THE TELEGRAPH: Tony Blair faced accusations last night that he is wasting nearly £7 billion of taxpayers' money on a failing war on terror after announcing massive sums of British aid to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.Mark Alexander
In the last three days, the Prime Minister and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, have trumpeted special funding to the three countries totalling £844 million.
This is in addition to the estimated £5 billion cost to British taxpayers of the Iraq war so far, and the £1 billion spent to date on the British deployment in Afghanistan.
The funding announcements came just days after Mr Blair admitted in an interview with al-Jazeera, the English language Arabic television channel, that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a "disaster".
No 10 officials have since dismissed the response as a slip of the tongue. But yesterday Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, said military victory in Iraq was no longer possible. Anger at £7bn cost of war by Toby Helm and Brendan Carlin
Throwing good money after bad governance
Monday, November 20, 2006
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3 comments:
Those are pretty controversial ideas you have there, Beakerkin! :-)
Winesy:
sorry i did not read the link on the 7bn cost of war,
and frankly mark i dinn't want to. as a working class, tax paying, family man and proud english man i thought it would just piss me off even more..
It p***** all of us off! It beats me how they can be as brazen as brass and spend the taxpayers' money like that.
this staggering amout of money is unbelivable, to me whos local hospital is a shambles, whos neibourhood is running alive with the result of the nanny state, and whos children are scared to walk the streets alone. soz, polotics aint my strong point, i'm just tryin to vent my anger at the amount this unjust war has cost the "man in the street"
They can never find the money for things that are genuinely needed; but when it comes to war, or giving overseas aid, they find the money very quickly. Strange that!
Beakerkin:
I'm sorry, but I disagree with your assessment of Henry Kissinger. He is a very erudite man who knows a thing or two about international politics. I would suggest that when he says something like that, then we should all listen carefully. We don't necessarily have to agree, it's true; but I don't think we should dismiss what he says out of hand.
Though I very much regret having to say so, also I happen to believe the war in Iraq to be unwinnable. Especially now. It has been allowed to fester on for far too long. As I have said many times before on this weblog, a country should never enter a war unless it is ready, willing and able to do everything necessary, regardless of how ruthless, to win that war. Neither America nor Britain has been prepared to do the necessary. Now the insurgents are gaining (nay, 'have gained') the upper hand.
Apart from that, we should never have gone into Iraq from the start. It is impossible to bring democracy to the Islamic Middle East for all the reasons I have mentioned so many times before. Democracy is a Western concept which depends on the separation of the religious and the secular. Islam does not, and will not, recognize such a separation.
In addition, all power in a democracy is supposed to rest with the people, the electorate, the voters. In Islam, all power rests with Allah. So in a democracy power filters up to the leader; in Islam, power filters down from Allah, via Allah's vice-gerents here on earth.
Western democracy and the Islam make strange bedfellows! The resistance to the attempted imposition of democracy on the Iraqis will go on and on.
By entering Iraq, Bush and Blair have opened up a hornets' nest!
Anyway, why should it bother us whether they have democracy, or not. As I said in my book, we should drop an "Iron Veil" between our two worlds. In the long-run, it's the only sensible way.
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