Tony Blair: Oh Yes We Did...

 Because the internet was just crying out for another person to complain about politics, I've decided to put my two cents in on Tony Blair's recent advice on the situation in Iraq.

 If, as some people speculate, satire died the day Blair was made a Middle Eastern peace envoy, then Blair telling the rest of the world how to best handle tensions in Iraq must be the day that satire's re-animated corpse was finally decapitated and burned to make sure it was truly gone forever.

 Blair - in a statement on his God-bothering website - says that we "need to stop saying 'we caused this'" when it comes to problems in Iraq.

 Well, he's right. WE didn't cause this. He did. Him and a few others. Along with an estimated 36 million other people [1], I was quite vociferously against going into Iraq in the first place. Mr. Blair, of course, felt that there was no way to talk George Bush out of his omnishambolic desert folly, and so rather than growing a spine and attempting to stand on the right side of history, he instead followed Bush into a disastrously ill-thought-out war that seemed to benefit nobody except Halliburton.

 Indeed, it's the way the war was so badly handled that really rankles. I'll admit - because unlike Blair, I can admit when I'm wrong - that I was initially against the war in its entirety, largely because it seemed to be George Bush's idea, and if I cut my finger and George Bush told me to put a plaster on it, I'd probably chainsaw my arm off as a reflex action. However, having changed my mind based on new evidence (something else Blair seems incapable of) I eventually came to believe that removing Saddam Hussein was a good idea. The man was a monster and a tyrant.

 Unfortunately, the way that he was removed involved the deaths of up to a hundred and forty thousand civillians, largely due to the bull-in-a-china-shop methods employed.

 Then again, let's not forget that Hussein was only in power because rich white men in the West initially wanted him there. Whichever way you slice the almighty clusterfuck that is the Middle East, "we" always "caused this." We've been causing or exacerbating problems in poorer nations for generations, now.

 The only way for societies to make progress is for the downtrodden and brutalised to rise up against their oppressors. It happened in Libya. It happened in Egypt. It happened in England in 1649 and France in 1789. What revolutions against tyranny have in common is that they have never been instigated or aided by the intervention of rich foreigners. The best way to topple Hussein would have been to let the people do it for themselves.

 If Blair was any kind of real socialist, he'd understand that.