Tony, meet Rudyard

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque is a favorite of Spot's. He's been writing for truthout.org latey, and he has a piece up this morning about Tony Blair's abasement by George Bush and his ignominy among the British public and his own Labour Party. As usual with Chris, it is terrific. What caught Spot's eye especially was this:

So wedded is Blair to Bush's policies that he's now led his country into what many say is rapidly becoming Britain's Vietnam - not the Iraqi quagmire, which is increasingly regarded here as an irretrievable failure, but the "good war" in Afghanistan, where Blair has hurled an underprepared, undermanned expeditionary force into the violent chaos spawned by Bush's callous neglect of the broken country in favor of his Iraq adventure.

What Chris Floyd is speaking of, of course, is the role the British are playing in the NATO forces in Afghanistan:

British forces have lost 27 men in Afghanistan in the last six weeks - almost a quarter of the total 117 lost during three years in Iraq. Soldiers report a lack of ammunition, armor and air cover. At times the Taliban has been able to keep British outposts under siege for days. A top aide to the commander of the UK forces in the pivotal Helmand province has resigned from the army, citing the "pointless" and "grotesquely clumsy" policy that is "just making things worse," The Times reports. "We said we'd be different from the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them," said Capt. Leo Docherty of the Scots Guards. "All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British. It's a pretty clear equation - if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would."

Iraq is going to make us lose Afghanistan too. Tony Blair should read more Kipling.


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