Please invite fewer Economist correspondents and more bloggers like Rachel onto the show, because it’s their voices that I listen to ROS for.

The found no such thing.

OBVIOUSLY they lied – Bush and Blair claimed that they had good intelligence data that Iraq had WMD’s. They didn’t. They neither had WMD’s, nor did they have good intelligence to that effect.

When you make a statement that’s untrue, it’s a lie. You can’t say it’s an honest mistake, because it was self-evident to millions of citizens in the UK, the majority of people in most other EU countries, and even a few people in the US,
that such intelligence did not exist. It makes no sense to say that we could see it and Blair couldn’t, so that rules out the “honest mistake” argument, therefore it was a lie.

My point was that, contrary to your post above, the Hutton inquire did comment on the so called “dodgy dossierâ€?, and that it found the charge to be bunk. And the only reason I am repeating myself is because people do not seem to get it: seperate inquiries have found the “they lied” argument to be horse manuer.

The dossier had not been “sexed upâ€?, but was in line with available intelligence, although the Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by John Scarlett, may have been “subconsciously influencedâ€? by the government”

What’s your point? Being “in line with available intelligence” is not a judgement on whether the available intelligence was valid or not.

“And the Butler Inquiry was a all white wash .. thats right .. move along people, nothing to see here, nothing to see here.”

Repeating yourself doesn’t add anything to the debate.

From the Wikipedia entry on the Hutton Inquiry

The dossier had not been “sexed up”, but was in line with available intelligence, although the Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by John Scarlett, may have been “subconsciously influenced” by the government

And the Butler Inquiry was a all white wash .. thats right .. move along people, nothing to see here, nothing to see here.

No, not true at all.

First of all, the Hutton Inquirly had nothing to do with the topic at hand – it was about whether Blair had any responsibility for the death of David Kelly, and that was the limit of its scope.

And the Butler Inquiry was nothing but a whitewash because it was was not allowed to follow the data wherever it went, but was forced to confine itself way too narrowly to draw any relevent conclusions. This is why Howard pulled out of it.

Both the Blair and Bush governments take the same tack on this – people demand an inquiry into the war or 9/11 or treatment of prisoners or whatever. So they set one up that deliberately is not allowed to ask the most important questions, or given full access to the intelligence information it needs to be effective. When anyone complains about this, Bush, Blain, & Co. excuse it by saying that secrecy is necessary to keep information out of the hands of the enemy. It’s a classic catch-22 created by Bush and VBlair to hide their lies and incompetence. Unfortunately for them the RESULTS of their lies and incompetetnce become clearer every day.

Funny, but I thought both the Hutton Inquiry and the Butler Inquiry found the charge of a “dodgy dossierâ€? to be a hill of beans and that British (and by extension US) intel was reasonable to conclude most of what it did, including the African unranium? In fact, didn’t some high ups at the BBC resign in disgrace for thier unethical shenanigans?

I know, nothing to see here, keep moving ….

Yes; this is very insightful and I’m surprised that more people have not found this retreat from honor and intellectual honesty by two men we THOUGHT had an abundance of both to be remarkable.

Hell, Kay Allen, the last century hasn’t yet arrived in central North America. In more ways than the ironic way you meant, too. We’re still, in the veiled-racist politics of the Deep South, still struggling with the sordid 19th century business called Reconstruction – and it’s still woefully affecting the whole of the nation’s politics. The quadrennially-flogged idea that any progressive Northerner is effectively ‘ineligible’ (according to the corporate media, anyway) to win the Presidency is proof enough. Hence our sad-sack Presidential series of rich white men masquerading as ‘good ol’ boys’ and ‘cowpokes’…

Anyway, thanks for your agreeable post and its consisely stated insights.

I agree. Yes indeed the US needs more than two parties that are alike for the most part. It baffles the mind, and the rest of the world, that in a country with population of approximately 300 mil, citizens have ONLY two parties that represent them. I don’t think that the American people are that homogeneous when it comes to political ideas.

