Obama and Blair: two fighters for world peace we are told.

Two war criminals having fun and getting rich

I’m sitting here in a café in North London reading the Independent and getting a little upset by the front-page article.  It is a graphic image of an Iraqi worker tortured and beaten to death by British troops. The anger and frustration is more about the fact that we have so little ability to respond to this, to make it known to the Iraqi people how disgusted and angry we are at the slaughter of more than a million of them by the forces of US and British imperialism.  A country and people that never threatened us, never harmed us in any way.

But a few pages on there is something even more revolting, a smiling picture of the war criminal Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister and Bush lackey.  Blair is speaking on the anniversary of 911.  I read some of the tapes of the workers involved that day, the guy at the control tower, the flight attendants; their words are the words of genuine, heroic and dedicated human beings as most workers are.

Blair, Bush, Rumsfeld, Obama on the other hand as the representatives of the ruling classes of the world are sickening not simply to watch but to listen to.  Blair is concerned about Iran which has become the new leader of the “evil doers” in their quest to destroy our freedoms and way of life.  Iran, a country whose secular democratic government was overthrown by the US and Britain to be replaced with the murderous Shah, has not invaded anyone in who knows how long but we are all supposed to fear it. As I told two Americans traveling in Australia last year who began to lecture me on Jesus and the Iranian threat, “I left Jesus on the bumper sticker of a car on Interstate 5 and the vast majority of the people in the world don’t fear Iran, they fear Washington.”

Iran according to Blair, is “one of the main problems in Iraq and Afghanistan”  which is laughable were we not dealing with such a serious subject and he goes on to tell the world that “The majority, as the Arab Spring shows, want what we want.”

As I read on it gets worse. Barack Obama, the spokesperson for the US military industrial complex that Eisenhower and Martin Luther King warned us about, told Le Figaro that “al Qaeda is nearing total defeat” and has failed to destroy America’s “unique leadership role in the world”. I assume in the sphere of politics and foreign policy he is talking about the attempt to spread peace and justice in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and throughout Latin America and in economics, the fine example that neo-liberal policies and the Anglo Saxon model brings to the world and which Blair so enthusiastically, as a “Labor man” supported. 

But wait; surely this can’t be true.  Obama tells Le Figaro that he welcomed the “Arab Spring Uprisings”.  Obama and Blair must have the same speechwriter.  Didn’t the US and Britain support Mubarak and Gadaffi?   Didn’t the Obama administration wait until it was obvious Mubarak would fall before finally supporting the uprising and after Hilary Clinton and others referred to Mubarak as a friend and ally?

Just as I think I can’t stomach any more it gets worse, Tony Blair is now a “Middle East Peace envoy” this article reminds me; it’s incredible then you think about it.  And some of the young people in the community around the place I am sitting in are feeling the tough arm of the law for their “riotous” behavior a few weeks ago, they smashed some windows and some of them, a minority, stole some goods. Two kids got four years apiece for encouraging them to have a go on Facebook.

Isn’t freedom swell?