today than in 2002. No-one in their right mind could possibly believe that. Perhaps now he’ll go and hide himself away for a while. He needs to. We’re tired of his excuses, bored with his plaintive assertions, but above all we’re heartily sick of the mass murder, torture, rape, starvation, orphaned children, husband-less wives, and the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons resulting from his actions and those of his political ‘buddies’ in the United States.

^{[1] “Tony Blair says world is better as a result of Iraq War” BBC, July 7th 2016}

There’s been nothing particularly new so far in the Chilcot report into the Iraq War, just confirmation of what was already known to anyone who’s been following the war’s history.

Tony Blair spent two hours on live television telling everyone how dreadfully sorry he was for being right – which surely fooled nobody – and there was the expected group of protesters, many who’d lost loved ones in the invasion and subsequent occupation, calling understandably for Blair’s prosecution as a war criminal. It’s never going to happen. It would mean indicting George Bush and most of his administration, and America wouldn’t hear of that.

Perhaps more interesting than the report itself is the chitchat of the aftermath. In particular, that of Sir Jeremy Greenstock who was the U.K.’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2003. According to a BBC report:

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN in 2003, said Mr Blair had wanted a UN resolution backing action.
But he told the BBC senior US officials thought it was a “waste of time”…

The 2003 invasion had not been the “last resort” action presented to MPs and the public, Sir John [Chilcot] said, adding that there had been no “imminent threat” from Saddam Hussein, and the intelligence case was “not justified”.

Sir Jeremy said he felt Mr Blair had wanted to wait longer before taking military action.
It would have been “much safer” to give weapons inspectors in Iraq another six months to continue their work, he added.

“I felt that at the time, the British felt it at the time, I think the prime minister felt it at the time, that the Americans pushed us into going into military action too early,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight…

Mr Blair had wanted to secure a UN resolution before the conflict but US officials were not committed to a resolution, he added.

“The Americans weren’t genuine about it – but the prime minister was genuine about it – because he thought there was a chance that Saddam could be made to back down before we had to use military force.
“And George Bush for a while agreed with him. But other people behind George Bush didn’t agree with him and thought it was a waste of time. [my bold]”^[1]

It’s long been known that the ‘other people behind George Bush’ were the then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and a number of other members of the PNAC* (including Paul Wolfowitz) who had infiltrated the Bush administration. Bush was the stooge fronting the show and Blair was part of the double act.

Interestingly, though frankly unsurprisingly, the U.S. State Department is refusing to acknowledge the Chilcot report. The BBC continues:

The US State Department said it would not respond to the Chilcot report’s findings as it was focusing on present issues in the Middle East.

“We are not going to examine it, we are not going to try to make an analysis of it or make judgement of the findings one way or another,” a spokesman said.
“Our focus is on the challenges we have in Iraq and Syria right now.”

Sadly, but predictably, the United States is not prepared to learn from history – not even such recent history. Arrogance and superciliousness are so often the creators of failure. America’s war in the Middle East has now been ongoing since the Carter Doctrine of 1980. Thirty-six years of military meddling in that region, the outcome of which has been the understated “challenges” America has today in Iraq and Syria. Apparently, Somalia, Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Tunisia, and the general threat of terrorism from all these countries and more, are not considered priority by the U.S. State Department.

Still, one job at a time, eh, lads?

It’s not an impressive record. The number of innocent civilians killed in those conflicts is astronomical, but totally unimportant – collateral damage – to the military industrial complex growing fat on the profits of the U.S. war machine.

It’s to be hoped that the U.K. will learn its lessons after Chilcot. It seems unlikely that America ever will.

^{[1] “Chilcot report: US ‘pushed UK into Iraq War too early’, says ex-ambassador” BBC, July 7th 2016}

^{* Project for the New American Century.}