The Butler Did It

For me, yesterdays Butler report represents the last straw, not for me and Blair or the "Labour" party, that relationship broke down many years ago, but with pretty much anything to do with faith in humanity, in the concept of integrity and the ideas I grew up with about individual responsibility.

A mealy mouthed exercise in semantics, the report acknowledges that the intelligence on which Blair based his case for war in Iraq was flawed but manages to blame no-one for it.
The fact is we have erroneously helped start a war in which thousands of innocent and horribly oppressed people have suffered and died.  According to Butler, this has occurred seemingly as a result of a series of madcap calamities more akin to the plot of a Marx Brothers movie than the usual mascinacions of Whitehall of the security services.
Blair believes that this second whitewash of his disastrous decision to go to war fully exonerates him and puts paid to questions about whether or not he acted in "good faith" by taking us to war.
Yeah, a couple of points on that:

1) Bullshit. You knew and didn't care, you liar.

2) It's a dumb defence anyway. If Blair wasn't sure, if the "intelligence" was in any way doubtful we shouldn't have been going to war. It's not the kind of decision you make and then hope you're hunch pays off. It's not an episode of Quincy. It's not a punt down the dog track. It's a war, and people actually die in wars. Their lives end and they never come back - the resentment lasts forever,  the damage is never repaired.
Even if we accept that Blair did make a "good faith" decision about going to war (and I don't for a second), that just means he's a Gung Ho idiot rather than a liar.
At best, Blair comes out of this looking like a gullible fool who will make decisions of global magnitude on the say so of some tube filling his ear full of cider. He now comes across as the type of person who will gleefully open his junk mail genuinely convinced that he's won a luxury yacht.
Michael Howard pointed out yesterday that if we ever have to go to war again under this Government, no-one will believe the evidence. A good point, but of course he and the rest of his pathetic party couldn't have been more behind Blair when the crucial decisions were being made. He doesn't have a leg to stand on, much like his idiot counterpart.

All this bares out a theory of mine which is that everyone is winging it and no-one really knows what they are doing. Even at the very top, we're all idiots floundering around in the dark.

But all that's not even the problem for me.

What kills me, what absolutely destroys my faith and makes me want to puke is that no-one will be a man and take the blame for this fiasco. No one will stand up, not Blair, not MI6, not Jack Straw or Geoff (Buff) Hoon.

The war on Iraq has been reduced to the level of an office dispute, where no one will take the blame for losing an invoice.

That we are being led by men and women who have allowed us to become party to Republican America's racist war of revenge on an innocent Arab people, that we are led by callow fools with no pride, no shame and no sense of responsibility, that's what really kills me.

Because what does that say about the rest of us?