But acknowledging he could have “been a little bit more knowledgeable” about I/P is akin to saying he knew as much about the area as George Bush did.

Is this your idea of logical thought?

Leading is about asking questions and making decisions not pretending that you know everything there is to know

I think that’s a smidgin churlish, Sunny. I’d rather be governed by someone who admits he does not know it all than someone (indeed like Bush) who thinks he knows everything and actually knows sweet FA.

To paraphrase a bon mot from Northern Ireland: if you think you understand the Palestinian/Israeli situation then you don’t really understand it.

Meh. It could easily also indicate he didn’t know what the hell was going in the region before he decided to join in the invasion or Iraq..

good to see that despite admitting he didn’t know all that much about Israel/Palestine, he was still a member of Labour Friends of Israel, eh.

He’s practising his defence for his trial at The Hague.

Saying “I could have been a little bit more knowledgable” is not the same as saying “I didn’t know much”.

I agree with Sli and Halloway. He’s being honest by saying he doesn’t know everything. Having visited Israel and the West Bank myself, met with numerous informed indivdiuals on both sides whilst out there, and studied international relations at University, the only thing I’m 110% sure about is that its an incredibly complicated situation which many people are too quick to jump to conclusions about.

I salute Blair for his honest!

“he was still a member of Labour Friends of Israel, eh.”

Precisely, he didn’t really have to know anything.

@ Halloway

I’d rather be governed by someone who admits he does not know it all than someone (indeed like Bush) who thinks he knows everything and actually knows sweet FA.

Shame then, that when Blair was in power he did give the impression that he did know it all (thanks to his faith, and a higher power, presumably), and he went along with the utterly misguided policies of fuckwit Bush, steered by others, and none of them actually had a fucking clue.

The solution is in having the best professional advice and guidance available to you in order to make the right decisions. Blair, and especially Brown, do not listen or act on sound advice, but believe in their leadership abilities, which the rest of us do not see or believe.
Since being a special peace emissary to the Middle East Blair has achieved absolutely nothing, and never will, since his elevation to this post was unbelievably incompetent. It took him over 18 months to visit Gaza, and was understandably shocked by it. Still nothing done since then.
Merkel had his number right from the start.

He knows alot about it now with all the holidays he goes on humping people int he middle east.

Boibby Are you a spammer?

#5: He’s practising his defence for his trial at The Hague.
C’mon. Speaking at the G8 summit in Evian in June 2003, Tony Blair said he stood ’100%’ by the evidence shown to the public about Iraq’s alleged weapons programmes.

“‘Frankly, the idea that we doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about a 45-minute capability for delivering weapons of mass destruction is completely and totally false,’ he said.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2955036.stm

So there.

What’s more, in a keynote speech in Chicago on 24 April 1999, Tony Blair said:

“If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar.”
From: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp

If readers are in need of a little refresher about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction which led to that invasion on 20 March 2003, the government’s dossier, published on 24 September 2002, can be found here:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2002/09/24/dossier.pdf

Btw according to this source placed to know:

“(CNN) — The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House [in January 2001], former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told CBS News.’”
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/

The bbc, Guardian and this government!
Who can believe any one of these 3 paragons of misinformation?
Information by ommission is their dictum.

Try this secret memo of 23 July 2002, which circulated among senior ministers and civil servants about the forthcoming war with Iraq and which somehow got leaked and published in the Sunday Times – a Murdoch newspaper – just before the 2005 election:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece

Quote:

“C [that's the head of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The final sentence is absolutely damning: “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”

What kind of person takes pictures of things being blown up? Madness?

So Grinning Tony took steps which led the deaths of thousands or tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and NOW confesses that his knowledge of the MidEast is about as good as that of a none-too-bright fourth former in Sedgefield.

And this piece of sh-t was fawned over by the desperate-for-poer Labourites and the f-ckwits of the media for being better-looking and glibber than Prescott or Beckett.

Roy Jenkins, at one time Tony Blair’s mentor in politics, later concluded that he had a “second class mind”:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2629489.stm

Try the assessment of Blair by Simon Jenkins – no relation of Roy:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21966258-7583,00.html

I wonder if he knows anything about the Middle East outside Israel/Palestine at all? This is the same guy that wasn’t aware of the Britain’s involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup to overthrow Mohammed Mossedeq.