Tony Blair, the Violent Islamist's Best Friend
I wanted to begin this piece with the sentence "Tony Blair is back". But, of course, our former prime minister has never really been away. Not for him a quiet life of self-portraits and coin tosses. Blair, unlike his ol' partner-in-crime George W. Bush, has spent his 'retirement' agitating for military action against Syria, calling for regime change in Iran, dodging citizen's arrests over his illegal invasion of Iraq and making the case for Tory-style austerity at home. Oh, and don't get me started on all those awkward rumours about the former PM and the former Mrs Murdoch.
This morning, the ex-Labour-leader-turned-Middle-East-peace envoy turned up at Bloomberg's HQ in London to deliver a keynote speech on the threat from Islamist extremism. It was a classic from the Blair-as-liberal-hawk meets Blair-as-expert-on-Islam genre; a collection of half-truths, belligerent threats, sweeping statements and ill-informed generalisations.
TONY THE NEOCON ( Text of his speech...http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.586876 )
"On foreign affairs, Tony is basically a neocon," a former cabinet ally of Blair once told me. "Tony believes he has a unique ability to join up the dots and see the big picture. The question is: do the dots exist and is he right to join them up in the way he does?"
Take Syria. Blair has long been a supporter of Western military intervention against the brutal regime of Bashar al Assad and in support of the Syrian opposition, despite the fact that in the conflict between Assad and the opposition, the violent Islamists - in the form of the hand-chopping, suicide-bombing ISIS and the al Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front, among numerous others - are on the side of... wait for it... the opposition. Blair glosses over this rather crucial point in his Bloomberg speech, making only a brief reference to "extremist groups" and saying, almost in passing, that they "should receive no support from any of the surrounding nations". (They do - including from our close ally, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.)
in full: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/tony-blair-islamist-speech_b_5196663.html?utm_hp_ref=uk