Chris Floyd: Blair and Bush team up to sell new war

Chris Floyd for Glenn Greenwald: Blair and Bush team up to sell new war


You can't teach an old lapdog new tricks. And Tony Blair was barking up the wrong tree yet again last week in his first major appearance since he skulked ingloriously away from office back in June. Blair seized the opportunity of a New York speech to trumpet the blood libel that Iran is now the embodiment of the entire "global ideology" of Islamic extremism, explicitly conflating the Tehran regime not only with al-Qaida but also with Nazi Germany.

One might almost suspect that the ex-parrot of Bushist mendacity on Iraq had dutifully calibrated his message to chime with the new chorus of unbridled Iran-bashing rolled out by the administration at the same time, beginning with President Bush's talk of "World War III" last Wednesday and culminating in Dick Cheney's libation to Ares on the last Lord's Day. Blair, as usual, was squeezed in between the two hulking Yanks, gilding their barbaric yawp with his crisp Oxonian tones.

Speaking at the annual Al Smith charity dinner -- safely distant from the mother country, where he has become a national embarrassment, never mentioned in polite society -- Blair eagerly trafficked in the ludicrous trope that views "Islamic extremism" as one huge, all-powerful, amorphous yet somehow monolithic mass, comprising -- as Mitt Romney once put it with blazing ignorance -- "Shi'a and Sunni ... Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood." In the minds of would-be he-men like Blair and Romney, this amalgamation of conflicting sects and completely disparate groups is a single, mighty Saracen sword aimed at the heart of Western civilization: a threat that must be stopped at all costs -- or, rather, at the cost of other people's blood and treasure.

Blair even went Romney one better in the dumb-and-dumber sweepstakes by stuffing this writhing mass of Islamic serpents into one big Persian basket. After wondering "if we're not in the 1920s or 1930s again" -- and of course invoking 9/11 over and over (an ancient rhetorical device known as guilianius affectus) -- Blair put Iran in the cross hairs as, well, the focus of evil in the modern world. Squeaking at the top of his pip, Blair declared: "This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilizing countries whose people wish to live in peace."

Think of that: We now have a state -- a concrete target -- where we can strike all of the strands of Islamic extremism at once, thereby quelling a dire and imminent threat to our very existence. How can we not attack it under such circumstances?

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/24/selling_war/index.html