This is Just So Wrong

Via The Guardian:

Tony Blair has landed a major diplomatic job as the international Middle East peace envoy, responsible for preparing the Palestinians for negotiations with Israel. His role, to be announced today, will be largely to work with the Palestinians over security, economy and governance.

Working from an office in Jerusalem, and possibly another in the West Bank, Mr Blair will become the special representative for the Middle East quartet of UN, EU, US and Russia. The announcement comes on the eve of his departure from Downing Street tomorrow and is privately welcomed by Gordon Brown.
[...]
The idea of Mr Blair doing this job is understood to have originated with the prime minister himself in conversation with George Bush, who then suggested it to the UN. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is said to be a keen supporter and Washington was reported last night to have mounted "an enormous push" to ensure Mr Blair got the post.

A man who lied his country into war with Iraq is thought to have enough integrity and dignity for such a post?

It was being stressed last night that Mr Blair's role - in the short term at least - would not be to act as a mediator between the Palestinians and the Israelis, or to become a negotiator for the road map to peace. He might, however, be responsible for trying to persuade the Palestinians to accept the conditions for ending the international boycott of Hamas. The now defunct Hamas government has not received any international aid since its election in March 2006, although aid has been sent directly to the poorest Palestinians through a temporary international mechanism.

The quartet says aid can only be conditional on the Palestinians accepting the right of Israel to exist and giving a commitment to exclusively peaceful means and to abide by all previous agreements.

Well, that all sounds quite lofty and simple but Charley Reese offers a realistic perspective on what life is like for the Palestinians while politicians pontificate:

Alas, President Bush discovered that he didn't like democracy after all. In his mind, democracy is only good if the election produces the results he wants it to produce. He immediately cut off aid and contact to the Palestinians, boycotted them and began a campaign to get other countries to withhold aid. These actions only harmed innocent Palestinian people. Since Hamas officials, unlike Fatah, were not in the habit of squandering public money on personal luxuries, the only people deprived by Bush's actions were ordinary people.

Now the president is pretending that the Fatah gunmen, whom he has been arming, were just sitting peacefully in the shade recently, trying their hand at knitting or crocheting, when all of the sudden those bad Hamas guys came up and started shooting. Regardless of Bush's lies, the truth is that Hamas fought back in self-defense. Between Fatah's gunmen and Israeli assassins, the Hamas guys must have felt like targets in a shooting gallery.

The Gaza Strip is a hellhole. It's a small patch of land, 41 kilometers long and about 6 to 12 kilometers wide. Its 360 square kilometers are crammed with 1.4 million Palestinians, about 1 million of them refugees from Israel's earlier wars. Unemployment is over 50 percent, and the poverty level is 60 percent. Nearly 18 percent of all children there suffer from malnutrition.

Israel controls its water supply and its air and land routes, and subjects its people to frequent closures, not to mention military attacks. It's true that some members of Hamas have resorted to terrorist acts, but the ratio of Israelis killed by Palestinians is small in comparison with Palestinians killed by Israelis. In the year 2006, according to B'Tselem, a respected Israeli human-rights organization, 660 Palestinians, including 141 children, were killed by Israelis, while only 23 Israelis were killed.

Try to visualize, if you can, 141 children. That's about the population of four average classrooms. Now visualize a heap of dead children. Those shot in the head are probably not recognizable, but you can see the bullet holes in the young, tender bodies of the others. If you can visualize this, then maybe you will get an inkling of the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israelis.

Blair will certainly not be rattling the Israeli government's cage, so how can anyone expect that he will advance anything - let alone peace? And the more western governments divide and punish the Palestinian people by backing Abbas, the worse the situation will become.

There are no easy solutions and Palestine is not Northern Ireland. Blair lacks international credibility to be considered an impartial diplomat in this situation. Once again, he'll get his marching orders from Washington and Israel - from people who deliberately put the road map on hold and who chose to fund Abbas in an attempted military solution (ie. coup) thinking somehow that more violence is the answer. As with Iraq however, they're just creating more resistance in the Palestinian territories. Blowback - the thing they never plan for.

