The United Nations mandate that gives a fig leaf of cover to the presence of US and UK troops in Iraq expires at Christmas. After that armed foreigners become an illegal, criminal element on Iraqi soil, even by the standards adopted by the Westminster parliament and the New Labour Executive.
The current regime is trying to close the book on the attack upon Iraq as Blair's war in which Brown was in no way involved. Well, it's true he refused to pay for arms and equipment, there's lots of evidence of that in the graveyards and the hospitals. So he wasn't involved in funding, rather he was deeply, primarily responsible for lack of funding. And other than that, by his own assertion, his role in New Labour was and is central; it is the basis of his claim to occupy legitimately the office of Prime Minister. Nothing, he has boasted, was decided in New Labour's years of government, without his input and assent.
Truths that can be associated with Brown are few and usually disgraceful. One of them, true indeed to form, is his persistent, settled loathing for the armed forces of the United Kingdom and the values they represent. Because of Brown's choices, soldiers have been left to die.
And now, the remnants of the invasion force in Iraq are hutched at Basra airport waiting to be an appendix of whatever deal can be made between the Iraqi government and the United States. Or even whatever deal they can make for themselves, as they have had to do once already to get some of their number out of the city of Basra at all, and survive in their abandonment, once the elected Prime Minister had been driven out of office, by the government that sent them there.
The Stop the War Coalition must be organising right now against any attempt at a return with honour. The families destroyed by loss are ready equally to deny any of the usual disgraceful grandstanding by the man who failed their soldier sons and daughters so deliberately and abysmally.
The New Labour regime will want to move on. If we move on in this we deserve the State we will be in.
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3 comments:
There are plenty of reasons to detest Gordon Brown. His contemptible treatment of our armed forces is the the one that really sticks in my throat.
Brown is always spouting that the troops are "preserving our freedoms and way of life"...NO!, that is what he fears they MIGHT do, which is why he wants them far away from these shores.
Every Carabiniere who died in Iraq - and they were there to give aid to the civil power, (whoever that might have been) in an attempt to aid the peace not to make war - was met by the Head of State as the cortege landed in Italy.
I do not know of any occasion when the English Head of State, or even the Prime Minister, paid this courtesy to the dead, or to the country they died representing.
I wonder if God will save the Queen. She seems unaware of the vigorous public disgracing her government is putting her through, and all of us who she is supposed to be in our state persona too.
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