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July 24, 2005
Ouch.
A Sunday Times Comment piece by Michael Portillo. He manages to ding on everyone from Cheri Blair to Edward Heath and Bill Clinton, and it's marvelous.
We all just sat back and let Londonistan rise against us
For all our stoicism we Londoners had hoped that July 7 would be a one-off. A kind of fatalism led us to expect that our city would take its turn to be attacked after New York, Washington, Istanbul and Madrid, but we harboured an unfounded expectation that once it had happened, it would be over......We can no longer tolerate mealy-mouthed attitudes from people in authority. Ken Livingstone should heartily regret sharing a platform with Dr Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who once said that suicide bombings in Palestine were a legitimate form of self-defence...
...During the Clinton presidency, as American forces went to the rescue of Muslims in Bosnia and as the president toiled alongside Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister, to bring peace to Palestine, Al-Qaeda escalated its attacks on the United States, bombing its embassies in east Africa and attacking the warship USS Cole. Clinton’s response — firing a few cruise missiles into supposed terrorist camps — was feeble...
...Long before George W Bush became president a policy of turning the other cheek was met by a sharp intensification of the terrorist onslaught on America, culminating in the September 11 attacks...
...During the long period in which the Iraq policy destroyed trust in Blair, Gordon Brown kept his head down and his hands clean. It seemed clever at the time, but less so now. Brown has supplied no evidence that he is the man to lead us at a moment of national peril. Blair retains that monopoly.
Posted by tree hugging sister at July 24, 2005 11:12 PM
Comments
And here everyone had assumed Portillo had had this total transformation and gone wishy-washy. There's definitely still a lot there of the guy who was once Margaret Thatcher's heir-apparent (before the Tory Party grandees got their knives out for her, something from which the party really has yet to fully recover).
Where to start? One more good thing that comes to mind about Blair is that as long as he's in Number 10, his wife will never be on the bench. She makes Hillary Clinton look like a paragon of sensible moderation, and she would be a very great danger to the British people as a judge.
Posted by: Dave J at July 25, 2005 01:33 AM
The wave of sense gathers momentum - first the Times (NY), and now London. It's really sick that dozens or thousands have to die to rip the blinkers off, but better than permanent blindness.
Posted by: Nightfly at July 25, 2005 01:18 PM