Related: Olmert promises to release 250 Fatah prisoners

Shalit's father: If Hamas wants talks, Israel must make deal

With friends like these...:

It is difficult to think of an American president who has caused more damage to Israeli interests than the president who is considered one of the friendliest to Israel of all time. No leader has done more than Bush - by commission as well as omission - to destroy the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

The Consequences of Faux Humanitarian Intervention

When NATO's secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer visited Canada this past week he tried to sell Canadians on an extended military commitment in Afghanistan beyond 2009. And to do that, he thought he could score political (and/or emotional) points by referring to our country's recent history as peacekeepers.

To critics of the mission, he said: "Please realize (that) in a nation like Canada, with such an enormous tradition of peacekeeping ... you are there for a good cause, and I know how dramatic it is if Canadian soldiers pay the high price, but I still say you are there for a good cause, you are there to defend basic universal values."

And writing for the Ottawa Sun, columnist Greg Weston laments that the Afghanistan war hasn't been sold properly to a public that overwhelmingly wants our mission to end when it's supposed to:

Rather than aggressively using the media to help frame the Afghan mission as a difficult humanitarian effort in a dangerous environment, Harper's failed spin machine has allowed the conflict to be framed by deaths, official snafus and other negative events. [Maybe that's because that's what's actually going on no matter how many happy puppy stories Harper tries to trot out? -catnip]
[...]
Whether the government can reverse the tide of public opinion on Afghanistan is a matter of some doubt, in part because the PM and his pointless grudge-match with the media are part of the problem. [And, in part because we shouldn't be there. Period. -catnip]

It's a "humanitarian effort", you see. It's about "basic universal values".

Except that it isn't and the public will not be fooled into thinking that it is.

Writing on the other side of the pond about the waning so-called "neutrality" of the UN and Tony Blair's part in that, Robert Fisk writes about the dangers inherent in the latest "humanitarian intervention" fiascoes:

The Iraq war has shattered the cause of humanitarian intervention endorsed by Tony Blair and directly led to the targeting of relief workers in conflict zones where they are no longer considered to be neutral, according to a former senior UN official.

[Ed. note: 6 UN peacekeepers were killed by a bomb in Lebanon on Sunday.]

In a speech in London tonight, Sir Mark Malloch-Brown will say: "The brutal truth is politics is making it harder and harder to serve victims' needs by reaching them with assistance or bearing witness to their suffering and thereby staying the hand of those who would harm them."

Mr Blair's belief in the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, or the use of force to advance moral causes, led to Nato's air war with Serbia to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars, and later to British military intervention in Sierra Leone. The doctrine was also used to rally international support for the invasion of Afghanistan.

And what effect has that had?

Sir Mark, the former UN deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan, however, points out that the Sudanese President, General Omar al-Bashir, has been able to use the Iraq invasion as the prime reason to delay acceptance of a UN force in Darfur. "Tony Blair and George Bush have repeatedly called for the right kind of action in Darfur only to be rebuffed as the architects of Iraq. Bashir has tried to make them his best weapon.

"It is not their loss of credibility that concerns me today, but rather that of humanitarian workers. The trouble is the two are linked," he goes on. "I have watched the work I used to do get steadily more dangerous as it is seen as serving Western interests rather than universal values."

While at the UN, he says, he would see the maps of Darfur showing ever-widening yellow circles that mark no-go areas for humanitarian workers. "Iraq is the immediate cause for this. And 9/11 the preceding trigger - but both come at the end of a process that has knocked humanitarian work off the straight and narrow of non-political impartial help ... bringing help to the needy."

Interesting that he should use the same phrase as de Hoop Scheffer. But the problem is that as far as conservative western leaders are concerned, western interests always trump those "universal values" and because those interests must be satisfied, the accepted doctrine is the use of military force - which they either fail to understand or refuse to admit as having a huge ripple effect.

Canadian troops are not on a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. We are not promoting "values". We're in the thick of battles in which 60 soldiers have now lost their lives. While politicians mimic Donald Rumsfeld who constantly complained about the lack of Good News™ coming out of both war zones he was responsible for, (and the record of achievements in Afghanistan is small as this current bunch of leaders try to convince you otherwise - with opium production fueling over 90% of the country's economy as tiny bandaids are offered as political solutions), apparently people like de Hoop Scheffer think they can tug at our humanitarian heartstrings to keep sending more troops to die into a country we've been at war with for 6 years now.

