Blair's Conversion

In subscribing to the “war on terror”, the then prime minister of the UK, Tony Blair, transformed and elevated the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks into the Olympian Gods of human destiny. Rather than treat the perpetrators as criminal fanatics and lunatics, he made them into the equals of states and nations. Rather than go after a few criminals with the surgical precision of forensic-based policing, he helped unleash the destructive terror of national armies.

Blair claimed that 9/11 changed the world. It did not. It was the response to 9/11, his response, that changed it. The launching of the “war on terror” threatens to change the course of human progress and history. The “war on terror” has ushered in a state of perpetual war, indefinite detention, mass killings and destruction, all of which would have been difficult to imagine at the outset of the new millenium.

The military might of several dozen nations is pitched against a few hundred “terrorists”. Thousands of innocent lives are being lost in the most horrific ways imaginable, and millions displaced. And the only winners in sight seem to be the 'masters of war', the makers of arms and mayhem, and their political servants.