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kpete

(71,984 posts) Sun Sep 1, 2013, 01:39 PM Sep 2013

Bush's Poodle Has Been Called Many Things But Now-The Most Damning Judgement Of All-"HE IS THE PAST"

Syria vote: a corner has been turned on the road to peace
It is now clear, as indeed it was in 2003, that most people have no wish to embroil Britain militarily in the Middle East

Thursday's vote by MPs to bar the way to British involvement in a war against Syria is a vindication of the mass anti-war movement in this country over the last decade. Parliamentarians of all parties claimed that they had "learned the lessons of Iraq". Better late than never, of course. But the millions who protested against the Bush-Blair aggression in 2003 understood the lessons at the time. After hundreds of thousands of dead in the intervening years, their message has reached the green benches: there is hardly a problem in the Middle East (or elsewhere) that Anglo-US military intervention cannot make worse.

This is the case in Syria, too, where the crying need is not for more bombing by anybody, but for a concerted drive for a Syrian-based political solution. The starting points have to include the west abandoning its cynical policy of basically prolonging a civil war which it wants neither side to win.

The seeds of Cameron's defeat were sown in February 2003, when about 2 million people marched against the Iraq war, only to have Tony Blair ignore them. That democratic outrage has hung over British politics as a cloud ever since and has, along with MPs expenses and the failures of neoliberalism but more serious than either, condemned politicians to the pillory of public disdain.

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Blair himself cuts a bizarre figure – the "Middle East peace envoy" who urges war in the region on every conceivable occasion, as he bobs around the Mediterranean on an oligarch's yacht. He has been called many things, but today at last we can deliver the most damning judgment of all. He is the past.