To what end?

That's the question more Canadians have been asking themselves lately and they're not satisfied with the answer.

I suppose history will judge our "will" as it does that of America in Iraq. In the US however, the main reason to call for the troops to come home seems to be that the war is being lost. In Canada, we have a different perspective: just how much good can we accomplish in Afghanistan?

We're different nations, the US and Canada, and we have different expectations of our roles in international affairs. (Well, we did until this minority Conservative government took over.) But what Robert Fisk has written about - the perils of the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" and the way it has played out - whether that's the actual or perceived policy - and the effects it's having on the actual peacekeepers (such as those in Lebanon who were killed this weekend) is not something that western interests should overshadow on the international stage. If the people who are the most vulnerable and in need are not able to trust those who are trying to help them, who else can they turn to?

Bush, de Hoop Scheffer and Harper need to realize that war is not a "universal value" and that as the use of military force continues to make life more instead of less treacherous for too many civilians (with 90 killed this past week in Afghanistan alone, which Hamid Karzai rightly railed against on Saturday), the people that they all seem to feign care for are continually being harmed, not helped. They need aid workers. They need peacekeepers. They need true humanitarian intervention. They need to be able to trust.

How can it be right then, that these wars these leaders so want to push as being for a "good cause", be allowed to go on when the very people they are supposed to be benefiting are suffering so much? More of the same is not the answer.
 

Gaza Update

Israel sends missiles, tanks into Gaza.

About 200 Gazans, petrified by the chaos in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip, have been camped out for six days in a tunnel reeking of trash, urine and sweat on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing, pleading with Israeli authorities to grant them safe passage to the West Bank.

From a Haaretz editorial: "The pictures at the Erez crossing remind any person who still tries not to forget harsh scenes of locked, sealed gates from the previous century."

The fear that dangerous Hamas operatives might infiltrate into the West Bank is not baseless. But the Shin Bet security service presumably knows how to properly screen those seeking to pass - if that is what Jerusalem decides to do.

In the dark days before the Holocaust, it was similarly argued, not without justification, that the German and Austrian refugees fleeing for their lives could include moles seeking to assimilate into the countries through which they passed and sabotage them.

The lessons of history should never be forgotten.

The Christian Science Monitor has more about the Palestinian refugees.

And, as I predicted last week, Olmert begged for more money from Bush and got it, of course. "At the end of the 10 years, Israel will receive $2.9 billion annually in military assistance from the U.S."

While the dictator strikes again:

The prime minister asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for his assistance in expediting the handling of a number of IDF procurement requests meant to complete the replenishment of equipment and stores used during the Second Lebanon War.

Gates pointed out that though there is no problem with the requests in principle, there is an orderly procedure. However, Bush intervened and directed the defense secretary to expedite approval of the IDF's requests.

The reason Bush did that, of course, is because Ehud Barak is reportedly planning a massive military attack on Gaza and he needs the supplies - hoping to avoid a disaster like the failed efforts of the IDF against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer. So, screw this talk of "process", Gates.

There won't be any talk of "peace" while Barak is around. He was waiting for an aggressive move by Hamas and he reportedly got it.

So, here we have the same scenario: innocent civilians stuck in Gaza, which the Israeli government is reluctant to lift a finger for - even those with pressing medical problems - who will be subject to a sweeping military incursion. How many innocents will die this time? And, more importantly, for what?

Meanwhile, Bush was busy hosting a congressional picnic on Wednesday.

MR. RUFFINS: Well, thanks for having us.

THE PRESIDENT: Kermit Ruffins and the Barbeque Swingers, right out of New Orleans, Louisiana. (Applause.)

MR. RUFFINS: Thank you. Thanks for having us. We're glad to be here.

THE PRESIDENT: Proud you're here. Thanks for coming. You all enjoy yourself. Make sure you pick up all the trash after it's over. (Laughter.)

