Margaret Beckett and the Middle East

The truly scary element to all of this is how transparent it is becoming that foreign policy is being made up as the powers that be muddle along.

Sabretache Blog

Trying Times. No, the tuly scary thing is that TPTB (as in those that formulate and dictate overall Western Alliance policy objectives) have a cast in stone, immutable foreign policy - especially as it applies to the Middle East and what remains of the Planet's Oil endowment. It is just that the likes of Blair and his cabinet are mere errand boys and girls in the tasks of implementing it. "Yes-sir no-Sir three bags full-Sir, and please can we keep our Trident missiles?"

I thought you were exagerating, but then I listened to the interview and realised you've paraphrased accurately. Now I'm really scared.

Err.... all "quid" and no "quo" perhaps ?

And that's our Foreign Secretary? She is incompetence incarnate. Listening to that was like hearing an airline pilot over the address system telling us that we might be experiencing some turbulence but there's nothing to worry about. But by the way, does anyone know how to fly a plane.

"Err.... all "quid" and no "quo" perhaps ?"

Doh! Thanks anon. The lack of connection between brain and fingers more obvious than usual today...

"but the private thoughts of the President and the Prime Minister really aren't important, it's the public platitudes that count."

Says it all really. Mouth a few platitudes and wait for a different story to come along and knock this one off the front page. In 9 years, nothing has changed.

Nojags, I just knew ringverse had it to rights, so didn't listen to the poor cow.

All so predictable, the bunch of flannelbrains.

One teeny crit, don't the scum usually say "jim" rather more often, to play for time and hopefully persuade the half-awake cornflaker that a friendly conversation, rather than Sado-Maso is taking place ?

Delicious new horizons for Press Reviews before us --- outing the Truth and giving us a larf to start the day.

No more anger as we scrabble for the offswitch....should be on the Health.

listening to our so called leaders over the last two days, I am totally convinced that world affairs are dictated by unseen people and, as smeone already pointed out, these pathetic excuses for leadership are in fact errand boys and messengers.

Any one who beleives in 'Freedom and Democracy' better start to realise what it actually now means - and find a better expression for fairness and justice.

What a vile, compassion-free and loathsome politician Margaret Beckett has become. In common with most of the Labour front bench, of course, accomplices each and every one in the Blair Project to turn the UK into Bush's sidekick, playing the pathetic jack russell terrier to the US Rotweiler-of-Doom. The more I hear the likes of Beckett and Clarke and Blair and Straw talk about our involvement in the M.East, the more I can hear the desperate fatalism in their words and voices as if they know in their shrivelled little hearts that they are so far in, so complicit in the whole, vast, ghastly carnage, that they are doomed and damned no matter what they do. So this is all that the Blair government is reduced to - desperately clinging to paper-thin justifications for their actions and the actions of anyone currently in favour with the Washington Bosses, and hanging on to political power in the face of the collapse of their support in the country. 22% of the whole electorate voted Labour at the last G.Election, the same figure which happens to be Blair's own approval rating. An electoral Night of the Long Knives is coming, and it's gonna be ugly.

Just for a bit of balance, the odious Tory tit Ed Vaizey is on Radio 5 at the moment, and, apparently with a straight face, asked us all to get things in perspective as 'you don't hear about the fifty civilians killed in Israel'. Quite apart from the accuracy of that statement (8 civilians dead in Israel gets vastly more coverage than a similar atrocity in Lebanon or, God help us, Iraq), it was put into its own perspective about two minutes later on the news bulletin, which briefly reported 40 Lebanese civilians dead in the latest air raid, after a suitably long peroration on Blairs pathetic attempt to rerun Dunkirk (what would have happened if he'd been in charge in 1940?).

Ed Vaizey is a member of the Henry Jackson Society, along with a large number of people you wouldn't want to be found dead in a ditch with, like Irwin Stelzer, Richard Perle, Gisela Stuart, Denis MacShane, David Trimble, Sir Richard Dearlove and so on. With an Opposition like that, it's left to Ming Campbell to bring Tony to task for his abject failure of moral authority. They're the political wing of the Euston Manifesto and thus a serious threat to life and limb.