The prime minister’s “we are at war” statements are irresponsible in the extreme. It is said that some of his senior officials understand this, as do many MPs: thus the messages of “restraint” now being whispered to journalists.
Tony Blair is endangering the people of this country as well as Britons abroad. His willingness to join Bush’s “crusade” and use military force will neither avenge nor bring justice to nor honour the memory of the ordinary people who died so terribly in America last week because this will almost certainly lead to a gratuitous slaughter of more innocents in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. It also risks nurturing a new generation of suicidal killers. Two years ago, Denis Halliday, the assistant secretary general of the United Nations who resigned over the Anglo-American-imposed embargo of Iraq, told me: “We are likely to see the emergence of those who may well regard Saddam Hussein as too moderate and too willing to listen to the west. Such is the desperation of people whose children are dying in their thousands and who are bombed almost every day by American and British planes.”
Blair’s wanton disregard of this threat has been demonstrated in recent years. On a bogus pretext, he joined America’s all-out assault on Iraq in 1998 and backed Clinton’s missile attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The following year, his “moral crusade” with Clinton against Yugoslavia killed hundreds of
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 21 Sep 2001