Who's going to end up picking up Bush's trash in the Middle East once he's gone and who will bury the bodies?

Related:

Tony Blair as the UN's Middle East envoy? They're joking, right?

A Leader of Hamas Warns of West Bank Peril for Fatah

And yet another big lie had to be rolled out again:

The Americans say that their effort to aid, train and equip the elite Fatah forces was to protect the crossings to Israel and to deter Hamas, not to start a civil war.

A Secular-Democratic State Solution; The Light at the End of the Gaza-Ramallah Tunnel
 

The Guardian: 'Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq'

No wonder Tony Blair thinks the Iraq war didn't have much of an effect on his popularity, he's been busy not only lying to himself, but to everyone else in the world too:

Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq

Tony Blair agreed to commit British troops to battle in Iraq in the full knowledge that Washington had failed to make adequate preparations for the postwar reconstruction of the country.

In a devastating account of the chaotic preparations for the war, which comes as Blair enters his final full week in Downing Street, key No 10 aides and friends of Blair have revealed the Prime Minister repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised his concerns with the White House.

That didn't stop him from sending troops though. Not only that:

He also agreed to commit troops to the conflict even though President George Bush had personally said Britain could help 'some other way'.

Even though Blair was apparently "exercised" over the fact that nothing had been planned:

Blair's most senior foreign affairs adviser at the time of the war makes clear that Blair was 'exercised' on the exact issue raised by the war's opponents. Sir David Manning, now Britain's ambassador to Washington, says: 'It's hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.'

Manning reveals that Blair was so concerned that he sent him to Washington in March 2002, a full year before the invasion. Manning recalls: 'The difficulties the Prime Minister had in mind were particularly, how difficult was this operation going to be? If they did decide to intervene, what would it be like on the ground? How would you do it? What would the reaction be if you did it, what would happen on the morning after?

'All these issues needed to be thrashed out. It wasn't to say that they weren't thinking about them, but I didn't see the evidence at that stage that these things had been thoroughly rehearsed and thoroughly thought through.'

On his return to London, Manning wrote a highly-critical secret memo to Blair. 'I think there is a real risk that the [Bush] administration underestimates the difficulties,' it said. 'They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.'

Within a year Britain lost any hope of a proper reconstruction in Iraq when post-war planning was handed to the Pentagon at the beginning of 2003.

That memo, of course, is one of the now infamous Downing Street Memos, the release of which focused on the statement that the facts were being fixed around the policy.

Manning's memo excerpt:

"I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge on your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option. Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks.

"From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions: how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified; what value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition; how to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal opposition (assuming there is any); what happens on the morning after?

"Bush will want to pick your brains. He will also want to hear whether he can expect coalition support. I told Condi that we realised that the Administration could go it alone if it chose. But if it wanted company, it would have to take account of the concerns of its potential coalition partners."

Bush didn't do that obviously, and Blair still went along with him anyway - putting on his faithful poodle face in public while lying to his own people.

That will be his legacy. May the Iraq war dead haunt him as he leaves office in disgrace.

These revelations and interviews with the officials mentioned in The Guardian's article are part of a new documentary airing in Britain next Saturday: "The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair"

Update: Sunday's Independent has a scathing story for Blair as well which I had not seen until after I wrote the above post. Ironically, the picture's caption reads: The Face That Will Haunt Mr Blair.

The death of a hotel receptionist in British custody was first reported by the IoS. In the week that the Law Lords ruled that the Human Rights Act applies to Iraqis in British custody, Andrew Johnston reveals the shocking witness statements that shed new light on a dark chapter in an illegal war

Graphic and shocking new information - including a photograph showing his battered and bruised face - about the death of Baha Mousa, the Basra hotel receptionist killed in British military custody in September 2003, has emerged as scores of Iraqis prepare to sue the Ministry of Defence for alleged mistreatment in detention.

The dead man's father, Daoud Mousa al-Maliki, is bringing a case on his son's behalf in the next four weeks, following Wednesday's ruling by the Law Lords that the Human Rights Act applies to civilians arrested and detained by British forces in Iraq. Nine other cases are proceeding at the same time, and solicitors say another 30 are in the pipeline.

