OMG, ITS TONY BLAIR

Tuesday 23 July 2013

OMG, Its Tony Blair!

Hameed Abdul Karim

For those of us who think we have seen and heard just about everything we had another ‘think’ coming when we heard Tony Blair support the army coup in Egypt. There he was on Aljazeera grinning away from ear to ear in the smile made famous by Christopher Lee in Dracula movies, the only difference is that Lee had to make an effort to bring about that frightening smile, but to our Tony Blair it comes natural. No effort needed there. 

He was explaining to the world what a good idea he thought it was to have a military coup in Egypt. No I stand corrected. He didn’t say it was a coup. He said it was a ‘military intervention’. Talk of verbal gymnastics! He went on to say amidst the blah-blah that the army had to intervene to prevent chaos in Egypt and that though 17 million anti-Morsi protestors in Thahir square didn’t amount to an election ‘it was an awesome manifestation of people power’.  And so that’s why the army had to intervene? If that’s his logic, millions of people in Britain and all over the Western capitals protested against his war in Iraq. The crowds came out in their millions in a grand show of ‘people power’ to stop the slaughter of people in Iraq. Wasn’t it time for the military to intervene and topple Tony Blair?

Paradox

There was a paradox on display. For one thing he was uttering nonsense that suggested that maybe he was singing for his supper. And the other was that he was on Aljazeera that he and his partner in crime George W. Bush the ‘lesser’ (according to Arundathi Roy) wanted to bomb to bits the network’s Doha headquarters during what they call the ‘Gulf War’. The idea was to censor any opposing narrative to the one espoused by the empire and its lap dogs like TB. Mercifully, the complexity in bombing an ally prevented their villainy. But bombed they did the network’s office in Baghdad killing two of its correspondent’s and leveling the office from where the network operated. One of the network’s journalists was picked up in Afghanistan and locked up in Guantanamo Bay for over 6 years. All this in the name of democracy and freedom of speech and for the good of civilisation, of course!  

But in all fairness Tony Blair wasn’t the only one making an ass of himself. Mohamed Al-Baradei was giving him stiff competition on CNN. The true democrat that he thinks he is was telling the world that what happened in Egypt was not a coup but a ‘recall’. He cited two examples in the US where this had happened and a squirming anchorwoman had to remind him that these were effected after referendums were held. ‘Ah, but then,’ said our hero ‘we had no time for a referendum’.

Figures don’t add up

Coming back to Blair. He claimed that 17 million people had participated in the mass anti-Morsi campaign to oust him from office. That’s a cool 5 million short of the figure Tammarod had given. Be that as it may, those living in Cairo say that at best Thahir square can hold a million people depending on the availability of oxygen. Likewise the streets surrounding Thahir sq. can hold a few hundred thousand people at a time. But by now we ought to be familiar with TB’s cons. He is the guy who said there were WMD’s in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein could fling a nuclear bomb at London in a matter of 45 minutes.

And to make matters more confusing we have Tony Blair as the peace envoy in the Middle East. There’s another paradox here. How come a war criminal became a peace envoy? That’s probably because the Quartet wanted to give a job to ‘one of the boys’ after he lost his Prime Minister Job. Besides, what makes him think the people of the region will take him seriously after what he did in Iraq? ‘Thousands died because Blair lied’ was one message on a placard during a protest in London against the war in Iraq. Indeed his wife’s sister, Laurent Booth, is critic of his dirty war. And isn’t it true that hundreds of Brits died in both Iraq and Afghanistan for no reason at all other the one to fatten the fattest of the war lords and banksters in the corporate world. And he has the temerity to tell us that the ‘military intervention’ in Egypt was the best thing that happened to humanity, all in the name of democratic process. What would Egyptians think of the current military regime after a chap like Tony Blair gives it a character certificate? And most of the characters in the present regime are remnants of the hated Mubarak era. Adly Mansoor the interim President was the Chief Justice of the country during that time. He would never have landed this job if he had not paid obeisance to Hosni Mubarak. All this and more makes you want to sympathise with the Morsi camp.