Postcard from London: Conspiracy Theories and Tony Blair

After the initial dozen emails from acquaintances and family who wanted tomake sure that I was still alive, I got a string of notes from friends whowanted to know if I thought the bombs were real or just a government hoax.

I doubt that there¹s a need to look for the same governmental conspiraciesin Britain. Londoners my age and older still vividly remember the IRA bombings, so much worse, so much closer to home, lasting so much longer.

I don¹t doubt that it¹s interesting to speculate about when a terror strike might be useful a government and when not. But so long as we¹reentertaining conspiracy theories, we need to ask, when is a terror strike useful to business and when not? American corporations may well profit from installing port security projects across the world and paving the roads of Iraq. London consultancies and financiers (more profitable than theirversions in New York) don¹t want to leave London with the rest of the elite in a panic.

Michael Moore¹s thesis (the most colorful and widespread of conspiracy theories) was that Bush steered the war on terror in order to distract the American people from political trouble at home by taking away civil liberties, with the added benefit of enriching corporations to which the Bushes had a personal tie. From the beginningit¹s been easy here to imagine Blair acting alongside Bush to insure his personal political success -- which works only for lack of a political rivalstrong enough to take away power.

Blair *is* the top Labour politician, and Labour is ascendant here -- its views towards the European Union and busines=being clearer and more pertinent to contemporary feeling than the Tories. So who knows, maybe I¹m just surrounded by Blair-haters, but I think Britain¹s involvement in our war has been a sad, old-fashionedbalance-of-power game, and understood as such, rather than anything asdriven by propaganda and faux-idealism as ours.

Link: "Blair Is Unfit to Be Prime Minister" By John Pilger, The New Statesman, UK, 25 July 2005. The British people, who do not take the bombings seriously, do take Iraq quite seriously.