Not only do witness statements in the cases shed fresh light on Baha Mousa's death, but, taken together, they also suggest a pattern of abuse by British forces in southern Iraq during the period following the defeat of Saddam Hussein's forces. With Tony Blair's imminent departure from Downing Street, the Government will hope that it is no longer so closely associated with the unpopularity of the war and the questionable means used to prosecute it, especially if most British troops leave in the next few months. But the decision in the House of Lords raises the prospect that their conduct in Iraq will be aired in the courts for years to come.

Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP whose parliamentary questions did much to bring the abuse to light, said the Law Lords' judgment would be "a continued headache for the Government, and make it difficult for Gordon Brown to draw a line under the Iraq debacle". Baha Mousa, who had suffered 93 separate injuries according to the post-mortem examination, is the only Iraqi to die in British custody, a tragedy that continues to haunt the Army.

At least two witness statements taken in Damascus just last week from Iraqis detained at the same time, and obtained by The Independent on Sunday, throw fresh light on his treatment. Mohand Dhahir Abdulah, then a 17-year-old student, said he had known Baha Mousa for two years, and immediately recognised his voice when he screamed: "Please give me only half an hour so I can breathe some fresh air. I am going to die." Mr Abdulah adds: "I heard sounds of beating, so it appeared the soldiers continued to beat him, despite his screams."

Maitham Mohammed al-Waz, a 37-year-old furniture maker, says he heard a voice pleading: "Please leave me. I am dying. I am dying. Have mercy. Don't hit me. I am going to die." The following morning the soldiers removed the hood over Mr al-Waz's head. "I saw a man lying on a stretcher. His body was not covered with any cloth. He appeared dead. I recall that at one point his arm bounced off the stretcher, limp."

And for two other Iraqi men who were tortured, the abuse didn't end when they were handed over to the US military:

Both men were subsequently taken to the notorious American detention facility, Camp Bucca, before being released after several weeks in custody without charge. In Camp Bucca Mr Abdullah says he was subjected to further indignities. His statement alleges: "We were treated like animals. We had to clean human waste with our bare hands."

The entire article is just gut-wrenching.

Robert Fisk, who originally broke the story, has more.

There's an old rule of thumb which I always apply to armies in the field. If you find out about one abuse, you can bet there were a hundred others that will never be revealed. New stories of "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture in British custody are emerging from Basra. US troops are still being questioned about unlawful killings and torture in Iraq. If one girl is raped and murdered and her family slaughtered by a US unit south of Baghdad - all of which is true - how many others have died in circumstances we shall never discover?

Exactly.

And why did all of this happen again? Because war criminals like Bush and Blair made them happen by illegally invading a sovereign country that posed absolutely no threat.

It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a hell-disaster and the old clichés about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the desert floor. Maybe there are hearts and minds to be maintained inside the Green Zone in Baghdad or any of the other "green zones" around the Middle East where our Western forces shelter from their enemies in their modern versions of the Crusader castles that once littered the Holy Land. But the moral high ground - if ever it could have existed after Tony Blair and George Bush's illegal invasion - has long ago been abandoned.

We will leave Iraq with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be left to Iraqis themselves - men like Daoud Mousa, carrying the grief of his son's death with him for ever - to create a new country out of the pain and sorrow we leave behind for them.

If they even can...
 

Quote du Jour: Blair in LaLa Land

Via The Independent:

Tony Blair has denied that his unpopularity has been caused by the Iraq war, blaming his loss of public support on people tiring of him after 10 years in power.

His comments surprised Labour MPs and political opponents, who accused him of "self-delusion" and being "in denial" about his legacy as he prepares to stand down in 12 days' time.

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Mr Blair was asked why the public was disenchanted with him even though the economy is sound. He replied: "I've won three elections and what happens when you're in power for a long period of time, people get tired of the same face, the same voice. It's just the way it is. I know people say this is all down to Iraq and so on, but that's not true. From the moment you start in these jobs, you're taking decisions people don't like. If you survive for 10 years, you're doing well."

I'm sure he and dubya will have a fine time sitting in their rocking chairs on the porch at the Crawford ranch someday reminiscing about their glory days when they were just so misunderstood.

