Joe Hack

After the longest farewell in the history of politics, Tony Blair has finally resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It was a leaving characterized by the same spin and cheesey schmaltz that has flawed British politics for the last ten years. Instead of diving straight into the trough of the lucrative American lecture circuit though, his Tony’ness is now apparently off to bring peace to the middle east ! Yes, you heard me right !The group of four (America, Russia, the EUU and the UN) charged with promoting a middle east peace settlement have appointed him as their special envoy to do just that. If you didn’t laugh you’d have to cry. It is, of course, purely and simply a Bush appointment.  He’s throwing Tony a bone for his poodle-like subservience over Iraq and at the same time placing a tame mouthpiece in the middle-east to push a pro-US agenda. Yet another cynical move that thinks its pretty clever but is, in fact, dumb as a bucket of spanners.

The Israel/ Palestine conflict is a running sore that infects not just the middle-east but the rest of the world. A just, equitable solution is desperately needed. No-one could argue with that. So what are Blair’s credentials for this utterly crucial job ? Well lets think. Together with Bush he invaded Iraq on the basis of either outright lies or ‘flawed evidence’  (depending on how charitable you wish to be). That catastrophic mistake has led directly to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people so far and turned a further 4 million into refugees.  The invasion and continuing occupation has de-stabilised the whole region,  pushed Iraq towards civil war, created a new breeding ground for extremist terrorism, and unarguably made the whole world a much more dangerous place.

More recently, when Israeli war-planes and tanks were waging war on Lebanon and the whole world was demanding a ceasefire, Blair joined with Bush and the Israeli PM as the only three world leaders blocking any such move, thereby allowing the unneccessary killing of civilians to continue. Impressive credentials as a supposedly unbiased ‘peace-broker’, eh ? And those are just a few of the highlights of Mr Blairs involvement in the middle east, where he is probably the second most hated western leader (after Mr Bush of course) and is generally regarded as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the USA and Israel. So in what crazy alternate universe was Mr Blair seen as the ideal man to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine ? There are any number of distinguished politicians who could have done this vital job and God knows someone certainly needs to do it, and quick.  In reality it would be difficult to find anyone who is a *worse* candidate for the job than Mr Tony Blair. He has no credibility in the middle-east whatsoever and is regarded with deep suspicion. Which kind of makes you question Mr Bushs seriousness about the whole process, or his understanding of the situation, or possibly both. But whats new ?

 Is it just me, or is the world getting crazier by the day ? You really and truly couldn’t make stuff like this up, could you ?

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