Tony Blair - Imbecile Yourself

Guaranteeing that any future warm welcome he receives in Washington DC will mean someone has set fire to him, Tony Blair has waded into the debate on the withdrawal of US and other troops from Afghanistan, claiming “We didn't need to do it. We chose to do it”, while somehow missing that Combover Crybaby Donald Trump and his idiot Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already sold out the Afghan Government to the Taliban.

Forward ... not back. Sentences ... without verbs

But what will ensure he gets no change out of Joe Biden this side of hell freezing over was this gem: “We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending 'the forever wars', as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even 10 years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months”.

Which would have been a more credible attack line had he (a) taken the Trump-Pompeo sellout into account, and more importantly (b) looked in the mirror first. The mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, the associated exodus of refugees, and the continuing incidence of terrorism (11M in Madrid, 7/7 in London, for instance) can be traced back to military interventions to which Blair was a party, and against which he was warned repeatedly.

Blair went full-tilt into the Iraq adventure on the basis of dud intelligence: Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress knew what Blair and Dubya Bush wanted to hear, and so he told them, pocketed the money and ran. Tone and his pals somehow missed Chalabi’s conviction in absentia in connection with the Petra Bank scandal in Jordan.

What Tone also seems to have missed, but Biden has not, is that had there been an easy way out of Afghanistan, it would have been found and acted upon by either Dubya Bush, Barack Obama or Trump. He also missed the brutal reality of day to day US internal politics. Chris Mason of the BBC has not, and added this coda to their report.

Tony who?

“The issue, though, in western countries - in democracies - is that long term, open-ended military commitments do require public support”. The USA has, effectively, a perpetual electoral cycle: next year brings a round of elections, with all of the House up for re-election, and a third of the Senate. What happens then will feed into the run-up to the 2024 Presidential Election. That is where a Democrat President will be looking right now.

The Dems hold the House, and they would like to keep it that way. The Senate is tied 50-50, with the Dems able to get legislation passed, providing it is not filibustered out, by the casting vote of the Vice-President. Winning a few more Senate races would be highly beneficial to Biden and his team. Which brings us to a Business Insider poll.

This is what they had to say last week: “A strong plurality of Americans - 48% - support President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan by September amid disturbing scenes as people try to flee the unexpectedly fast Taliban takeover. That's according to a new Insider poll conducted in conjunction with SurveyMonkey Audience, which reached 1,105 respondents on August 16-17”. Think about that.

Yes, US opinion polls are fluctuating as to public response. But a 48% to 26% lead shows that Citizens are not enthusiastic about continuing wars halfway around the world. There’s nothing imbecilic about politicians in power wanting to keep it that way, eh Tone?

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