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January 12, 2007
Grandfather Q&A: Part One
Edwin A. Santos asks:
"What are your thoughts about the UK's involvement in Iraq? What are your thoughts of achieving success in our war against terrorism and is their a resolution to this in the near future? And, what is your opinion of Prime Minister Tony Blair?"
Dealing with the easy one first:
When the Iraq invasion began I was still in active ministry. When it became clear that our P.M. was planning to go to war hanging onto Bush's coattails, I preached a violent sermon saying that to do so was plain contrary to the traditional Christian doctrine of the just war, to go to war on the basis that some quite insignificant country (from the military capability point of view) could be a threat to us was utterly wrong and I ended by shouting: "For God's and the world's sake stop it and draw back before you commit us to this evil thing". That's not an exact quote but more or less what I did then.
I think the whole idea of a war against terror is complete nonsense and the chances of winning it are nil. In the end what happens is terror is fought with terror and the "goodies" become as bad as the "baddies". This was clearly demonstrated not so very long ago in Vietnam.
Tony Blair was a good leader who did lots of good things for his party and for the U.K. but his long period in office steadily increasing his own power has done the usual sad thing: it has corrupted him. He is now blindly sticking to the notion that because he feels something is right he must act accordingly no matter what anyone else thinks. He truly seems to believe that history will judge him kindly over what he has done over Iraq.
More later. I have to stop for now.
Love,
Peter
[Technical notes: If there is any kind of point-counterpoint discussion in comments, I may forward the remarks along, and cut-and-paste my grandfather's responses in the comment fields. I mention this to pre-empt charges by IP trackers of so-called "sock puppetry" -- he's not used to how blogs work, so inputting the answers he sends me by email seems best -- LYT]
Posted by LYT at January 12, 2007 1:45 PM [Message Board]
Comments
Your present opinion of Tony Blair sounds like my opinion of our US President, George W. Bush. Thank you, sir, for your reply. Looking forward to reading more from you about this.
Posted by: Edwin A. Santos at January 12, 2007 2:25 PM
Sort of actually honored to be the first question asked, posted and answered...
Posted by: Edwin A. Santos at January 12, 2007 2:46 PM
His views politically I am pleased to have almost inherited - there was a massive anti-war campaign here well before we went and joined in -
Tony Blair should concentrate on Northern Ireland - where he does have a chance of some reasonably brilliant legacy - that would be no small achievement - and its relevance to how you actully succeed in dealing with terrorism by entering into unpleasant concessional politics is something he should have had a chance to teach Bush - but I doubt it would have worked, I think Bush is a product of a very hawkish, Rambo3-right wing misinterpretation of the true lessons of Vietnam.
Posted by: offpat at January 12, 2007 3:25 PM
Oops! My bad. I used to word, "their" instead of the word, "they're" when I posted my question. How unlikely of me to do that.
Posted by: Edwin A. Santos at January 12, 2007 10:22 PM
Rambo3-right wing misinterpretation of the true lessons of Vietnam.
The irony being that Rambo aided the Taliban in Rambo III.
Posted by: LYT at January 13, 2007 5:08 PM
You are absolutely right. Blair has done a great job in Northern Ireland, with help of great significance from your then President Clinton. If only he had kept to the same principles when dealing with Middle Eastern problems and could have persuaded Bush to do likewise we'd all be much better off than we are now.
For March I'm thinking of writing about Christian attitudes to the issues raised by people of diverse sexual orientation. This seems to be a hot potato among religious leaders but it is a subject I've touched on briefly before in these articles, so it may be too soon to bring it up again.
Posted by: Peter Graham at January 14, 2007 2:24 AM