Lib-Dem Iraq whataboutery is the pinnacle of hypocrisy

A lot of people seem to have incredibly short political memories so it's important to remind anyone about the Lib-Dems disgusting and deeply illiberal track record in government between 2010 and 2015 and all of the vile policies they supported.

Policies like austerity fanaticism, tripled tuition fees, turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground, Theresa May's racist "Hostile Environment", inflicting the worst period of collapsing wages since records began, disability persecution, devastating public service cuts, Secret Courts, police cuts, the gagging law, the Royal Mail privatisation scam, increased snooping powers, welfare vandalism, infrastructure-underinvestment, the sanctions regime, the 2012 NHS-privatisation-by-stealth act, workfare, prison and probation privatisation, unlawful Tribunal Fees, overseeing the lowest peace time house building rate since the 1920s, Bedroom Tax, and all the time lavishing massive tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich.

It's also worth reminding people that it was this vile combination of hard-right Liberal Democrat-endorsed policies that trashed our living standards and caused the furious public backlash that manifested in the 2016 Brexit vote.

It's absolutely stomach-turning to see smug unapologetic Lib-Dems now appealing to the politically gullible by posing as noble white knights to save us from Brexit without even apologising for the crucial role they played in creating Brexit in the first place.

But whenever you point stuff like this out, the Lib-Dem tribalists have one stock response, and it's every bit as cynical and dishonest as positioning themselves as the "stop Brexit party" after they wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place.
 

An example of Lib-Dem "Iraq whataboutry" from a thread
about the 130,000 people pushed into early graves
by Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism.

  This stock response is to go "but what about Iraq?"

They know that this is unbelievable disingenuous because Labour members have showed contrition over Iraq by electing one of the few Labour MPs who vehemently opposed the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Alongside the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was the only anti-austerity candidate in the 2015 leadership election, the fact he was a principled opponent of possibly the biggest error of judgement in Labour's entire history was a major factor in him becoming party leader.Huge numbers of people would never have been drawn back towards the Labour Party without contrition over the Iraq catastrophe, and Corbyn's move away from pathetically imitating economically illiterate Tory austerity fanaticism to actually oppose it.

The Lib-Dems on the other hand have shown absolutely no contrition whatever over their role in trashing our living standards.

In fact they're so lacking in remorse that they sent a massive "fuck you, we're not even remotely sorry" to the entire nation by picking Vince Cable as their leader.

Vince Cable willingly served as one of George Osborne's austerity hatchet men at the Treasury for the full five years, and he also personally orchestrated a massive fraud against the British people by flogging off the Royal Mail portfolio to city speculators at a tiny fraction of its true value, at a cost of literally hundreds of millions of pounds.

And then just look at their new leadership contenders Jo Swinson and Ed Davey.

Their despicable voting records between 2010 and 2015 show that they were actually more loyal to the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising Tory whip than the Tory leadership contenders Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove!

These weren't just "junior partners" in the austerity coalition. They were such enthusiastic participants that they voted through even more Tory malice than two of the highest profile Tory ministers in the austerity government!

They're still not even remotely sorry, and they're still saying "fuck you" to the British public by fielding these despicable austerity-enablers.

Yet with their other face they're harking back to the disastrous Blairite invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2013 despite knowing that the Bairites lost control of the Labour Party years ago, and it's now led by a guy who stood alongside their former leader Charles Kennedy when he took his brave and principled stance against war-mongering in Iraq.

But bringing up something that Labour have shown remorse over as blatant whataboutery to distract from something that demonstrably causes no pangs of conscience whatever to the Lib-Dems isn't even the worst of it.

The worst of it is that in 2011 the Lib-Dems, (including their current leader Vince Cable, and their two new leadership contenders Swinson and Davey) voted in favour of doing exactly the same thing to Libya as Blair did in Iraq.

The Lib-Dems know that they shat all over Charles Kennedy's legacy by voting to turn Libya into a vast lawless terrorism breeding ground just like the Blairites voted to do to Iraq eight years previously.

They know exactly what they did, and that the blowback included the appalling Manchester Arena bombing carried out by a terrorist from the Libyan chaos they created, but they're absolutely 100% unrepentant because they insist on picking the very people that did this as their current leader, and as his successor too.So these despicable hypocrites will use the catastrophe in Iraq to crudely deflect attention away from their complicity in the ruinous austerity coalition that laid the groundwork for Brexit, but to do this they have to completely ignore the fact that they voted in favour of their own chaos-causing, terrorism-fuelling, refugee-creating disaster in Libya.

