Iraqi Mobile WMD Laboratory
(per Colin Powell)
BBC's Question Time is possibly the most important program on British Television. It is arguably the only forum in which politicians are held accountable to the general public; unless you're one of those people who still believes that our elections mean anything (e.g. the Labour Party gets about a fifth of the available vote then rules the country with absolute power).
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Question Time isn't perfect. There is no public scrutiny of question selection and the audiences tend to be mostly middle class but, nevertheless, politicians are asked questions that they are otherwise shielded from in the media and certainly in the House of Commons. They squirm in a way you don't see anywhere else.
The last two weeks have been excellent. Audiences in two very separate parts of the country, Poole and Tyneside, vented their spleen on the Labour Party representatives; particularly on the subject of Iraq. At a rough guess, 70-80% of the audience was hostile to the Government on this issue and when I say hostile, I mean hostile.
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Early in the week I was particularly concerned that people might be sucked in by the story of mass graves being shown to journalists in Iraq. These graves date back to the 1980s, before the First Iraq Conflict, at a time when the US / UK were still supplying the Iraqi regime with chemical weapons (those pesky scamps were supposed to be using them to liquidate Iranian funda-mentalists and not for dealing with 'internal issues'). Also, the graves' locations have been known to the US/ UK for the last eighteen months. Without any doubt, journalists were taken to see the bodies this week to distract us retards of the general public from the fact that the case for Iraqi WMDs had been thoroughly demolished a few days before. On the same day the 'story' broke Tony Blair made explicit reference to the mass executions as a justification for the attack on Iraq. Which is strange, because if 2003 invasion was some kind of a rescue mission it was about 15 years too late.
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What really took place this week was an attempt by 'democratic' politicians to distract us from their sins by hiding behind the corpses of long dead women and children that our governments helped to exterminate in the first place. Blair truly is either wicked or crazy and it's so damned difficult figuring out which it is. A lot of people can't see that, regardless of the evidence buidling up in front of them, because, understandably, they don't want to live in a World where they are subject to the whims of a lunatic; it's called cognitive dissonance and there's bucket loads of it swilling around the UK and US at the moment. Here writeth a right-wing, pro American (well maybe not their current government) person. God knows what the left wing, anti-Americans are thinking.
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Thankfully, the Question Time audience clearly hadn't fallen for the recent spin. A couple of panellists tried to play the 'mass graves' card but they were comprehensively taken down by well-placed replies from the audience. It was reassuring to watch. It would be so very easy to believe that the majority of my fellow citizens have been taken in by the nonsense they are being told but clearly a large number haven't. In that regard I don't feel as alone as I did, even a few weeks ago. I suspect that the most incensed are those who believed what they were told at the time of the attack.
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For many of us this isn't a hindsight thing. Even at the time of the attack on Iraq, the stories we were being told were clearly nonsense. Unless you took the sight of Colin Powel pointing at aerial pictures of rusty ice cream vans and empty car parks seriously. Fair enough, less cynical people believed in the basic decency of the UK and US Governments, particularly after 9/11, but people have become a lot more cynical now.
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There's another Stop the War march this Sunday. I'll probably go along. I won't march as such. I'll just take some photos and bask in the thought that there are still some people left in this country with a brain between their ears and a heart between their shoulder blades. I might even feel fluffy enough on the day to include Lefties in my fluffy thinking.
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