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If Only We Had Sonic Screwdrivers
Posted by Matthew Barrett (@matthewrbarrett)
Saturday, 9th January 2010
While reading through my fellow House of Twits frontbench blogs, I noticed Liberal Democrat frontbencher, Caron Lindsay wrote:
"Clearly, the Labour Party is not without some issues right now and I do get frustrated. They need to sort some stuff out. I don't think the Time Lord would have been in favour of the Iraq War, for starters."
Of course, if the Time Lord had had anything to do with Iraq, presumably he would have simply sonic screwdriver-ed the Ba'ath Party leadership, and Saddam's fascist regime, not to mention his footsoldiers of terror.
Sadly, the Time Lord didn't have anything to do with Iraq, and so the hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent people who were "impure Iraqis" or political opponents of Saddam perished. The New York Times reported in 2007:
"...he murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants - friends on friends, circles within circles - making an entire population complicit in his rule."
That the Liberal Democrats opposed Britain and America's arrogance in standing up for liberty is historically ridiculous. Gladstone, who ought to be the idol of any Liberal Democrat, of all people, would have supported the invasion of Iraq. It was Gladstone who attacked Disraeli for his indifference to the Turkish oppression of Bulgarians.
Then again, perhaps I am being naive. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats, being a party of the left, is following the farcical logic that imperialist oppressors = bad, but anti-Westerner oppressors = acceptable.
