Tony Blair joins a strange and exclusive club of political leaders whose careers have been blighted

[Jefferson23]

Sunday March 23, 2015
Patrick Cockburn

A new tomb has just gone up in that graveyard of US and British political reputations

Tony Blair stepping down as a Middle East peace envoy after eight years was greeted almost everywhere with a mixture of harsh criticism, derision and relief. He had reportedly long been allocating three days a month to the job and devoting the rest of his time to his business interests.

Blair is a member of a strange but exclusive club consisting of British and American political leaders whose careers have been blighted or terminated over the past century by calamitous involvement in the Middle East. On the British side members include Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Anthony Eden, and among the Americans are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.

Do the different crises in the Middle East with which these six men failed to cope successfully have anything in common? Were similar mistakes made, and why has the region become such a graveyard for political reputations?

Blair’s departure coincided almost to the day with the centenary of the moment on 18 March 1915 when an Anglo-French fleet entered the Dardanelles with the purpose of fighting its way through to Istanbul. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was a prime advocate of the plan which failed disastrously when Turkish mines and guns sank three battleships and seriously damaged three others. Shortly afterwards he supported the landing of ground troops on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April, which ended in total defeat eight months later, after a quarter of a million British and French troops had been killed or wounded, along with a similar number of Turkish soldiers.

in full: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tony-blair-joins-a-strange-and-exclusive-club-of-political-leaders-whose-careers-have-been-blighted-by-the-middle-east-10125170.html

[djean111]

1. Sometimes it seems to me like America and England (England to a lesser extent, but then

it also seems to me that they were vastly more successful at conquering a long time ago, and just hate to stop completely) somehow regard themselves as Guardians of the Universe and consider the rest of the world as their back yard.
Yes, grievously horrible things happen all over the world. But it seems strange to me that The Richest Nation on Earth should have so many poor people, and people who still cannot actually get or afford good health care, and still have all of the violence and out-sized prison population, over a trillion in student debt, etc.
Just what is it we purportedly are trying to propagate all over the world? Our system of Capitalism seems to be nearing its Monopoly game finish - a handful of people hold all the money, and the rest cannot afford to pay the rent.

Hate to consider that all of the misery is just collateral damage for the banks and the corporations and the MIC.

Sorry for the rant, but reading about failed and planned conquests, and then considering how much "choice" is being peeled away - women's bodies, food, our taxes for war, etc. - seems a bit bleak, and that little club of failed leaders is so disparate. Bush and Reagan (I don't know so much about the English guys) were just nakedly political and ambitious or tools. Blair is a tool of enormous proportions. So is Bush. Some days it seems pretty futile to even pay attention, much less hope for better.

[Jefferson23]

2. What they have established is unsustainable and one problem in changing it, is asking those

who fucked it up, to be part of any effort to repair it. Also, those same ideologies, does
not matter which new face says it..same failed approach, same failed response.

Watching Obama on Iran is promising, I feel..not only for the obvious avoidance of more
conflict but also the opportunity for more American voters to see that his way forward
was the rational approach. I can only hope it educates the casual observer of foreign
policy..hey, nothing happened there, maybe this guy was on the money, lets not do that
anymore!

I appreciate every gain we can get but it is difficult at times, to be hopeful.