They're actually using their historic opposition to the Iraq catastrophe under Charles Kennedy's leadership to deliberately distract attention away from the fact that they bulldozed his centre-left anti-war legacy into a pit and burnt it to ashes by propping up a disgustingly illiberal hard-right Tory government, and voting in favour of their war-mongering exploits in Libya.

Yes, the ongoing chaos and suffering in Iraq is an indelible stain on the history of the Labour Party, but you couldn't think of more hypocritical and unprincipled people to point this out than those who outright refused to learn the lessons from that imperialist war-mongering catastrophe, shat all over their principled former leaders' legacy, and voted to do exactly the same thing again to Libya in 2011.

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The imperialist attitudes of the British establishment class

You only need to take a brief look at the news to see how the imperialist mindset is still absolutely rife in Britain.

On the one hand we've got Brexiteers telling Ireland that they should quit the European Union and the Euro in order to ally with Brexit Britain, and on the other we've got Tory government ministers confidently asserting that they've got more right to choose who serves as President of Venezuela than the Venezuelan people!

Almost a century after the declaration of the Irish Free State you might have imagined that the British establishment might have figured out that the days of Tory toffs in London telling the Irish what to do are well and truly over, yet somehow this imperialist mindset is still rife.

The BBC Today presenter John Humphrys demonstrated this entitled imperialist mindset when he publicly suggested to an Irish government minister that her country could quit the EU and join the UK!

However this absurd imperialist attitude towards Ireland is far from exclusive to establishment elites in the media and political classes. Just a few months ago literally hundreds of thousands of pro-Brexit Brits signed a petition calling for the pound to be imposed as legal tender in Ireland whether the Irish want it or not.

It's hard to figure out what's more dim-witted, the idea of creating a de facto currency union between the Pound and the Euro, or the idea that the Pound can be forced on the Republic of Ireland by means of petitioning the UK government.

Screw the fact that 92% of Irish people oppose quitting the EU, and that an even higher percentage would oppose a return to London-rule, the establishment mentality seems to be that Brexit would go a lot more smoothly if the Irish would just shut up and do as they're told, and a lot of ordinary Brits share this mindset.

These imperialist attitudes when it comes to our closest neighbours are shocking enough, but when it comes to Venezuela it's not just insulting Brextremist fantasies of renewed British dominion, deliberate interference is actual government policy.

When the British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt feels empowered to recognise coup-plotters who appoint themselves President (despite not having even stood in the 2018 Presidential election at the time) this is a whole other level of arrogance.

What gives the UK more right to determine the President of a foreign nation than the people of that nation themselves?

There is obviously no legitimate answer to this question, but the imperialist mindset always churns out justifications based on how bad the foreign head of state is, and how removal by outsiders is what's best for the people of that country.

We've got two glaring examples of how this imperialist "regime change" mentality has led to unspeakable humanitarian disasters just in recent history.

Yes Saddam Hussain and Muammar Gaddafi were authoritarian rulers, but only a madman could attempt to argue that turning Iraq and Libya into vast lawless terrorism breeding grounds full of ISIS training camps and modern day slave markets was either good for the peoples of those countries, or good for the regions as a whole.

We've been sold this imperialist turd before, yet here we are again with liberals and self-proclaimed centrists clamouring to align themselves with the hard-right to promote the imperialist "regime change" agenda in Venezuela, and desperately smearing anyone who dares raise questions about the dangers of this imperialist mindset as being nothing more than biased stooges for the latest target regime.

If you dared question it in 2003 you were smeared as a Saddam Hussain supporter, and if you question it today you're accused of being a stooge for the corrupt and incompetent Maduro government in Venezuela.

The fact that the very same arguments are being wheeled out to support imperialist "regime change" in Venezuela as were used in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 proves that this imperialist mindset has never really faded away.

But imperialism is resurgent again now thanks to factors like Brexit, the mainstreaming of extreme-right jingoism, and the destabilisation of Venezuela in a brazen grab for corporate control of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but it never fully diminishes in the interim periods between the waves of ultranationalist jingoism.

More evidence that this imperialist mindset has never really died down amongst the British can be found in the poll findings that huge swathes of the British public consider the British empire to have been a positive thing!

