Mark sounds a bit ticked off with Mr Blair.
If this is an open ping list for Mark Steyn, I want on it! The guy's a genius (Steyn, not Blair).
For all the homers this guy hits, you'd think he might be a Colorado Rocky.
Nope, Steyn's homers are EARNED.
Thanks for the ping, Pokey!
That's the salient point. Iran committed an Act of War and the Brits gave them a stern talking to - almost.
And compared to Spain, the Brits are pretty tough.
<< This past week these pages have been filled with daily meditations on the British embrace of loserdom ..... [But] it seems to me this morbid obsession with the national loser fetish obscured the really big British defeat - to Iran, in the Shatt al-Arab water polo. [Eight Brits] ... intercepted in Iraqi waters, forcibly escorted to Iranian waters, arrested, paraded on TV blindfold, obliged to confess wrongs and recite apologies ....
Mullahs 8, HMG nil ....
.... if you'd just arrived from Planet Zongo and were plunked down at a joint Blair/Bush press conference on Iraq or Afghanistan or most of the rest of the world, you'd be forgiven for coming away with the impression that ['Blare'] is doing 90 per cent of the heavy lifting and [United States of America's] President [And Armed-Forces Commander-In-Chief, George Walker Bush] is just there for emergency back-up ....
Blair often [Is] a better salesman for American policy than [Our] President. But in the Shatt al-Arab incident for once he was on his own, and [Once-great] Britain's Number One seed was unable to return a single volley. >>
As, on its own, once-great Britain hasn't for more than one hundred years.
And, for at least a hundred years before that even then only against Gunga Din and its various other assorted colonial Fuzzy-Wuzzies, serfs, slaves and sychophantic subjects.
Seems to me Blair -- including, lately, to those hostile third-world colonialists and Brussells-based Neo-Soviets now safely-established within its own once-sovereign shores --is doing a very fine job indeed of holding tightly to once-great Britain's already long-established solo tradition of surrendering at every opportunity and to every comer -- and settling back 'till America's Blood and Treasure bails it out again.
[Just ask any grey-haired Singaporean -- any Israeli and/or any one of the enslaved millions of Arabia's one-time British "trust territories" and "protectorates" -- any formery East-African Asian -- any Rhodesia/zimbabwean -- or any of Once-FRee-British Hong Kong's recently-cravenly-surrendered-and-enslaved seven and a half million Once-FRee-British-Hong-Kong citizens!]
Great and perceptive piece, Mr Steyn.
Thanks for the ping, Pokes.
BUMPping
bttt
Steyn's on target as usual.
! bump pmub !