The American Spectator

So Blair is a coward, EUroweenie,and appeaser. Right on all points —I’ve been saying so for years. Christopher’s knowledge of British military history is a bit dodgy —his reference to the days when “thin red line of phlegmatic Yorkshire fusiliers held off waves of screaming, bloodthirsty Zulu head loppers against all hazards” doesn’t take into account that the original “thin red line” were Scots, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War — the Crimea being, for the avoidance of doubt, in what was then Russia and not South Africa; nor that the soldiers who held off Cetewayo’s Zulu impis at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift were mostly Welsh. Heck, that day the Taffs did a better job of holding a fortified position than Davy Crockett at the Alamo — sorry, did I just say something ‘culturally inappropriate’?

Ah, so we are “gutless and stupid”? Can’t think of anyone having cause to call Russell Aston gutless. Or Pita Tukutukuwaqa. Or Scott McArdle. Or Paul Lowe. Or Russell Beeston. Or Gordon Gentle. Now, if you were to apply that description to the military policemen of Abu Ghraib, who would have had a hard time finding work as extras in Deliverance, and who made their naked prisoners form human pyramids, and were then dumb enough to get their pictures taken, in the off moments when they weren’t impregnating each other — they could certainly be classed as both gutless and stupid.

Christopher H., who in a move clearly designed to appease his critics doesn’t provide us with his surname, correctly notes that Blair has appeased the IRA — as, incidentally, have George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, Pete King, Teddy Kennedy, and a legion of my dopier Irish-American cousins who for years fell for the beast Gerry Adams’s homespun tales of fighting the Brits (anyone who wants to know how the dollars they gave Big Gerry in the hope of freeing Holy Mother Ireland from Brit oppression were put to work had better not eat before they read what they did to a Catholic) and put their bills into the plate; just for welfare. As far as appeasing Libya goes, one had thought that the current resident of the White House was equally guilty of that charge; although not much apart from Qaddafi’s annihilation will ever erase the anger I personally feel towards him for killing my countrymen in their beds, and leaving the nose-cone of Pan Am Flight 103, the Clipper Maid Of The Seas, lying on Tundergarth Hill as a monument to his viciousness. An un-Christian and unworthy sentiment, I know; but I guess a lot of American folks might feel the same way.

There are those of us, of course, who think that the most profound of what Christopher describes as “the fundamental problems and serial misjudgments that bedevil the war in Iraq” are that we’re there in the first place. No doubt Christopher doesn’t see it that way — he’s fallen for the triangulating garbage spouted by the allegedly conservative magazines and think tanks, with their talk of “global democratic revolution” (or is it “benevolent global hegemony”? Or “New World Order”? Geez, you get confused). Debating with a neocon is almost Newtonian — for every argument there is an equal and opposite counter-argument. Saddam has WMDs — no he doesn’t! We are bringing democracy to the Middle East — the Iraqi constitution is already on the way out because it endorses Sharia law! Give me liberty or give me death — give them liberty or give them death; or why not give them both, because that’s what they seem to have at the moment!

Christopher is a repeater of talking points, a hollow man. It’s a pity that his willingness to buy into the most extreme theories of world affairs have led him to make statements that Rush Limbaugh might have found in bad taste. As the old Royal motto goes, “Nemo me impune lacessit,” which, for Christopher’s sake, is nothing to do with a movie starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason; it means, ‘Don’t tread on me’; and don’t tread on your friends or their “crown jewels.” You never know when you might need them.