In a small country like Denmark, with a population of 5.5 mil, there are more parties participating in the national and local election than one can count extending from the far left, to the centre (social dems) to the far right and anything in between. Hasn’t the new century arrived to the US yet?

Still, I think it says something of appalling significance that, against the prevailing backdrop of the suzerain yet intellectually-bankrupt conceptual construct called American Conservatism, well-informed Europeans can recognize the (inexcusable) timidity of the Democrats, and, simply to save the time it would otherwise take to explain, make the entirely plausible assumption that yet another Republican will win the next American Presidential Propaganda Election.

Sheesh.

We need more than just two parties, People. And to have more than the Two (capitalized on sarcastic-purpose) that the corporate business interests tacitly sanction for us, we’ll likely need a constitutional amendment (or more than just one, maybe) that tackles the modern democratic concept called proportional representation, in lieu of our slavishly loyal and unimaginatively jingoistic adherence to the 18th century Constitution’s mandate of the simplistic status quo called representation-by-individuals.

Wake up, folks, and smell the 21st century coffee. It’s delightfully more flavorful than all that aging factory-ground Maxwell House—and vastly more democratic to boot.

The question that no one seems to be able to answer is whether Blair truly believed in his policies or was just an utter pragmatist of the highest degree, and skilled enough to win a few rounds in the fight of geodiplomacy (before finally losing). And of course the biggest unspoken mystery in Blair’s legacy is the fact that his government had *seen* the evidence that the run up to the war was a complete fraud. This alone seems to answer my question, at least in part — he could not have truly believed that his reasons were just.

One question we did not explore was the fractured special relationship Tony Blair had with Gordon Brown. Brown wrote a book on Devolution and was elected from Scotland.

Notes for a future show. What will be great about Great Britain when it devolves?

Just out of curiosity, do you think Blair has extracted any benefit at all (for himself or for the UK) from this special relationship?

The only apparent thing that has kept Blair in power this long is the same thing that has kept Bush in power — The US Democrats and the British Tories are in a close, neck-and-neck race to see who can be the most inept, useless and dysfunctional “opposition” party in the world of democracies!

Right on. How nice it would be if we had a national political mechanism that demanded, on a weekly basis, the exalted executive (auftokratos? that’s for all you Byzantine scholars ) called President demonstrate to his (putative) constituency the People (Demos) an ability to think on his feet and articulate intelligibly.

Man, do I ever wish that We the People could see through the smokescreens of jingo drifting from the contrail of all those rockets’-red-glares long enough to craft, collectively, a new and modern Constitution. (Not on the British model, though. More like on the Swedish – or something even more democratic than that…)

Yeah, I know: a pipedream. We got videogames to play, after all, and ‘reality’ to watch on TV.
Democracy?
We don’t need no stinkin’ democracy!

Shakespeare could write about Blair. Yes, Galoot, Blair is a compelling ablbeit slick communicator. As a communicator he might have translated England historic experience in the Middle East. He seemed not to grasp or learn from England’s history.
He promissed to be the mediator between Europe(old) and the US. Yet his polcies alientated europe.
Perhaps, as the Republic of Ireland leaned a long time ago(and the IRA belatedly) that Brussels is more important that London. Blair may very well be the last Prime Minister of Great Britan as governemnt power delvolves.
I do regret that George W. has not been sujected to the “Prime Minister Questions”

Supporting the US over Iraq was meant to come with the quid pro quo that the US would then throw its weight behind the formation of real Palestinian state. Can we see Blair’s influence in that the Bush administration has actually called for a two state solution? Of course it seems that this expectation involved a rather unrealistic assumption that Bush could even if he wanted to go against the serious US domestic constituencies that don’t see a viable Palestinian state as a good thing. Perhaps Blair wanted that as his legacy – but post-Lebanon this seems to be in tatters.

