Blair's vision of a new world order is critically tainted

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1164264,00.html

If Tony Blair's purpose was to set out a credible and internally consistent justification for his decision to go to war against Iraq and establish it as a model for the reordering of international relations, his speech failed on both counts. Instead, it exemplified the intellectual and moral confusion of a man who acted on gut instinct and now finds himself rebuked by the facts. One year on, the prime minister still seems uncertain about how to characterise the war.

He started by acknowledging that it wasn't a humanitarian intervention to liberate the people of Iraq from tyranny, but concluded that "we surely have a responsibility to act when a nation's people are subjected to a regime such as Saddam's". This is hardly a passing detail; it goes to the heart of Blair's proposals for reform of the UN and his new "doctrine of international community".

More troubling was the assertion that intervention was necessary to prevent Islamist terrorists and an authoritarian regime armed with weapons of mass destruction making common cause to attack the west. There was scarcely a scintilla of evidence to support this thesis before the war started and there is even less in its aftermath.

No group of people can have been subjected to more threats or offered more inducements than the Iraqi scientists and Ba'athists in coalition hands. Not one has substantiated the allegation that Saddam was stockpiling WMD, let alone that he was considering passing them to al-Qaida. The link is a product of Blair's imagination and the moral reductionism he mistakes for statesmanship. The world, as he sees it, consists of "good guys" and "bad guys", with the latter combining to form a composite threat. This may be an asset for a Hollywood scriptwriter, not for a world leader. This is not to dismiss the threat posed by terrorists or their ambition to acquire the means to kill on an ever-larger scale. Both are well-attested facts. The problem for Blair is that there is no convincing evidence to support his contention that regime change in Baghdad has made that threat more remote and rather a lot to suggest the opposite.

[Capt_Nemo]

1. "Military humanitarism" is fascism in a pseudo-progressive clothing

It is fundamentaly opposed to the rule of law, because it enables
might to become right.

That is why the end results of leftist
ideologies contemptuous of the rule of law are so simmilar to fascism:
they become one and the same - The unrestrained exercise of ruthless
power (just for the sake of it).

Blair's ideology is the most
dangerous thing made up by the "left" since Stalin.
Are we going to wait until he has as much blood on his hands as uncle
Joe?

[T_i_B]

2. Trying to justify a war of aggression

That's all Blair's speech was trying to do. He's given us a number of excuses, from WMD to the UN excuse (which does not fit as the war was NOT sanctioned by the UN) and the B-B-B-B-B-B-But Saddam was brutal dictator argument, none of which justify what he has done.

If the reason for war is just then there is no reason to keep changing it. If the reason for war is power at any cost then it is not a just war, hence Blair's blathering.