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The whole thing with Blair's support of American plans for an attack on Iraq is just *so* fucked up.
Forget what you think about Britain's involvement with bombings and sanctions prior to this point, or even the question of American foreign policy generally and American involvement in the Middle East specifically... On a basic domestic level, the fact is that a very substantial majority of this country's elected representatives don't want us involved in a war with Iraq. Presumably because they know that their constituents don't want a war with Iraq. But Tony does. And so it's basically been decided that this will happen - the specific details of how backbenchers and then the public are made to accept this are more or less irrelevant, in a way.
Backbenchers will either be offered a trade like the one above, or brought into line using the Whips - anyone who dissents can presumably expect similar treatment to that of Paul Marsden late last year - ridicule; being labeled "emotional", "cowardly" and an "appeaser"; verbal and possibly physical bullying.
Meanwhile the mainstream media can be expected, with maybe a couple of exceptions, to put forward the case for the war strongly... This is apparently one of those issues where the government believes they're right, and the public is wrong and needs persuading otherwise (there's a specific term for this, but I can't remember it... argh).
And if we want to know what to expect from a war with Iraq, we might want to consider what actually happened during the Gulf War for starters...
quote:Let me tell you what happened briefly. There were 114,000 seperate aerial sorties in 42 days - one every 30 seconds. Eighty-eight thousand tons of bombs were dropped. Only seven per cent were guided. Ninety-three percent were free-falling bombs that hit where chance, necessity and no free will took them. There were 38 aircraft lost by the US in the slaughter. That number is less than the accidental losses in war games where no live ammunition is even used. No enemy aircraft rose to meet them. When the ground war came... there was no ground war. Name one battle. It wasn't a battle, it was a slaughter. General Kelly said when the troops finally moved forward that there were 'not many of them left alive to fight'. We killed at least 125,000 soldiers and to date 130,000 civillians. We killed as many as we dared.
- Ramsey Clark, Former US Attorney General, final hearings of the Commission of Inquiry into US conduct in the Gulf, New York, February 1992 |
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