Yes of course there are some periphery positive legacies like the rail networks that British imperialists left behind, but even then the main purpose of those rail networks was to enable the looting of the invaded countries' natural resources in order to enrich the British establishment class.

The warm glow of nostalgia over rail networks, colonial buildings, and the political remnants of Commonwealth should surely be outweighed by the centuries of political repression, resource theft, racism, slavery, starvation, and outright genocide.

But somehow no! When asked to evaluate the British empire, more Brits will award it an overall positive legacy than admit that the ethical problems might have somewhat outweighed the benefits.

So given the massive proportion of Brits who exalt and glorify the age of empire is it any wonder that our establishment class keep embarrassing Britain on the global stage by pushing the same old imperialist nonsense that Britain has somehow got some special right to inflict our political agendas on our closest neighbours and distant peoples alike?

When they impotently try to boss the Irish around, promote their post-Brexit trade plans as being "Empire 2.0", and push deadly imperialist "regime change" agendas in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela, they're actually giving a significant swathe of the British public exactly what they want.

If more of us stood up and protested against grotesque displays of ultranationalism and imperialism then perhaps the establishment class would learn to stop doing it, or at least tone it down a few levels.

But as it is now the next unbelievably arrogant insult aimed at our closest European neighbours is always just moments away, and the next Iraq-style humanitarian disaster is always looming just over the horizon.

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Jack Straw helped create the illiberal secret court rules he's now using himself

In 2013 Tories and their Liberal Democrat enablers colluded to launch an an astounding attack on the concept of fair and open justice by creating a system of secret courts to protect the political establishment from scrutiny.

Secret courts (or Closed Material Proceedings as they are officially known) create the bizarre Kafkaesque circumstances that people can have their fates decided in courtrooms that they are not allowed to enter, based on evidence they are not allowed to see.

Not only does Theresa May's secret court legislation prevent citizens from seeing the evidence that is being used to determine their fate, it prevents their lawyers from seeing it too.

In March 2013 it was clear that the Tories and Lib-Dems had enough votes to pass Theresa May's attack on the justice system, but the Green MP Caroline Lucas tried to make two key amendments to the legislation in order to try to at least prevent outright abuse of the system.

One amendment was to prevent the use of secret court proceedings in civil cases, and the other was to ensure that judges have a legal obligation to consider the "public interest in the fair and open administration of justice" before any secret court proceeding could be launched.

Both of these amendments were voted down by the Tories, their Lib-Dem sidekicks and four liberty-hating Labour MPs.

One of the four Labour MPs who voted with Theresa May and the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition to defeat these amendments was the former Labour Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Jack Straw is facing a civil lawsuit alleging his complicity in the abduction and torture of a Libyan dissident and his pregnant wife in 2004.

After the fall of the Gadaffi government in 2011 incriminating documents were found that showed how members of the British security services tipped off the Americans about the whereabouts of the anti-Gadaffi Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife.The couple were then were then kidnapped by US forces, transported out of Malaysia on a torture flight to Tripoli and then handed over to the Libyan government, where they were then tortured and subjected to interrogation with numerous questions supplied to them by MI6.

Not only is there strong evidence that the UK colluded with Gadaffi's secret police torture centres under Jack Straw's watch, he also deliberately and brazenly lied in the House of Commons 2005 when he claimed that Britain had never been involved in any US torture flight operations.

Now Jack Straw and the MI6 agent Mark Allen are being sued for damages by the torture victims for their role in this kidnap-torture plot, and the judge Andrew Popplewell (a privately educated establishment insider) has decided to invoke secret court rules to allow the defendants to present secret evidence that cannot be seen by the victims, their lawyers, members of the press, or the public.

Had Caroline Lucas' amendments to Theresa May's monstrous attack on the justice system been passed (with the help of Jack Straw's parliamentary votes) then Jack Straw wouldn't now be able to obstruct the fair and open administration of justice by using secret court proceedings, presumably to hide evidence of his complicity in the plot from public scrutiny.

After the decision to allow secret court proceedings in the case was announced, Belhadj said that "I went through a secret trial once before, in Gaddafi’s Libya. It took about a half hour, and I never saw any of the evidence against me. Later a guard came to my cell and tossed in a red jumpsuit – that was how I found out that the secret court had sentenced me to die ... Fatima and I have stuck with this case for all these years because we believe the British system, unlike Gaddafi’s, can deliver justice. But what kind of a trial will it be if we put in a mountain of evidence and government officials can simply refuse to answer us?"