And the Iraq war will still be going on then too...
 

Friday Fun

Hugh Muir in The Guardian: The A-Z of Tony Blair

R is for regions. Blair ceded power to Scotland, Wales, London and created mayors in many regions. Voters in Hartlepool were so grateful that they elected a monkey.

Yes, really.

X is for Camp X-Ray, the Cuban facility used by the US to humiliate al-Qaida suspects. Blair faced legal action because British subjects were mistreated there. Many felt they could just as easily be mistreated here.

Bonus Friday Fun: Cowboys for Social Responsibility presents excerpts from the Ponoka News Police Blotter (not to be missed).

One more bonus: Olbermann on Gonzo-Gate

Random News & Views Roundup

- Revisiting Mississippi Burning. Jonathan Steele makes the trip back to Neshoba county.

- CNN and Pelosi's "big wet kiss" for Syria's president Assad. The Washington Post gets in on the Pelosi-bashing as well. The left-wing blogosphere is not impressed, obviously.

- Following the release of the British captives by the Iranian government, a very short, grateful honeymoon ensued. That came to an abrupt end on Thursday with Tony Blair now blaming Iran for the deaths of four British soldiers in Basra although he has no firm evidence of Iranian involvement. Then there's this menacing news:

Kuwait City, April 4 (Xinhua) The US is planning to attack Iran's nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities by the end of this month, the Kuwait-based Arab Times newspaper reported Wednesday.

Citing anonymous sources in Washington, it said that various White House departments had started preparing the political speech to be delivered by the US president later this month, announcing the military attack on Iran.

The speech will provide the 'evidence' and the 'justification' for the US to resort to the military option after failing to persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear ambitions, said the report.

According to the Times, one of the justifications expected in the speech is Iran's alleged role in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq by supporting various militias with money and arms.

These rumours are common, of course, but never misunderestimate Bush and Cheney. One of these days...well...

- Just how much bigger is this escalation in Iraq going to get? 12,000 more Guard troops may be going to Iraq. That's on top of the 21,000 troops originally stated by Bush. There's no end in site to this:

Surge timetable could be extended
Gates indicated Thursday that defense planners expected the U.S. military commitment to last well beyond the timetable of early next year that was put forth in the Pentagon’s arguments to send more than 20,000 regular Army troops to help quiet sectarian violence.

- Speaking of Iraq, check out Tom Hayden's 'Stop Funding the Dirty War'.

The time has come to understand the new de facto US policy in Iraq: to support, fund, arm and train a sectarian Shi’a-Kurdish state, one engaged in ethnic cleansing, mass detention and murder of Sunni Arabs.

If this description seems harsh, it is only because our minds are crowded with false or outdated paradigms. First was the dream of Baghdad as an exemplary democratic domino. Then the kumbaya notion of a unitary neo-liberal state with proportional representation and revenue-sharing among Shi’a, Kurds and Sunnis. All along, the US has described itself as a neutral arbiter among warring factions, a promoter of the rule of law and human rights in the Iraqi jungle.

more...

- Looks like the infamous Hatfield v McCoy feud may have been more than just a matter of long held grudges. Interesting. I wonder if Cheney's related to them.

- Speaking of Cheney:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Obviously, he lives in McCain's Neverland too. But we already knew that... The Vice Denier-in-Chief.
 

Tony Blair: Ignorance is Bliss

After all of this time, all of the intense and realistic dissections of what has happened in Iraq - from going in without any plans to sending in a minimum number of troops, along with every other disastrous aspect of this entirely massive screw up - Tony Blair is still blissfully ignorant:

A defiant Tony Blair yesterday told the grieving families of British soldiers killed in Iraq that he could not apologise for the invasion because he believed it was the "right thing" to do.

"I understand for these families, it is a time of immense grief and anguish, but I can't say what I don't believe," said Mr Blair. "I don't believe it was wrong to get rid of Saddam."

The Prime Minister added: "I also don't believe that the reason that we have the problem we have in Iraq is because of anything other than a deliberate attempt to give us that problem by terrorists."

His departure from politics can't come soon enough.