Just ten days before his 14th anniversary as his an elected official, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced his resignation from his post, effective June 27th. Blair, 54, began his term of service at the age of 30 on May 20, 1983, became prime minister in 1997, and is Britain's ninth longest serving prime minister. A member of the Labour Party, he will likely be remembered as the leader who both helped bring peace to Northern Ireland and who sent troops to Iraq, against the better wishes of the public and his party. Despite his unpopular decision to enter and remain in the war in Iraq, Blair has been a true friend to the United States and the British economy has thrived under his leadership. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, Blair announced to the world that he would stand "shoulder to shoulder" with America.
Not since Harold Wilson in 1976 has a British Prime Minister stepped down on his own accord, but little drama surrounds this event. Britain has been expecting this resignation since 2004, when Blair announced that his third term would be his last. Recent unrest within the party, in large part due to the war, has led to further speculation that the announcement was imminent. It is expected that Treasury Chief Gordon Brown, Blair's Labour Party reform partner, will easily win the party's election and become the next prime minister. At least one opponent from the party's left wing, however, is expected to announce his candidacy some time today.
So, what of Blair now? He will continue to represent the parliamentarian district of Sedgefield until the next national election, though his representative has said he may abandon that post as well if he is offered "a major international or United Nations job." Perhaps he will spend more time with his wife and four children or return to his college rock band, the Ugly Rumours, for which he played guitar and sang. A bit hard to picture, isn't it?
The most interesting thing about this announcement to this writer is the similarities in the political climate between Britain and America. Much like the American Republican party, the Labour Party has been losing a lot of support, in large part do to the Middle Eastern presence. In the last election, several seats switched over to the opposing party and it is expected that the next national election will also swing the other way.
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LA Reid, Politics Correspondent
LA's column, 'Clicks & Balances,' published every Thursday to Gather Essentials: Politics, is a tell-it-like-she-sees-it overview of hot political topics. There may be other days of the week that she just has to get her opinions out there, so be sure to check back often.
LA is an attorney with the federal government in Washington, DC. Having worked in all three branches of the government, there is nothing she loves more than a good discussion about politics and she welcomes your thoughts and questions. The challenge? Change her open mind - it does not happen often, but she looks forward to those rare occasions.
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Comments: 27
act like Prime Minister Nevil Chamberlain before Churchill in the 1930's. Terrorism
is as big a threat as Nazism-only more difficult to fight. History will show both Bush
and Blair to be right, just like Churchill stands as one of the great leaders of all time.
Beleive it or not, Europe and most Brits thought him to be a "kook" while in office.
Churchill lost re-election because of his involvement in WWII. He had 28% approval
rating as well when he attempted re-election. Sound familiar? (BLAIR and BUSH have the same numbers. Come on people-- I would rather fight terrorists and
insurgents on "their soil" than in New York or Chicago, LA etc. At least give Blair
and Bush credit for leading and not playing the appeasement game like
Chamberlain, the Congress, and the British Parliment. This was wrong in the 30s and it is wrong today.
Listen closely to this statement:
I don't know of any Democrat, or person, for that matter who does not believe that terrorism is a threat to the world. Got that? Should I repeat it?
The issue is that MOST people do not think that Bush and Blair's strategy of war in Iraq is doing anything to actually fight terrorism. In fact, it's done exactly the opposite. It has fueled anti-western sentiment around the world within the Muslim community and incentivized many, many more young Muslim men to join terrorist organizations. Bringing down Saddam's regime and creating an environment of civil war in Iraq has just provided a perfect opportunity for the terrorist to invade that country and do damage to the western countries involved by weakening their military and putting them further and further into debt.
Deal with reality - not Bush platitudes.
So much for the illogic of young Muslim men. We have young Sunni men slaughtering Shiite's and young Shiite men slaughtering Sunni's -- and who gets the blame? - why American's of course.
Clue, the Americans did not instigate interfaith violence in Iraq. The Americans, on the other hand, offered the Iraqi's the first honest chance in the history of their nation to work out their religious differences in a rational manner.
Let us put blame where blame belongs.
The comparison of Blair with Churchill is drop-down hilarious.
The reality is this... I hate to come to terms with this reality, but it is what it is... Countries the world over laugh at us because we do not practice what we preach... We talk of freedom of expression and the like while we have a permananent underclass. We've got money for wars & can't feed the poor... It is saddening..
When Hurricane Katrina hit people saw the hypocrisy for what it was, the offers for help from other nations went unaccepted and a great many people died as a result. The city of New Orleans is being run by a mayor who wants the buck to stop everywhere but at his desk, but the failures and the hypocrisy is systemic & the citizenry needs to stand up and demand more from the people that serve us...
Have we forgotten... They work for us!
On earth, where most of us live, Sunni's and Shiites killed each other with astonishing regularity.... some 100,000 Shiites were butchered during a spontaneous uprising in 1991.
Please take a moment to learn the history of a region before making foolish statements.
Greg you are master of half fact and partial truth. Take the last 1991 issue. That's when we encouraged the southern Shi'ia to rise against Saddam and left them hang. We overthrow the Sunni power base and it's not our fault that sects murder eachother. Who exactly are you spinning for today? Certainly not Dubya.
Dan, you are right I think....he made his bed early with BP.
Blair and Labour were voted in originally as a protest to the years of Tory power under Thatcher and Major, and while they seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time, it did not take long for people to start feeling that Blair's New Labour and Cool Brittania were simply tinsel wrapped around the sort of policies they had vowed to replace.
None of this would have ever started if the United States had not destabilized Iraq by overthrowing Saddam and putting the Shiites in control of the government.
