“Yeah Blair, what are you doing?” Bush asks.
What are either of them doing? Do they know?
What’s for sure is, they didn’t know the microphone was on until Blair found it and muted it.
More interesting at the G8 summit lunch in Russia than George W. Bush’s profane discussion of irony was the lowly fealty of Tony Blair throughout the conversation.
After Bush says “What about Kofi?…I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything is settled…,” Blair responds with “Yeah, no. I think…” and stammers on from there about the need to get “international visits agreed.”
Standing near Bush and leaning over, Blair hopefully proclaims “I am perfectly happy to try to see what [inaudible], but you need that done quickly–“
Bush explains: “–Well she’s going, I think Condi’s gonna go pretty soon…I told her your offer too.”
“It’s only if…if she needs the ground prepared, as it were,” Blair graciously deflects after a few seconds.
After Blair says that Condi (Rice) has “got to succeed as it were” in a diplomacy mission (as opposed to him), Bush then moves the topic to Syria, and says “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah stop doing this sh** and it’s over.”
Blair later backs Bush up on Kofi (Annan): “What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way.”
The way that Blair turns the disaster in Iraq into something so peripheral is downright cowardly. How much chance, the British people should ask him, that Iraq “goes in the right way,” given present trends?
In this war between Hizbollah (and Hamas, and Lebanon) and Israel, that Bush and Blair failed to provide necessary leadership in pushing for a ceasefire is by now obvious, with or without the recording of their conversation.
Bush and Blair are both now highly unpopular in their own countries. Their war for Iraq is an historic disaster, and no amount of round-the-clock coverage of the war going on just to the west of it can obscure the fact that it remains the deadlier conflict, even over the last week.
Now the dark specter of further war looms over the paranoid rants of neoconservative commentators and other assorted Iran haters and Syria bashers. These people have a truly hateful, worthless ideology that is now preaching the predictable–that punishment has come upon those with insufficient faith in the cult of militarism and forced “democratization.” Not that such a critique could apply to Tony Blair.
So what of a ceasefire now? Well, according to the AP from papers on Monday, Bush hasn’t acquired much of a taste for one:
“However, White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones said after the meeting that “our position on an immediate cease-fire is well known and has not changed.“”
On the other hand, at least one foreign and commonwealth official is applying serious pressure, while the Blairite spin management trys to deflect the impact–soon they are claiming that he “had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
According the Guardian in Britain:
“Mr Howells ignored the diplomatic convention that he tone down his comments because of his presence in the host country, saying the Israelis “have got to think very hard about those children who are dying.”
…
Yesterday, in an interview in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, Mr Howells said the Israelis
“know only too well it is not enough just to seek a military victory, they have got to win a wider political battle. That means they have got to think very hard about those children who are dying. It is not enough to say it is unfortunate collateral damage. Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now”.
At some stage, he said, the Israelis had around 60 jets flying over the Mediterranean, readying for strikes in Lebanon. “I think it is something the whole world should worry a great deal about,” he said.
Mrs Beckett, interviewed on BBC Radio Four yesterday, insisted there was no difference between the line espoused by Downing Street and herself, and Mr Howells. “I think basically what he is saying is that Israel has been saying all the way through that they are targeting Hizbullah. And there are bound to be problems because Hizbullah have entrenched themselves in relatively speaking ordinary neighbourhoods – not totally, but to a very large extent,” Mrs Beckett said.
“What Kim is saying is that targeting Hizbullah is one thing and one understands why it is being done, but it is not working in the way that Israel had hoped and claimed that it was. And so that’s why we have to continue to … urge recognition of that danger on Israel.”
Asked whether Israel had heeded calls for restraint, Mrs Beckett said she would not disclose private conversations with Israelis.
Foreign Office diplomats confirmed over the weekend there were significant differences between No 10 and the Foreign Office, and within the Foreign Office about how to respond to the conflict. No 10 also claimed that Mr Howells was merely calling for restraint all round and had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
So it does not appear that Bush and Blair have made any substantive change to their views since their G8 luncheon talk, despite the continuing casualties with hundereds of Lebanese dead and dozens of Isrealis dead already thus far in the war. They made the wrong call about how much war Iraq needed and they are miscalculating again, while Kim Howells gets to make the visit Blair asked Bush permission to take.
[photo: AFP]