Dear Prime Minister Blair,
Even though one feels a need to congratulate you on your speech in the US Congress, on the other side there is just too much wrong with all this and you know it yourself. If you had held the same speech at home you would have been the usual source of ridicule. That already says a lot about how one really has to judge the speech, doesn't it? And coming to some other country and then telling the people exactly those things they want to believe in - despite quite a bit of evidence that many of those things are simply not true - is not exactly an achievement. But let's look at some of your statements in detail.
Let us not argue about those words which make US politicians always glow with pride. Let us not talk about freedom or liberty, say, even tough there is a lot to be said about freedom or liberty in a country with the highest prison population in the world, a country which holds hundreds of prisoners in little cages on Cuba, denying them even the most basic rights. So let's also not talk about those rights, either. You can do that in private with the US president when you might try to get your two citizens out of that Kafkaesque cage-world.
[snip...]
Regarding the possibility that those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq never show up, those weapons which Saddam Hussein, as you claimed before the war, could have used within 45 minutes, you said "If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive." History will forgive a lot of stuff - especially if it is being written by the right people. But I'm not sure, Mr Blair, that in this case you will be so lucky. With tens of millions of people in the street protesting against the war before it even started - including more than a million in London - history will certainly note that you lead a war against the majority of world opinion, including probably a majority in your own country. And where is that threat anyway which you destroyed? How can we consider a country to be a threat which can be invaded in just a few weeks? A country which doesn't have those terrible weapons of mass destruction? A country where the military strategy seemed to be to attack tanks with pickup trucks and rifles? What kind of threat is that? Was that country a threat to Britain? Is Britain's defense so weak that you have to be afraid of pickup trucks and rifles?
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