Netanyahu Promises Israeli Voters - There'll Be No Palestinian State On My Watch.

With Israelis heading to the polls, Benjamin Netanyahu is running scared.  He's seen Likud's numbers and all the polls show he's in trouble.  He's in deep enough that he's pulling out all the stops and scrambling for the hardliner vote.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau said Monday that if he were to be reelected, a Palestinian state would not be created, in a definite disavowal of his 2009 speech, in which he had voiced support for the principle of two states for two peoples.

Netanyahu's remarks in an interview with the NRG website - which is owned by casino mogul [and Bibi owner] Sheldon Adelson and tied with the settler newspaper Makor Rishon - were a last-minute attempt to pull right-wing voters away from Habayit Hayehudi. 

The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, also reports that Middle East envoy, Tony Blair, is about to resign.

In 2014, a group of former British diplomats and political figures wrote an open letter calling for Blair's resignation from his role as the Special Envoy of the Middle East Quartet, citing, among other reasons, his "blurring the lines between his public position as envoy" and his private business dealings in the region.

Israelis vote tomorrow but it won't be clear whether Netanyahu could keep post even if Likud emerges trailing Zionist Union by three or four seats.  With nearly a dozen parties expected to pick up seats there's enormous room for horse trading.  Of course our Mr. Harper won't hesitate to embrace a Likud coalition even if he denounced the legitimacy of the very same thing in Canada.

Tony Blair and his "Bloody Crusades"

Tony Blair's former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, thinks he can explain the radicalization of Britain's Muslim youth - his former boss Tony Blair's "bloody crusade" to topple Saddam Hussein.

The outspoken former deputy PM, who was recently appointed as an unpaid adviser with special responsibility for climate change by Labour leader Ed Miliband, said he believes Blair was wrong for invading Iraq in 2003.

"They told us it wasn't regime change. It was. And that's exactly what the Americans have had,” he was recorded saying.

"Now Tony, unfortunately is still in to that. I mean the way he's going now, he now wants to invade everywhere.

"He should put a white coat on with a red cross and let's start the bloody crusades again."

He went on: "When I hear people talking about how people are radicalised, young Muslims. I'll tell you how they are radicalised.

"Every time they watch the television where their families are worried, their kids are being killed or murdered and rockets, you know, firing on all these people, that's what radicalises them."

Mr Prescott’s remarks come amid growing fears over the number of young men, women and teenagers from Britain fleeing the country to join Isis in Syria or Iraq.

The Muddled Mind of Lord Prescott

Back when he was Tony Blair's deputy prime minister he was for it but now Lord/Baron John Prescott says the Anglo-American war on Iraq "can't be justified."

Prescott says he supported the conquest of Iraq back in 2003 because he'd been told that George w. Bush would sort out the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Speaking on BBC One’s This Week, however, he said he “can't just disown it” but now thought the war was wrong.

“I go through my thoughts trying to justify it,” he said. “It cannot be justified as an intervention.”

He had been persuaded of the wisdom of the intervention because, he said, Mr Bush “was quite prepared to have a plan for Israel and the whole problem in regard to Palestine and he promised.”

But the plan "fell apart as it often does in American politics because the influence domestically is too great", he added.

Prescott's former boss, Tony Blair, has spent the week moaning that people are still "very abusive" of him for dragging Britain into America's Iraq adventure and he's given up trying to persuade them (i.e. everybody but himself and Dick Cheney) that it was the right decision.

Tony Blair, War Criminal

Then British PM Tony Blair was told months before the fact that invading Iraq would violate international law and the UN Charter. He got that warning, in writing, from his most senior legal adviser, Lord Goldsmith. How did Blair react? According to The Guardian, he took away Goldsmith's place at the cabinet table:

Lord Goldsmith, then attorney general, issued the warning in an uncompromising letter in July 2002, eight months before the invasion. It was becoming clear in government circles that Blair had had secret meetings with George Bush at which the US president was pressing Britain hard to join him in a war to change the regime in Baghdad.

The hitherto unpublished letter has been given to the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war. Goldsmith is due to be questioned about it early in the new year with other senior government lawyers who questioned the legality of an invasion at the time. Goldsmith warned Blair that "as things stand you obviously cannot do it [invade Iraq]", a source familiar with the dispute told the Guardian.

Increasingly concerned that Blair was ignoring his earlier advice that regime change was "not a legal basis for military action", on 29 July 2002 Goldsmith wrote to Blair on what the Mail on Sunday described as "a single side of A4 headed notepaper".

The typed letter was addressed by hand, "Dear Tony", and signed by hand, "Yours, Peter". In the letter, whose existence was confirmed by other sources, Goldsmith warned that the UN charter permitted "military intervention on the basis of self-defence", but it did not apply here because Britain was not under threat from Iraq; that the UN allowed "humanitarian intervention" in some circumstances, but such was not the case in Iraq; and that it would be very difficult to rely on earlier UN resolutions approving the use of force against Saddam.

Bush is all but immune from prosecution but Blair isn't. Shouldn't somebody be putting this man on trial for an illegal war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis?

Tony's Desperate Search for Relevance

Tony wants to be loved. He wants to be valued and respected and hoisted up on some sort of international pedestal.

When he finally got his marching papers from No. 10 Downing Street, Blair fashioned himself into some "super envoy" who would do what none had done before him, make peace between the Palestinians and Israel.

That hasn't exactly worked out, has it?

Then he was casting about for support to become the President of the European Union. A lot of major EU states are wary about Tony's breathtaking submission to the Washington dominatrix. No, sorry Tony, that looks like a non-starter.

Now Tony wants to save the planet. That's better than Palestine, right? Better even that the whole EU, right? Yes, the planet. There's something fitting to a man of Tony's experience and accomplishments. Just the ticket.

According to The Guardian, "Tony Blair.. ..plans to publish a report over the next year that could form the basis for what he described as a proper global deal to combat the biggest threat facing the world.

Explaining his thinking, Blair said: "Essentially what everyone has agreed is that it is a serious problem, it is man-made, we require a global deal that there should be a substantial cut in emissions at the heart of it, and this global deal should involve everyone, including in particular America on the one hand and China on the other, so it is the developed and developing world.

"The question is: what is the framework that gets everyone in the deal that has obligations all around, even if they are different obligations, and results therefore in a chance of reaching that substantial cut in emissions? So the task is both to specify finally what we mean by a substantial cut in emissions to get a clear global deal, but also to set out the framework.

"The problem is that you could work out what you are going do, and what the Europeans are going to do, but it seems far more difficult to see how you put the whole thing together, so that you have a true and proper global deal."

He said that the initiative "arose out of my experience in office. We got a long way from 2005 to the 2007 G8 summit in Germany, when people - including the Americans - finally agreed there had to be a new global deal, and everyone had to be part of it, and there had to be a substantial global cut in emissions.

"But we have not decided the target, or the means by which we are going to give effect to those common but differentiated obligations. There will be an insistence that everyone has to be part of the deal."

"I can give this some realistic political guidance, and I am not going to come up with something that I myself would have rejected when I was sitting round the table. There is no point producing something that is not politically doable. It may be politically challenging but that is a different thing."

Can Blair really make the difference he believes he can? I hope so but I think he left his credibility to drain away into the sands of Iraq. He sure hasn't made a difference in the Middle East and a lot of Europeans don't think much of George Bush's sock puppet. He's an enthusiastic little shit though, isn't he? Annoying, but enthusiastic. You have to give him that much.