[Peace] BBC Special Tuesday on AM 580

[C. G. Estabrook]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Kranich, Kimberlie wrote:

> Tuesday (9/24) at 4:06 p.m. AM 580 will air a special program from the
> BBC reporting on the special UK Parliament debate and examining where
> Britain now stands in the confrontation with Iraq.

[A good comment on the matter -- and on the position of British Prime
Minister Tony Blair -- comes from the Monty Python cast member Terry
Jones.  --CGE]

The audacious courage of Mr Blair

	You cannot help but admire the Prime Minister's 
	steadfast refusal to be intimidated by facts and figures

	Terry Jones 
	Sunday September 22, 2002 
	The Observer (London)

I would like to pay a tribute to the courage of Tony Blair. During these
dark days in the build-up to war against Iraq it is reassuring to find
ourselves with a leader who demonstrates such fearlessness in the face of
tremendous odds.

Despite bitter opposition,Tony Blair has demonstrated that he will push
ahead stalwartly with whatever the US intends to do. Even though the
majority of his fellow countrymen are against the war (despite last week's
propaganda campaign in the media), Mr Blair has shown not the slightest
sign of wavering from his determination to do whatever Mr Bush wants. It
is true that he has regrettably had to cave in over the question of
debating the issue in Parliament, but he has fearlessly shown his contempt
for the process by not allowing a vote. Mr Blair realises that he needs
all the nerve he can command to resist demands for democratic discussion,
if Mr Bush is to have any opportunity of dropping bombs on Iraq before the
mid-term elections.

I would like to say a special word about another side of Tony Blair's
courage - his moral courage. Tony Blair has the guts to stand on platform
after platform repeating the words of the President of the United States
even though he must be well aware that in so doing he makes himself a
laughing stock to the rest of the world. Tony Blair has the balls not to
be influenced by the knowledge that people imagine he is the US
President's parrot and that his knee jerks only when George W. pulls the
strings. It must take a very special kind of stamina to withstand that
sort of daily humiliation. It is time we gave Mr Blair credit for it.

Tony Blair's dedication to carrying out the policies of the White House
proves time and again that he has the courage of their convictions. He is
prepared to back Mr Bush's arguments to the hilt even when they are
palpably nonsensical. When Mr Bush cites Saddam Hussein's contempt for UN
Security Council resolutions as the justification for his own
determination to do the same, Tony Blair urges the President's case, for
all the world as if he couldn't see the ridiculousness of it. When Mr Bush
cites Iraq's failure to comply with UN Security Council resolutions as the
reason for going to war, Mr Blair backs him up, boldly ignoring the fact
that Turkey and Israel have got away with ignoring UN resolutions for
years.

It is this refusal to be intimidated by the illogicality of the US
position that perhaps displays Mr Blair's courage at its best. He is Mr
Bush's faithful echo when the President demands that Saddam Hussein
immediately cleanse Iraq of all terrorist organisations, even though he
knows the UK never found a way of eradicating the IRA, and that, in any
case, the terrorist organisations that perpetrated 9/11 were operating out
of the US and Germany.

Mr Blair also refuses to be unnerved by the irony of Saddam's chemical
weapons being anathematised by the nation that employed Agent Orange so
liberally in Vietnam, where the ravages are still apparent. Mr Blair is
unafraid to support a 'War on Terrorism' waged by the nation that has
routinely used terrorism as a tool of foreign policy in Chile, Colombia,
Nicaragua and Cuba, to name but a few.

But my admiration for Mr Blair's courage reaches new depths when I
consider what he has to wrestle with over the matter of the sanctions
against Iraq. As a practising Christian, he must need tremendous fortitude
to bear the knowledge that his policies are the certain cause of death to
so many Iraqi children. In 1996, the World Health Organisation concluded
that since the introduction of sanctions, the infant mortality rate for
children under five had increased six times. In 1999, the Mortality
Survey, supported by Unicef, reported that infant and child mortality in
Iraq had doubled since the Gulf War.

In May 2000, a mission to Iraq sponsored by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) found that in South and Central Iraq at
least 800,000 children under five were suffering from chronic
malnutrition.

Despite the fact that George W. Bush's father claimed that the United
States had no quarrel with the Iraqi people, it is the Iraqi people whom
he and his successors have determined to punish, and Tony Blair, to do him
justice, has not flinched from following their lead.

The Gulf War witnessed one of history's heaviest bombing campaigns, a
43-day bomb-fest, largely by units of the US Air Force, left something in
the region of $170 billion-worth of damage. The subsequent enforcement of
sanctions has meant that much of that damage has never been repaired, and
it is the lack of safe water, housing, food and medicine that is exacting
the greatest toll among children and the elderly.

It is therefore very much to Tony Blair's credit that he refuses to be
intimidated by these statistics. He has had the grit to stick by those US
policies which target the most vulnerable sections of Iraqi society, and
he has courageously ignored the logic that sanctions aimed at a civilian
population in order to oust a dictator who cares little for his people are
pointless.

It is a bold and audacious stance that our leader has taken up and it is
clear that nothing will move Mr Blair from that posture - not democracy,
common sense, compassion nor shame.

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