Posts by giovanni tiso
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Martin Luther King is the second most admired person of the 20th century, according to a Gallup poll.
Perhaps the US are ready for its first female president then, given that the list is topped by mother Theresa (although I'm sure Christopher Hitchens will demand some sort of recount). And MLK at 2 (with Reagain at 15 behind... wait for it... Nelson Mandela!) bodes well for Obama.
But what really impresses me is Helen Keller slotting in at five, behind Einstein and ahead of FDR. What an enlightened bunch of respondents.
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This article is a wonderful piece of rhetoric, but that's all it is.
Wonderful? Really? I would go as far as to say Idiot Savant was wasting his Brecht on this one.
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No doubt (well, possibly a little doubt) Bush would have invaded anyway,
Well, the Brits had no doubts about US aggressive unilateralism and wanted to control it.
I'm in no way trying to be glib here, but there's an argument in Italian right wing circles that Mussolini went to war with the intent of moderating Hitler's excesses, and it makes the exact same amount of sense to me. In any event, if the effect is to shift the assessment of Blair's main piece of foreign policy from "criminal" to "delusional", it doesn't do much to enhance the historical stature of the man.
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Okay, I know see that other posters (esp. simon g) beat me to it. It will teach me to refresh more often or write more quickly.
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If, heaven forbid, you still have nothing better to do with your time, you can question the wisdom and efficacy of the invasion of Iraq, but wasn't the British who screwed up.
I'd have to take issue with this. Sorry if some of us with nothing better to do still feel like questioning the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq, but it isn't as if a country hasn't been devastated in the process, for reasons that have never ceased to pass understanding. It may be the Americans who brought most of the heavy artillery and pig-headedness to the task, but Blair has enormous responsability concerning the overall mess, not just the parts of the country overseen by the Brits, which at any rate look good only in comparison to the carnage elsewhere. No doubt (well, possibly a little doubt) Bush would have invaded anyway, but Blair was a very valuable ally also in the months leading up to the invasion, not least in the doctoring of the case for war. And it's not as if hundreds of thousand of people haven't died and millions haven't been displaced as a result of those decisions. Sorry if that bores you, though.
Sheesh...
As for the argument that the Bush-Blair foreign policy might yet work, it of course depends on what you mean by "work", and whether the success will be worth its human cost. Of course the stated aim of the war was to rid the West of an imminent threat, and the threat was simply not there, so in a very important sense that policy has failed already. If the actual objective was to spread democracy in the middle east, since we were never told this at time it would seem that the task involved suspending democracy in the middle west, which is more than a little ironic. But who right now would bet the guest bedroom, let alone the house, that this "other" aim will actually be achieved?