Blair

Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Talk about Blair resigning.

TARIQ ALI: Well, it was classic New Labour spin, well-orchestrated, designed for the global media networks, a self-serving speech, a carefully hand-picked audience so that there would be no trouble at all, and, actually, for him, a very bad speech. I mean, and I’ve always regarded Blair as a second-rate politician with a third-rate mind, but he's had better speech writers than this, and I wondered whether he had written it himself. I mean, it's sort of full of contradictions and half-truths. I mean, if he was going to see the so-called war against terror through, why quit?

We had no real accounting of why he's leaving as prime minister. And the fact is he's leaving is, because he's hated. And the reason he’s hated is because he joined the neocons in Washington and went to war against Iraq, which now 78% of the population in this country oppose. And when people are being asked what will Blair’s legacy be, a large majority is saying Iraq. And I think that's what he will be remembered for, as a prime minister who took a reluctant and skeptical country into a war designed by Washington and its neoconservative strategists, all of whom are in crisis.

And you listen to Blair now and his successor, Brown, and they sound much worse than any Democrat in the Senate or the House, because they realize the war's unpopular. These guys carry on living in a tiny bubble, media bubble, which they construct. And I think the BBC's sycophancy, the way in which they portrayed him yesterday as if he was a sort of dead Princess Diana, doesn’t do them proud. It was a low point in BBC journalism, with one of their political correspondents saying, “Gosh, look at him. Isn't he a winner?” Well, he isn't a winner, which is why he's leaving. And a reluctant party is saying farewell to him, because they think they’ll lose the next election if he’s in charge. That's what's going on.