Do most people 'dislike' Tony Blair?

[AgentZigzag]

I accept that the word dislike may not fully encompass the emotional response he provokes in some people, but I personally don't think he's that bad. I see him as a politician who's had to make difficult decisions, rather than someone who took us to war for dishonest reasons.

It was his job to look at the bigger picture after 9/11, I've just seen him saying on the Iraq Inquiry that 3000 people were killed on that day, and if they could have, they would have killed 30000. Surely he had to do everything and anything he thought necessary to try and protect us from people whose reality is so distorted that they would gladly kill and maim as many people in the west as possible, and certainly don't play by any of the rules of normal modern warfare.

I don't think I'm being naive, and I can't stand Labour so it's not because I'm some NuLab fan, but I just don't think he's as bad as the media wants us to think he is.

Tony Blair broke International Law.

He broke the law!

No country is allowed to pre-emptively invade another country. The UK SIGNED these treaties of international law.

He is therefore a war criminal and should be brought to justice.

I cannot believe the ammount of support he still gets!!!

"Why didn't Bush say they were considering "regime change" the day he stepped into the Oval Office?"

If you read Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies", you will see that Bush was considering invading Iraq from very early on, if not the first day of his presidency.

On the very day of 9/11, he was talking about invading Iraq, although there was absolutely no reason to think Saddam was behind those attacks.

What's always interested me is why Bush (or rather, Dick Cheney pulling the strings of his idiot puppet) went after Iraq, not Al Quaeda or Bin Laden. Could it possibly be because the Bush family had multi-million pound business dealings with the Bin Laden family? Or because he needed a quick win to assuage domestic opinion - wanted to hit SOMEONE to show he was doing something, even if it was the wrong target, and thought Iraq would be easier than Afghanistan?

well, i have got to the point where i feel that i cannot vote for the forseeable future - most of the current cabinet/shadow cabinet is made up of Oxford people around 40 years of age; they were contemporaries of my older siblings and many of them moved in the same social circles and went to the same schools/Oxford colleges. I have know about what they are really like for years and based on what i have seen and heard, there is no way any of them are fit to run this country.

Let's face it can you find a PM you like? Surely the nature of the job is going to produce a person that most people are not keen on.

I don't dislike him. To be honest I don't really have an opinion on him - he was just there doing a job. Didn't vote for him so that says everything I suppose.

LOL, Sophable.

Georgimama, are you still here? I think you talk much sense.

right in the cold light of day i concede that if he were on fire I might grace him with my piss.

Stil think he is despicable, self aggrandising and more interested in the american lecture circuit than anything else. he absolutely did NOT take the 'hard decision' which would have been standing hard and firm on the need for a second resolution...which he may even have eventually got.

he is responsible for the rise in recruitment to al quaida, he is responsible for the increased terrorist threat to the UK and above all else he is responsible for waging and illegal war.

he is utterly utterly beneath contempt.

And I really hope that throughout his comfortable life, there are instances where he attends social occasions and people that he might wish to include in his social circle shun him for what he has done. it will not be forgotten.

Hello HA, yes I am still here - or rather I came back to see if there was anything further on the thread. DS is a bit under the weather and needed me last night.

I am actually really surprised that after everything that has happened, everything we now know about the dodgy dossier, WMDs (or lack of them), Kelly etc people not only still admire Tony Blair at all, but admire him for his actions on Iraq.

Equally laughable that anyone regards this government as some sort of bastion of free speech. You aren't even allowed to stand outside Parliament with a placard without permission anymore. You'll get moved on and if you refuse you'll be arrested. Remember?

Blair knows EXACTLY why he felt joining Dubya in the Iraq War was a good move - for HIM. If anyone at that enquiry wants to REALLY see him squirm, they only have to say two words to him: BAE SYSTEMS.

The Official Secrets Act has a hell of a lot to answer for.

Anyone who even begins to think that this government has anything to do with free speech must be living on another planet.

I can't read this thread without getting angry about Tony Blair and the Iraq war, I don't give a flying fuck about liking or disliking him, he was wrong to do what he did, and I do think he should be tried for war crimes. I am ashamed to have him represent me in any way - for him to make money out of a career - having made the decision that resulted in so many innocent people dying is sickening.

couldn't agree more chaos and cran.

edam - re "Why Iraq?"

The answer is simple and obvious: Oil.

