OP/ED: Why I Believe Blair Should Resign.

The Conspirator, I agree with quite a lot of that post

Ive always maintained that invading Iraq made things worse, not started terrorism. Thats the issue here though. Why did we invade Iraq when the negative aspects outweighed the benefits. i.e. did the theorhetical risk of Saddam providing Islamic militants with WMDs outweigh the very real motivation and breeding ground that the Iraq invasion created?

I think something that is quite overlooked is that we all know how idealogical Al-Qaeda is. They want to bring death and destruction to American and her allies because we are infidels. But people forget that Saddam ruled a secular nation and was considered an apostate by even moderate muslims.

Al-Qaeda would of sooner detonated bombs in Baghdad than cooperate with an apostate. There could of been a chance of Al-Qaeda trying to over throw Saddam Hussein, but absolutely minimal chance of them cooperating.

This makes me take the view that Tony Blair acted foolishly and didnt weigh up the pros and cons of invading Iraq. He did it to make us safer and yet it did the opposite. He prevented a theorhetical risk and delivered us a very real and forseeable actual threat. He didnt create a problem when he invaded Iraq, he compounded it. Either way it is gross incompetence and he has to go.

Also have you considered how vulnerable OUR governments are to radicals and criminals? We have a culture of acceptance when it comes to glaringly obvious lies that our politicians are caught out with. We gloss over it and ignore it for the pragmatic belief that ousting a liar is much too much trouble and would devide the nation. That is a breeding ground and a reciepe for our own governments to be taken over by radicals and criminals. But the majority of us dont see it. We have just as much danger of getting tin-pot dictators as Pakistan and any other country on the globe.

[edit on 4/8/05 by subz]

Well made points there Subz

Needless to say i disagree with you about the points over Iraq .....personnally, i think in 10 yrs from now if will be proven to be the right coarse of action to overthrow Saddam for the greater good of world stability. Obviously, i doubt you'll agree. Time will tell for both sides of the debate.

The last point you made was absolutley right, but the systems in place when it comes to government and the overthrowing by criminal or dictatorial regimes are covered by this the U.K. If the systems of democracy here were dismantled by some power hungary thug then the military and security services would act independantly of the government to overthrow and reinstall these processes. Now i know alot of people will laugh at that statement, and obviously i can't prove it either - but that would happen.

I suppose the point i was trying to get to in my initial post was on two fronts - the first being that Iraq has made us more vulnerable, whilst initially this might be the case (although i don't think thats proven)..in the long run the UK being made more vulnerable by attacking the Hussein regime is definatley not the case, not in my opinion anyway, and i haven't heard an arguement to convince me otherwise. The other point i was trying to touch on was that the openeing post seemed to give the impression that keeping the UK out of the sights of terrorists was what was important here - for me that is rather short sighted and ignores the overall problem of Islamic fundamentalist ideologies.

My problem is that i'm rubbish at english and grammer and therefore don't get my points across in the way i necessarily mean.

Originally posted by The Conspirator
The last point you made was absolutley right, but the systems in place when it comes to government and the overthrowing by criminal or dictatorial regimes are covered by this the U.K. If the systems of democracy here were dismantled by some power hungary thug then the military and security services would act independantly of the government to overthrow and reinstall these processes. Now i know alot of people will laugh at that statement, and obviously i can't prove it either - but that would happen.

Generally I would agree with you there. Our military is more than capable of acting independantly and our very culture allows for our soldiers, being citizens and enjoying our freedoms, to over throw a dictatorial government.

But, and its a huge "but", what if we were all convinced into believing such dictatorial powers (locking people up indefinately with no trial and at the behest of a single minister and not a jury) would protect us from a much larger threat? What would be the militaries impetus to intervene if they ACTUALLY thought these changes to our democracy were for the greater good?

That is the way I view the situation we are in now. We have some god awful laws and we've allowed our politicians to gain grotesque amounts of power. If we didnt have a threat of terrorism constantly drummed into us we wouldnt of accepted a bar of all these new laws.

Which brings us to a very credible, and much argued about, scenario where our governments could either allow these attacks to happen or even stage them themselves. They knew how we would roll over and accept these kind of dictatorial and fascist laws. They knew how the military wouldnt intervene either.

Its a very plausible scenario and one that I sadly dont think our uniformed soldiers will be inclined to help us with.

We are in a dictatorship that fears public sentiment. We can oust the dictator but we're being minipulated into not doing so through fear. Now its really irrelevant of whether the government is allowing or perpetrating these acts of terror. They are making political capital out if it, they are legislating themselves immense authourity over us and they know we wont complain because we are scared.

[edit on 4/8/05 by subz]

I agree in principle with your point subz, but i don't think the reality would allow this happen.

Law lords can and do have a major input on what is and isn't acceptable when it comes to the laws that govern our freedoms. The "detained without trial" is a contentious issue, one that not even the two main parties can agree on - there has to be a consensus for the process to move forward from the debating side in the house of commons to it actually being made law. I can see the pros and cons of both sides of the arguments on this particular issues - the pros being incidents were their is intelligence of an impending attack (or just the planning of an attack) but not the evidence to bring someone to trial. This can be for various reasons, the most obvious being compromising agents that are installed in the inner circles of particular groups (hence risking their lives which in my opinion would be unforgivable given what their doing for the greater good and security of us all). The cons being the obvious wrong-doings as proven by some of the cases involving IRA convictions....although it's worth pointing out that it was the police at fault there and not politicians.

The issues you raise about allowing attacks to happen or even planning them themselves to keep us all fearfull are very valid points - but in my opinion are very very unlikely to happen. The most obvious reason for this is that it isn't the politicians that can do this, it's the security services that prevent attacks and therefore would have little to gain by allowing them to happen, afterall, we all see the flack they get when an attack does happen and they would be very eager to avoid this criticism being levelled at them. As for planning them, the same applies in my opinion.

The security services have very large and detailed files on all the politicians in this country - their career is monitored closely from their first interest in politics. For all the security services' faults, following the political agendas of certian individuals isn't one of them. This was proven by the JIC report cited in the opening post on here - it would have been easy for them to say whatever Blair wanted them to say so invading Iraq was easier - but they didn't, they stuck to the facts as they understood them.

SUBZ:

So how does one get re-elected with 20% of the votes (perhap's as a minority government?).

Dallas