In March of 2003, the United States bombed and invaded Iraq, overthrew the Sunni-controlled government of Saddam Hussein, and established an interim government of military occupation. This interim government of occupation led eventually to a U.S. - inspired Constitution (the Paul Bremer Constitution which the Iraqs' will promptly toss into the trash once the occupaton leaves or is driven out) and an elected government dominated by the Shiite majority, which had been largely disempowered by Saddam and the minority Sunnis.
From the beginning, the majority Shiites were more receptive to the U.S. occupation than were the Sunnis, because the Sunnis had lost the political power they had enjoyed under Saddam, and the majority Shiites were surely going to gain it.
The Sunnis began to form a violent resistance movement to oppose the U.S. occupation, just as the French Resistance had opposed the German occupation of France during World War II; and the occupying American troops began to come under attack from the resistance "insurgency."
Soon after that, the resistance "insurgency" began to consider anyone who actively helped the occupation government to be a collaborator with the USA, and both the collaborators and the U.S. forces came under attack. Because the Iraqi police were clearly viewed as collaborators, they were among the first Iraqis to be attacked by the insurgent "resistance."
Now, the situation has deteriorated to the point where all-out civil war seems to have erupted between the Shiites and the Sunnis. The vengeful executions of Saddam and his top officials have added support to the Sunni belief that the government is stacked against them.
And amazingly, Dubya now believes that more U.S. troops will help the situation, when it was really the presence of U.S. troops in the first place which ignited the whole problem.
IPS News reports:
LONDON, Oct 11 (IPS) - About 655,000 have died as a consequence of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the leading medical journal The Lancet reports.
The Britain-based journal says these deaths are in addition to the number of deaths from natural causes.
The new estimate is far higher than earlier studies by The Lancet reported. In October 2004 The Lancet published a paper indicating more than 100,000 excess deaths between March 2003 and September 2004 because of the invasion of military forces.
The new study estimates the deaths from March 2003 to June 2006, and compares them with the deaths in the pre-invasion period January 2002 to March 2003 in 47 randomly selected sites across Iraq. That led to the figure of 655,000 -- on average more than 500 deaths a day more than in pre-invasion Iraq.
The survey covered 1,849 households and 12,801 household members. Each household was surveyed about births, deaths, in-migration and out-migration in May and June this year. Wherever there was a death, surveyors asked for a death certificate, which was produced in 92 percent of the cases.
The study found that of the 629 deaths reported, 547 (87 percent) were in the post-invasion period compared with 82 (13 percent) in the pre-invasion period. The pre-invasion mortality rate was 5.5 per 1,000 people per year, while post-invasion this rose to 13.3 per 1,000 people per year.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35073
And from Foreign Policy in Focus:
The sectarian violence which has swept across Iraq following last month's terrorist bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara is yet another example of the tragic consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Until the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, Iraq had maintained a longstanding history of secularism and a strong national identity among its Arab population despite its sectarian differences.
Not only has the United States failed to bring a functional democracy to Iraq, neither U.S. forces nor the U.S.-backed Iraqi government in Baghdad have been able to provide the Iraqi people with basic security. This has led many ordinary citizens to turn to extremist sectarian groups for protection, further undermining the Bush administration's insistence that American forces must remain in Iraq in order to prevent a civil war.
Top analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the United States to "expedite" such a collapse anyway.
As a result, the tendency in the United States to blame "sectarian conflict" and "long-simmering hatreds" for the Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is, in effect, blaming the victim.
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3139
Stop brown nosing BushCo, Greg, it's unbecoming and makes a fool of you.
Geez, that line about 100,000 getting killed in '91 is just plain spooky. Opperatives of our government encouraged an uprising, promised help, and then left them high and dry. What do you think a regime like Saddam's, or any regime at all, would do in the face of a massive revolt?
Never mind, I like others here smell a nasty smell. That was a wicked thing you did.
I wish I could move forward in time and see what spin history puts on this time. I also wish I could move forward in time and see how the Iraquis and the rest of the Middle East come out in history.
There were rumors that the U.S. has some post or another for Tony Blair. He might want to think twice on that if it is true.
So long, Mr. Blair.
Fekix and Greg, please allow me to weigh in on your dispute. Yes Sunni/Shia sectarian bloodshed has occurred for centuries. Its a bit like the Catholic/Protestand slaughters that happened for a couple centuries in Europe, except that the Muslims never outgrew it. But Saddam kept it under wraps by pampering the Sunnis and filling the Republican Guard with them- so that the Shiites and Kurds would pose no threat to him. So in essence he kept it under wraps by being a "strong man"- like, don't tell me about your religious problems because I will simply kill you all. To that extent, oddly, Saddam was a secularist. That secularism explains why he could never get along with Bin Laden. To Bin Laden, caring more about staying in power than carrying out Allah's Jihad is simply an unthinkable viewpoint.
Why are we surprised that deposing and hanging Saddam results in a bunch of sectarian strife? It was there all along, but kept under a lid. Zarkawi and his buddies brought it out by bombing a famous Shiite Mosque, reasoning that chaos always benefits the insurgent rather than the government. Well, it worked. The genie is out of the bottle and how to put him back?
One recipe to restore order is for a new strong man to take over Iraq and put down all opponents with merciless cruelty. Al-Maliki is simply not that guy. So what else can we try? I don't know. Our presence is not doing the job, we are not even in control of the political realities. We are keeping things at a simmer rather than a boil, but you know what?- It may take a full boil of Civil War to clear up the situation. For peace to come, somebody is going to have to lose. I thing with a Shia majority and the Kurds on the sidelines, we could eventually see a massacre of the Sunnis if the Shia get mad enough. Thrilled? I'm not.
When Labour took over from the corrupt Tory Govt, we all thought it was going to be a new dawn for Britain.
It wasn't.
All I know is: I shall be glad to see the back of the shifty little toad!