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Blair Has Made Britain a Target
Friday September 21, 2001
By John Pilger
The prime minister's belligerence is dangerously irresponsible. We want an end to terrorism, not a new war

The Guardian
The prime minister's "we are at war" statements are irresponsible in the extreme. It is said that some of his senior officials understand this, as do many MPs: thus the messages of "restraint" now being whispered to journalists.

Tony Blair is endangering the people of this country as well as Britons abroad. His willingness to join Bush's "crusade" and use military force will neither avenge nor bring justice to nor honour the memory of the ordinary people who died so terribly in America last week because this will almost certainly lead to a gratuitous slaughter of more innocents in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. It also risks nurturing a new generation of suicidal killers. Two years ago, Denis Halliday, the assistant secretary general of the United Nations who resigned over the Anglo-American-imposed embargo of Iraq, told me: "We are likely to see the emergence of those who may well regard Saddam Hussein as too moderate and too willing to listen to the west. Such is the desperation of people whose children are dying in their thousands and who are bombed almost every day by American and British planes."

Blair's wanton disregard of this threat has been demonstrated in recent years. On a bogus pretext, he joined America's all-out assault on Iraq in 1998 and backed Clinton's missile attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The following year, his "moral crusade" with Clinton against Yugoslavia killed hundreds of innocent civilians. This summer, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported the Bush and Blair governments had privately "given Sharon a green light" to invade Palestinian territories. With each of these actions, and now his bellicose declarations, Blair increases the risk of terrorist attack against British citizens.

Blair's being "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush means allying this country to a willingness to kill large numbers of non-Americans in pursuit of uncertain immediate goals that has long been a feature of US policy. This list is long. Remember, if you can, the "free fire zones", including the use of chemical weapons, that killed as many as 50,000 civilians every year in Vietnam; the bombing of Cambodia that killed 600,000 people; the unnecessary slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis during the 1991 Gulf war, the beginning of a silent holocaust that has since claimed half a million children, according to the UN. For Blair and Bush to say that war has been declared upon America is rich.

During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places. Moreover, far from being the main perpetrators of terrorism, Islamic peoples have been its victims - more often than not of an American fundamentalism and its proxies.
(More: The Guardian News Source)

Across the ‘pond’, the Blair Witch Hunt is apparently on,
Dan