Stiff-Lipped Disgust

British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently spent some time in a pillory. He was there to face a public whipping for his policies on Israel and Iraq. In what’s being called an unprecedented move, a legion of ex-ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials delivered Blair a scathing, public rebuke for following American policies. The former diplomats were undiplomatically direct, coming very close to calling their prime minister an American puppet.

Specifically, the 50 ambassadors lambasted Blair for support for the U.S. "Road Map" in Israel and for the nations' brutal occupation of Iraq. Of Israel, the ambassadors said in a letter, "nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence." They condemned Israel PM Ariel Sharon's unilateral plan to unload Gaza and other Arab settlements, calling it "illegal" and one "which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood." Sharon recently got the OK from Bush for the giveaway, only recently to receive a trenchant rejection not just from the pacificist factions in Israel, but from his own conservative political base. His own party staged a referendum in which he was rebuked (The American equivalent would be Republican Party fundamentalists walking out on Bush).

To the chagrin of these British foreign careerists, Blair seconded Bush's approval of Sharon's Gaza giveback. With Sharon's defeat, the British are humiliated by Blair's backing Bush on a policy that most the people of Israel hate. So instead of bringing democracy to the Middle East, Bush has in effect participated in undermining the people of Israel; and in his war on Iraq, has brought vast suffering to the Iraqi people. Instead of "exerting real influence as a loyal ally," write the ambassadors, Blair has abandoned Britain's most successful principles for finding peace in the Middle East. And "this abandonment of principle comes as a time when rightly or wrongly we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq."

Add to this the images of Americans torturing Iraqis – including extreme pain and sexual humiliation – and the ambassadors' stiff upper-lips must be curled back smartly for the misdeeds of their American cousins. (The ambassadors' letter is worth reading. It's available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3660837.stm.)

And just in case you need something else to gag over, consider this milestone that's not often mentioned here at home. According to the human rights group Iraq Body Count the number of civilians killed since the Iraq invasion last year recently passed the 10,000 mark. (www.iraqbodycount.net).

How high must corpses be stacked, our and theirs, before the U.S. heeds the advice of its closest friends whose best minds are seized with disgust?

(bruce@citypaper.net)

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