It's impossible to deny that Belhadj has a point here, especially in light of the fact that one of the actual defendants in the case actually voted this shockingly illiberal system of judicial secrecy into existence in the first place.

You really couldn't get a clearer example of a self-interested politician making up laws for their own personal benefit than this, but that's how the British establishment operate, with the likes of Theresa May and Jack Straw colluding to scratch each others' backs.

And that's why Jeremy Corbyn is seen as such a huge threat by the Westminster establishment, because he's never shown any inclination to participate in this cross-party collusion to protect establishment elitists from the consequences of their own actions.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Jeremy Corbyn was right so many times

When we look back at the 1980s, when Jeremy Corbyn was a controversial firebrand left-wing MP, we find that he was on the right side of history while the political establishment was in the wrong.

Jeremy's progressive attitudes were considered outlandish back then, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see that he was right on so many issues, and has continued to be right on a range of fundamentally important issues up until the present (Iraq, Libya, Austerity dogma, pubic safety ...).

Back when young Conservatives were producing "Hang Mandela" merchandise and vociferously supporting Apartheid racial segregation in South Africa, Jeremy Corbyn was at the forefront of the campaign against it. It's now over two decades since the racist Apartheid regime was consigned to history; Mandela is remembered as one of the world's great peacemakers; and virtually nobody would claim that Corbyn was wrong to campaign against it.

From the 1980s onwards Jeremy Corbyn was a vocal gay rights advocate [source - Pink News]. At a time when people were still regularly being attacked, abused and harshly discriminated against for their sexual orientation, Jeremy Corbyn stood with them and demanded gay equality.

The passage of gay marriage legislation through parliament in 2013 under a Conservative government (despite fierce opposition from a large number of David Cameron's own MPs) was a huge step towards full gay equality in the UK, and a vindication for people like Jeremy who have consistently opposed homophobia. Who now, other than the bigoted fringe, would dare to argue that Corbyn was wrong to support gay rights in the 1980s, back when it was still deeply unfashionable?

Jeremy Corbyn's most controversial campaign in the 1980s was his effort to talk to politicians from either side of the conflict in Northern Ireland, both Irish republicans and Ulster loyalists, in order to try to get them to sit down and negotiate with each other towards a political solution.

The Tories and their attack dogs in the right-wing media have dug up this past "controversy" as a desperate effort to smear him into submission, but the evidence of history proves he was absolutely right. The Good Friday Agreement came about because the belligerents eventually did as Corbyn always encouraged them to, and negotiated a political solution.

Although power sharing in Northern Ireland has been a rocky road at times, who could possibly argue that things aren't better now that the bombings and killings have stopped?

In 2003 Jeremy Corbyn was one of the leaders of the campaign against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This time he had public opinion on his side, and he helped organise the biggest ever protests in the streets of London, but the Westminster establishment didn't listen, and Tony Blair, backed by the votes of Tory warmongers like Theresa May, triggered unspeakable chaos and suffering in Iraq that the world is still paying the appalling price of now, as Islamist terrorists have thrived and multiplied in the power vacuum that was created. Just watch the short extract from his speech at the Stop the War demo in London and tell me that his words weren't prophetic.

This bears repeating pic.twitter.com/e1FYUJik0e

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) June 4, 2017

In 2011 Jeremy Corbyn was one of just 13 MPs who voted against more warmongering in Libya because he feared the creation of another power vacuum, and another breeding ground for fanatical Islamist terrorists. Six years later and Libya is a terrorist infested nightmare, and a British born terrorist who was radicalised there just committed a grotesque atrocity in Manchester. Who could say that he was wrong to express his concerns about us creating yet another mess in Libya in light of recent events?

In May 2015, after five years of coalition chaos, Labour somehow contrived to lose a general election that they should have absolutely romped to victory in. They lost because they came up with the idiotic strategy of weakly imitating Tory austerity dogma instead of confronting it head on as the failing, economically illiterate and downright dangerous hard-right fanaticism that it was, and still is. 

In the wake of this pathetic defeat (in which the architect of austerity-lite Ed Balls famously lost his seat) Jeremy Corbyn was propelled to a landslide victory in the leadership election because the Labour membership understood far better than the cossetted Labour Party MPs that Britain needed actual opposition to the toxic Tory austerity dogma that was strangling the economy through lack of economic demand (unprecedented wage repression and severe government investment cutbacks in a post-crisis recession will go down in history as a textbook example of grotesque economic incompetence driven by delusional ideological zeal).