It is actually quite a rational (albeit abhorrent) decision. The largest economy in the world needs a secure supply of oil and Iraq is sitting on the second largest oil reserves in the world, which also happen to be very close to the surface. With 9/11 they had the means to galvanize public support for such a brash move.

Dubya wanted to get Saddam because

a) his daddy tried and failed
b) he wanted the oil
c) his daddy was still pulling his strings and told him to.

Well, I've always enjoyed those possibilities but no doubt they are puerile.

Though I never met TB, I met many many MPs in the shortish time I was a lobbyist, and he has given me the impression that he is amongst the worst of them. Not many were people I wanted to know socially.

There are parts of this thread which remind me of my sFIL who actually said to me once, in all seriousness "But these are MPs; why would they lie to us?" (err..... words failed me.)

I am still gobsmacked when I discover that there are people who still believe what they're told and then accuse me of reading the DM (never have) when I don't agree.

Anyway, TB's now in the ME so I suppose we're all going to be all right then. He won't piss them off, will he?

And I also think Cameron is TB as a Tory - both slime balls with something shifty about them, they are cut from the same privileged cloth.

Haven't read the whole thread, but in terms of the OP: Balir drawing an analogy with 9/11 and using that as justification for invading Iraq shows at best how delusional he has become and at worst a total blinkeredness lack of interest in looking at any inconvenient facts that did not support the decesion he had already made. That lack of judgement, that inability to look for the facts makes me extremely thankful that he is no longer the prime minister (not that Brown is any less complicit).

Iraq was not a breeding ground for international terrorsts before we invaded, it is now. Now explain to me who it was that made the world a more dangerous place

Saddam Hussein was indeed a bad man. However, he was not threatening the west, so therefore the objective of regime change was illegal. This is not "with the benefit of hindsight" - dh and I were amongst the many millions who marched against it before it happened.

BTW - I was brought up to beleive fundamentally in Labour principals. However, neither I nor my parents, who brought me in those principals, will ever vote Labour again.

I haven't read the whole thread either but I agree completely with prettybird, even down to the not voting Labour bit!
Some of you on here appear quite naive.
It was all about Oil and protecting rich people's investments not about any imminent threat to The West. Tony Blair is a liar.

I detest Blair and always have done,I never voted for him and we have lost a lot of our freedoms under his watch.The war on Iraq was nothing to do with 'things changing after 9/11',none of the hijackers were Iraquis,were they?Oh no,they were Saudi,but Saudi Arabia wasn't invaded by our troops was it.And don't get me started on BAE Systems.

Tlaking with dh last night whole watching Mo, I came up with what I thought of Blair:

He is a self-deluded megalomaniac control freak with messianic tendencies and tall poppy syndrome. The best thing I can say about him - and even that is arguable (for example, dh disagrees with me on this) is that he was so determined to "find" WMD in order to "stand shoulder to shoulder" with Bush that he may have actually convinced himself that they were indeed there, so that in his mind he is telling "the truth". However, such an ability to discount any other information that doesn't fit with your pre-determined version of reality is highly dangerous in a leader.

I used to have to walk out of a room if Maggie Thatcher started speaking on TV. The sad thing was that I now do that if the leader of the Labour Party comes on (formerly Blair, now Brown) as I cannot tolerate their hyprocracy.

No wonder people are being turned off politics

However, I was brought up to beleive that you can't complain if you don't vote - and in Scotland, we do have a choice.

god Mo last night was like the final nail in the new labour coffin wasn't it:

blair and mandy came off absolutely appallingly. blair particularly so. wonder if he watched it!

I am guilty of only having read the OP. But I simply have to respond, and haven't the time to trawl through 6 pages of posts.

I loathe Tony Blair. He is a superficial self-hyping, ego-deluded cretin. He is like ectoplasm in human form - he manages to ooze and schmooze his way into and out of any situation, and is, as a consequence, 100% untrustworthy. The day I decided that I simply could not and therefore would not trust him was the day in December 2002 when The Guardian (or Observer) published a front page article with him saying 'there's stuff about Iraq which I can't tell you about but you just have to trust me on it'. Until then he had the benefit of my doubt, but on reading that article I just knew in my bones that he was up to something and have not liked him from that day to this.

Is it really so wrong to wish that during the Israel/ Gaza crisis of a few years ago someone had strapped him to one of the missiles?