Sunday, August 05, 2012

Hejira

Aseel Kami (Reuters) reports that a group of prisoners labeled as terrorists were caught today attempting to tunnel their way out.  This follows last week's attempts to storm a Taji prison using bombs and guns and doing the same on a terrorist center in Baghdad which also housed prisoners.
In addition, AP notes today's violence included an attack on a Mosul checkpoint which left 3 police officers dead and a Baghdad car bombing claimed the life of 1 police officer and left five other people injured.  But that's only some of the violence today.

Alsumaria reports, in addition to the above, the corpse of 1 Iraqi soldier discovered on the road outside Mosul (shot to death), a Tikrit sticky bombing injured a police officer, 1 suspected al Qaeda was shot dead in Tikrit in a gunfire exchange between security forces and assailants, a police officer in Kut shot himself dead as police arrested  his police partner and a Kirkuk roadside bombing left three police officers injured.


Meanwhile in England where the Conservative - Liberal Democrat coalition government refuses to release a transcript of a March 2003 phone call between Tony Blair and Bully Boy Bush on the eve of the Iraq War, Jack Doyle (Daily Mail) reports Clare Short has called for the transcript's release and insists that it will demonstart that "there was no meaningful discussion at all" about the legality of starting a war with Iraq.

The suprise here is that others aren't making that call.




It's perfectly natural for Clare Short to make that call.  She resigned from Blari's Cabinet and has been a critic of the illegal war for many, many years.

 But while she's being consistent, I'm surprised at the inability of the Labour Party as a whole to be craven.

The Iraq War is the issue that drove them from power.

You'd think they be jumping on this issue and pointing out that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are conspiring against the people of England, of the world, to keep the truth hidden.

Tony Blair's toast.  He can dream all he wants of a comeback but it's over. His toadies are pretty much all out of office.  This is how the Labour Party could draw a line between the incident that cost them support (the illegal war) and the modern day Labour Party.

They could demand the release of the transcript.

If they're really craven -- and I know Ed -- then they'd be smart enough to grasp they just had to make some noise.  They don't have the power to release it.  It's doubtful that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will budge on this issue.

So all Labour had to do was take to the media, make a bunch of powerful (but ulitmately meaningless) statements and, presto, the UK discovers the birth of a new Labour Party.

That's how they can bury their attachment to the Iraq War.

And I'm surprised it didn't hit them.  If nothing else, I would've thought the posers in charge of the Labour Party knew how to pose.









I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

 The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4488.


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