I keep wanting to stop writing about the war. But there is fresh horror almost every day. It is not the fact of war, or the collapse of the UN, and all the other consequences that were foreseeable, but the increasing revelations about the morals of the people running it. First there were Richard Perle’s business interests (and the subsequent revelation that in 1971, when he was a Senate aide, Kissinger caught him passing classifed NSC information to the Israelis); now it is torture.
I think it is a reasonable test of the limits of Mr Blair’s hypocrisy that we demand that he repudiate torture, and assure us that it is not practised on British territory. A reasonable case for FaxyourMP, I’d have thought. Unfortunately, my MP is the deputy speaker of the House, and thus almost unique in being ex officio useless for this kind of thing.
A thoughtful and well-informed post I found from Electrolite points out that this wicked and disastrous precedent was first set in the War on Drugs. It’s impossible to think of a worse policy outcome than that “America’s War on Terror” should be fought in the same manner and with the same success as “America’s War on Drugs”.