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British clergy slam Bush, Blair
Two British church leaders blasted Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday for going to war in Iraq, with one bishop saying he and US President George Bush had acted like "a bunch of white vigilantes."
| What if they'd acted like a bunch of black vigilantes? Or a bunch of Chinese vigilantes? G.W. and Tony have to work on that, get a little variety into their foreign policy... |
Their criticism - plus an embarrassing contradiction over weapons of mass destruction by the US administrator of Iraq at the weekend - comes at the end of a miserable year for Blair whose popularity has tumbled over the invasion of Iraq.
"Cherie, my year has been just miserable. I've taken part in tumbling one iron-fisted dictator and scaring another into reforming, but the Archbishop... the Archbishop... doesn't like me."
"The Archbishop doesn't like you? Tony, I want a divorce." |
The Archbishop of York, David Hope, who is the Church of England's second most senior churchman, said Blair had displayed "a real lack of listening" over Iraq and his claims of fallen dictator Saddam Hussein's arms capability remained unproven. "Undoubtedly a very wicked leader has been removed, but there are wicked leaders in other parts of the world," he added in an interview with The Times newspaper.
| "Therefore we shouldn't remove any of them, ever." |
Hope urged British churchgoers to pray for Blair, and said he and Bush should remember they will one day answer to God. "I want to say... that there is a higher authority before whom one day we all have to give an account," he said.
| "Of course, if I actually believed that, I'd be saying entirely different things..." |
The Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, was scathing about Blair's military alliance with Bush in Iraq. He likened them to a pair of mavericks fighting crime in multi-racial inner-city London.
| That statement makes no sense, even for a churchman... |
"For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing. This is not to deny there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it," he told The Independent newspaper.
| Seems like they missed the Archbishop's drug dealer, doesn't it? I wonder which credible people His Excellency had in mind to deal with the problem? |
"The world now needs a UN army in the way that Britain 200 years ago needed to turn its bands of militia in each town into a national police force."
| He thinks a UN army would be the credible people? He doesn't read the papers, does he? |
Wright said the religious conservatives surrounding Bush espouse "a very strange distortion of Christianity" while the fact "some of them stand to benefit financially from the reconstruction of Iraq" made their motives suspicious.
| "Not that I believe any of it for a moment, of course, but suspicions have been raised... Could you help me get this meal out of my mouth, please?" |
Blair braved major opposition in Britain before the March invasion, saw support rise as fighting began, but has since faced a barrage of criticism over the reasons for war and the handling of post-Saddam Iraq. He has said he would do it again and is "ready to meet my maker".
Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-12-29 |