Its interesting you cite both Furedi and Spiked – Furedi is very linked to the magazine as he is a leading member of the “LM Group” that also produce Spiked. They all started out as the “Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain” and hate the Blair government for Kosovo, as they always supported Milosovic for being ‘Europe’s Last real Communist’. The original LM (Living Marxism) magazine was sued out existence after they accused various journalists of having made up the Bosnian concentration camps story. A pretty loathsome lot. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Frank_Furedi

I can’t say I agree with the plea for a “suspension of cynicism” coming from ‘Toby in the North’, and I suspect that most Brits feel nothing but cynicism towards Blair and his government today. New Labour suffers from a complete lack of political vision: knee-jerk reactions to media stories (the ‘respect agenda’, the regulation of lifestyle and health, the urge to ban everything remotely risky) and personal messianism (Blair’s support for the ‘War on Terror’) are substituted in its place.

One thing I think the show should consider is Blair’s relationship to intervention. He is often seen as Bush’s ‘poodle’ in the UK for going along with the ‘war on terror’, but if you look at his foreign policy record pre-9/11, it is full of interventions: Kosovo (1999), Sierra Leone (2000), Iraq (1998). The idea of ‘humanitarian warfare’ bleeds very easily into interventions to secure ‘freedom and democracy’. This article definitely overstates the case but it notes this fact and shows how Blair talks about ‘good and evil’ in terms that are often thought unique to Bush and his right-wing coterie: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1316/

I think it’s important not to get bogged down in Blair/Bush poodle or Blair/Brown saga issues with this show but rather to think about what the “triumph of Blairism”, as a recent Downing St memo put it, means in relation to British and perhaps Western politics. The so-called ‘third way’ that Blair champions reflects an absence of political vision, not a new vision for the future. I would suggest getting the British contemporary philosopher James Heartfield on if you possibly can – I think he has the best understanding of what New Labour represents (his homepage: http://www.heartfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/) His ‘Death of the Subject Explained’ is a brilliant, accessible look at contemporary politics and the decline of human subjectivity, with clear, compelling examples from both the UK and the US. If you can’t get him, try Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent, who has written extensively on the new ‘politics of fear’ and risk management represented by New Labour (http://www.frankfuredi.com/).

The tragedy is I don’t think he would up initiated this war on his own, he was faced with a choice and he sold his soul for economics. You can almost feel the pain when you talk to Brits about Blair. They oh so want to like him, if only he hadn’t made such a magnificent blunder.

I voted for Nader years ago because I believed him when he said there was no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. It turns out, again tragically, that he was only half right.

“Politics is never neat; it is rarely possible to say in a sprawling democracy that one certain thing was the reason behind a certain policy. Ideology, vested interests, indifference, lack of time, compromise, mistakes and sheer chance may all play a role in how policy is produced. Nevertheless policies can change radically as a result of a change of government. This has been shown above in the cases of British policy on the Balkans, humanitarian intervention more generally, third world development and European defence. If one person within government can exert significant influence it is the Prime Minister, particularly in the case of Blair who has been centralizing power through his period in office, with the claimed intention of creating better coordination between the different sections of government.

Blair stands out amongst world leaders in that he not only has a vision of a better world beyond the borders of his own country, but he is willing to use the resources of the state he leads to try and achieve it. We are seeing this again in Afghanistan. Of course this whole vision might turn out to be a monumental folly; his rhetoric might create expectation in poor countries that will remain unfulfilled leading to cynicism towards all efforts of the rich nations to assist. Blair is already seeing domestic anger over the perception that whilst he is off fighting the war against terror, the British rail network is in disarray and other public services are not improving as promised. Yet the news footage of the cheering and dancing citizens of Kabul, greeting the first British paratroopers as they marched out onto the streets of that city alongside the local police should perhaps make one forget the cynicism, at least for awhile.”

It is such a great shame that Blair has failed to realise the promise that he showed both in 1997 and again in 2001.