Price of Blair's tawdry deal in the desert

[andypandy]

3. two way street...

one of the things that most disappoints me in political discourse is the idea that every start point is a zero sum game.

yes, Tony's deal in the desert meant that some people we'd never heard of, and don't care about, ended up in a dungeon under the tender mercies of a viciously nasty peice of work like Gaddafi - but it also meant that Gaddafi destroyed his Chemical weapons capability, stopped work on a (very) infant nuclear programme, opened his intelligence files on some equally unpleasent individuals who meant us as much harm as they meant him, and he confirmed exactly what ordnance he'd given to PIRA, allowing us to be more certain about PIRA decommissioning - and therefore allowing the various unionist parties to enter into deals they might not otherwise have done.

it probably, in the atmosphere of the time, was a deal that stopped a war.

yes, it was tawdry, but lets not pretend we didn't get somethng out of it - and for most of us, something far more important than the desire to wash our hands...