This entry was posted on
Monday, October 8th, 2007 at
7:49 pm and is filed
under It’s War! It’s Legal! It’s Lovely!.

[WARNING: Contains some justified swearing]

Gordon Brown is a can’t.

Dan Hardie – Iraqi employees: the numbers game

Pissweak weasel-words are not enough. Further, the approach and timing (i.e. immediately before/after tomorrow’s meeting without acknowledging same) is an insult I’m all-too-familiar with…

This is exactly what happened with Tony Blair’s email address; everything was filtered through a bunch of absolute fuck-knuckles desperate to hang on to their jobs, and the end result was a government machine pushing the idea that this was their idea… plus the notion (crafted by a separate but no less spineless department) that the glorious leader had something approaching ideals.

Heaven forbid that the general public should get the idea that their leader was shamed into action by this campaign and a similar level of grass-roots support and media/political awareness that brought this belated promise in the U.S.

So, if we’re going to sort this, it’s up to the ‘leader’ to make a difference.

Is Brown up to it?

Either Brown is the can-do man or he’s an absolute can’t. Of the highest order.

In this high-stakes game, mealy-mouthed promises, hints and leaks are beyond useless… they’re downright fucking dangerous; not only for the potential victims of the death-squads, but for everyone here at home… including those who will swallow this tripe as readily as they swallow the empty call to ‘support the troops’.

For the government blog-monitors and (few) holdouts in the blogosphere, I have this to say; not dealing with this in an urgent fashion is going to cost us more than you can possibly imagine.

Brown’s senior advisers should know their history, not just what they can remember from media studies; if they’ve fought more than one local election campaign, they should be aware that the echoes of the miner’s strike pale into insignificance next to the memories of the 1991 uprisings in Iraq, and this decisive moment will have an impact far beyond local activism.

These people need to be looked after immediately.

Those in immediate danger should be shipped to a point of safety now. If Brown’s people aren’t sure who those people are, they should try doing something novel like talking to the fucking army.

Sure, they’ll have to follow this up by also making sure that our troops and the general Iraqi population have adequate post-conflict care, but that’s what they’ve been promising all along, yes?

Unless, of course, they’re all a bunch of can’ts. In which case, they can do what has always been done before; keep shovelling the platitudes while the largely uncounted death toll continues to rise.

Meanwhile, the ‘good’ war will be conducted from a safe distance by grey-faced drones with an Excel spreadsheet, and terrorism will continue to breed here and abroad.

Morals aside: smart, this isn’t.

[In the unlikely event that this message reaches Gordon Brown uncensored: You’re about to be Blaired, mate… make no mistake about it.]

UPDATE (09 Oct) – David Miliband’s statement on Iraqi Employees

UPDATE (09 Oct) – Well noted. Well said.

UPDATE (10 Oct) – BSSC – The Nasty Government