Rich Lowry puts paid to the stupid notion that Tony Blair was George Bush's lap dog:

Long before President Bush arrived in the White House, Blair championed the idea that the West should intervene to stop human-rights abuses in other countries, putting morality above respect for the borders of sovereign countries. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that Bush embraced a version of this expansive vision, essentially making him a convert to the Blair view rather than the other way around

Long before President Bush arrived in the White House, Blair championed the idea that the West should intervene to stop human-rights abuses in other countries, putting morality above respect for the borders of sovereign countries.

But the actual policy has been to intervene to stop human-rights abuses in only one country, Iraq. Human-rights abuses in other countries aren't a priority. Afghanistan was a priority for a while, but not any more. Making Iraq the be-all of human rights is what makes Tony Blair the lap-dog of George Bush.

Not just human rights, actually, but foreign policy in general. Iraq is well over half of Bush's entire foreign policy, even though it has only 1/250 of the world's population. That is why Putin and Chavez and others feel emboldened: they know that America won't respond.

As for sovereignty, Bush doesn't really care about the sovereignty of any country other than the United States. Tony Blair is rather different on this issue; he recognizes sovereignty except in a few extreme cases.

Iraq HAD NOTHING to do with human rights abuses.

Had Bush gone to the Congress and detailed every instance of abuse Saddam had done, or some the DvD's of his horrific sons at their birthday parties...The American people would have said "GADS" and then gone on about their business.

Legacies are impossible to write real time, but the pivot point on going to Iraq was that Bush and to some extent Blair saw a threat in Saddam and his government to western culture, stated all the reasons to go, and found out that everyone of them was exaggerated.

All while doing what they did incompetently.

If there is a model of human rights intervention, it is Kosovo.

Robert

A commendable moral streak in both Blair and Bush was at least part of the motivation that took us into Iraq. David Brooks piece in the NYT today adds more detail on this.

The problem for Blair was probably that the size of the problem (Iraq) outstripped the resources that were applied or the mental faculties of the assembled experts working for Dick Cheney. And for this, the blame, if any isn't all someone elses. He had ample opportunity to offer differences of opinion with Bush, and at least outwardly he never did anything but give the impression of wagging his tail. We know now for example that British analysts had a very different view of the magnitude of the problem, agreeing for example with Shinseki on numbers needed and quite different from the Americans in charge. Hence the references as a lapdog. That servility in the means, not the big picture, was a big mistake, both for him personally and in terms of how Iraq could have been handled.

A little more spunk, a litle more bark, and he would have been a nice Yorkie instead of a lapdog.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at May 11, 2007 09:29 AM

"spot on"...

If one looks at American wars, with the exception of WWII and the internal ones; we have more or less invited ourselves to every war we have fought.

What Bush did with his WMD was not so far different then Wilson with his "Z gram". Wilson more or less invented a German threat to the US and pushed really hard for the US to get into WWI.

What seperates this war from all the others is the stunning level of incompetence that has been demonstrated by the civilian leadership. The military has made mistakes but 1) those mistakes have been trivial in comparison to the civilian ones and 2) the mistakes have more or less been tolerated by the civilian leadership.

Just a guess is that Blair's prime mistake was simply underestimating the "mental abilities" of the people who worked for this administration. My guess is that he was accustomed to the competence level of "Dad" or even Clinton and sort of figured out "it will be sloppy but with their resources and smarts they will pull it off".

The fiasco's in this war make the British military fiasco's of WWI seem well "quaint".

Robert

> The fiasco's in this war make the British military fiasco's of WWI seem well "quaint".

Does anyone understand what Oler thinks he is saying when he writes stuff like this?

Obviously, he thinks adding an apostrophe-s to a noun makes the noun plural, rather than possessive. I figured that much out.

But what's this business of sprinkling quotation marks around seemingly random words?

He is not quoting anyone, nor is he indicating irony -- the functions that quotation marks usually serve in English. Clearly, quotation marks serve some other purpose in Olerspeak, but I can't fathom what that is. Or does he just do this to make his posts even more annoying than they already are?

I've read Oler's letters in Space News, so I know he can write coherent English when he wants to. So, why are all his posts utter gibberish?

I've read Oler's letters in Space News, so I know he can write coherent English when he wants to. So, why are all his posts utter gibberish?

That's an easy one. Space News has this new-fangled thing called "editors."

Anyone who has read Bob's posts on the Internet (and I've been doing so for almost a couple decades, going all the way back to the Compuserve days) knows that his familiarity with grammar and spelling (not to mention facts and reality) is tenuous at best.

So his clown-college nonsense here is not at all out of character. Space News apparently occasionally decided, for whatever reason, that his thoughts were worth publishing, so they edited them, as they do everything they publish. What you see here is raw, unadulterated, pompous and clueless Oler, as it's always been.

Bob O is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own "facts."

The "Z gram" - usually known as the 'Zimmerman Telegram' was "invented," alright, but it was invented by the Germans, not a would-be warmongering Wilson administration. Wilson campaigned on an isolationist platform and did his level best to stick to it, tamping down the rush of war fever that broke out in the wake of the Lusitania sinking in 1915, for instance. When the Germans - doing badly by 1917 and vexed at the U.S. policy of letting Britain buy essentially unlimited quantities of war materiel - decided to offer Mexico the return of the southwestern United States in return for invading on Germany's behalf, even Wilson couldn't let things slide any further. The "Z gram" was stone-cold authentic. The threat was real.

As for the "fiascos" of the Iraq war compared to British bungling in WWI - the mind fairly boggles. What alleged "fiascoes" of the current war does Mr. Oler have in mind, pray tell? How exactly do they stack up against, say, repeatedly sending human waves to the slaughter against machine guns or refusing to build proper facilities and sanitation in the siege lines because that would be an admission that the campaign was bogged down. The British lost over a million dead because their Blimpish generals with musket balls for brains were still determined to fight a Napoleanic war in an industrial age. The experiences of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War were evidently held to be of no relevance by these worthies.