War is Bad (But Tony Blair Has Confused the Issue)

Conventional political wisdom considers the war on terror to be an issue mostly characterized by the Left vs. the Right. The Right is fascist, so they want to capture or kill terrorists, while we on the Left know that if we’re nice to jihadists they’ll drop their jihad faster than they can say “allahu akbar”.

And yet Tony Blair, supposedly a good-hearted Lefty, is the number-two gangster — Vader to Bush’s Emperor, Starscream to Bush’s Megatron, Destro to Bush’s Cobra Commander — in this atrocity of a war. Obviously, those to the left of Blair support the freedom fighters and know the war is immoral. This goes without saying. What’s confusing is that Blair’s war critics also include the opposition Conservative Party.

Granted, politics in Britain is different from here. But not that different. And yet in Britain we have an immoral global war on terror being waged by a sitting pro-war Leftist government (in name only, mind you) that’s being resisted and criticized by a right-wing anti-war opposition. It seems that, at least from an American perspective, Britain is bizarro world.

What does this mean? Does it mean that the war’s not about Left vs. Right? Is the war more about simple right vs. wrong? Alone, each of these analyses is overly simplistic. I hate simplistic explanations for things. There is truth in both. Yes, of course the debate over the war is very clearly right vs. wrong. But it’s also Left vs. Right, because the Left is always right. Only in Blair’s messed-up Britain, and only on this issue, is it the other way around.

By supporting Bush’s war, Tony Blair has confused the issue into something more complicated than simply “war is bad”. This is unforgivable. We need “war is bad”. The beauty of “war is bad” is that it absolves you from thinking too hard. It shelters you from getting confused enough to think that it’s wrong to abandon those who want democracy.

If it weren’t for Tony Blair, his party would be against the war, and the conservatives would be for it. For conclusive evidence of this, we need only look at the way Britain’s conservatives oppose the war. They don’t argue that the war’s immoral, as they should — as we all should. They simply point out that the reasons for invading Iraq weren’t truthful enough. (Duh! Even a moron knows that the WMD materials we have recovered in Iraq don’t prove that Iraq ever had any WMDs.)

In other words, British conservatives’ opposition to the war is purely half-hearted. They know they need to distance themselves from Blair if they’re going to have any chance of being elected, so they opportunistically oppose the war. You’re a fool if you were duped into thinking British conservatives are any less immoral than conservatives here and everywhere else.

At this point, it seems Blair’s with Bush until the bitter end. All we can hope for is that he goes one step further in being like Vader, Starscream, and Destro: Hopefully, for whatever reason — selfishness, jealousy, or to save his son from destruction by the blue lightning Bush is firing from his fingertips — Blair eventually decides to sell out the number-one gangster, just like he sold out the British Left by confusing the war issue.