In November 2015 Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour leader, strongly opposed the ideological Tory cuts to the police service being enforced by Theresa May, saying that "By pressing ahead with these cuts the Government is failing in its most basic duty – to protect our citizens. The planned cuts pose a direct threat to the security of our own people". Jeremy Corbyn could clearly see that the Tories were putting their zealous Austerity fanaticism above public safety, and he spoke out, but yet again the political establishment wouldn't listen. They were far too ideologically blinded by their fanatical austerity dogma to care.

The crossroad

Now we stand at a crossroads in British history.

We can either stand behind the man who was consistently on the right side of history (at times earning himself the visceral hatred of his political opponents that has burned away for decades).

Or we can stand behind a woman who voted for the Iraq invasion catastrophe in 2003, and demonstrated that she had utterly failed to learn her lesson from it by voting to create another terrorist breeding power vacuum in Libya in 2011. A woman who was a key figure in David Cameron's economically ruinous austerity government, and who ignored Jeremy Corbyn, and all of the expert advice, to impose her savage ideologically driven cuts on the police force and the UK border agency.

Of course the mainstream media are pushing you with all of their might to back the woman who failed to learn the lesson of Iraq, and who let her fixation with austerity dogma overrule her primary duty to protect public safety.

Of course the establishment want to slam the door on Jeremy Corbyn. They want you to reject him because he's been a constant thorn in their sides.

Theresa May is their puppet and Corbyn is their nemesis.

So it's up to you. Will you admit that Corbyn has been right so many times when Theresa May and the Tories were so wrong, or are you actually going to go out and vote for more short-sighted warmongering imperialism, more economically ruinous austerity dogma, and more ideologically driven cuts to public safety?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

13 questions mainstream media should be asking about Salman Abedi

The more we find out about the Manchester Arena terrorist, the worse it looks for the UK government and secret services.

One of the first revelations about the British-born terrorist Salman Abedi was that he had been banned from a mosque for expressing pro-ISIS views, and repeatedly reported to authorities for by other members of the Manchester Muslim community too.

So much for the extreme-right mantra that "Muslims should do more to root out terrorists"!

The Muslim community of Manchester did their civic duty by repeatedly reporting Abedi to the authorities, but the authorities apparently did nothing to actually stop him.

Another early revelation was that he committed the atrocity at Manchester Arena only days after arriving back from the lawless terrorist breeding ground in Libya, and also that he was also known to have travelled to Syria to associate with Islamist fanatics.

People soon started asking the obvious question of how he managed to travel between Manchester and the terrorist hotspots of Libya and Syria unhindered by the UK security services, and if he was able to travel freely between the UK and terroist hotspots, how many others have also been slipping in and out of the UK to train as terrorists in Libya and Syria?

The website Middle East Eye soon found several UK based Libyan fighters who detailed how they had actually been encouraged by the UK secret services to go and fight in Libya. Several of them had had their passports revoked for suspected extremism, but had them handed back when the Islamist uprising against Gadaffi began to kick off.

The next damning revelation was that the UK secret services were tipped off in January 2017 by the Americans that Abedi was actively planning an act of terrorism. Apparently the UK security services monitored him for a while before dropping the investigation.

Their excuse for dropping the investigation into a known extremist it is absolutely astounding. Their claim is that they were too busy juggling other terrorist investigations!

Of course keeping track of suspected terrorists is a difficult job. Nobody is saying it's easy. But if the Muslim community of Manchester repeatedly tipped them off that the guy is a dangerous fanatic; and the Americans tipped them off that he's actively planning a terrorist atrocity; how is it that the investigation was dropped? And how is it that he managed to pass through the UK border without at least being stopped?

13 questions

Here are a some important questions that any mainstream media journalist who is not a total Tory stooge should be asking Theresa May, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and the Tory government:

1. Was the Home Office made aware of the US tip off that Salman Abedi was actively plotting a terrorist attack in the UK?

2. Why was the investigation into Salman Abedi dropped within months of the US tip off?

3. Who signed off on the investigation being dropped?

4. What was the justification for the investigation being dropped so soon after such a serious tip off? 

5. Have any other investigations been dropped after tip offs from the Americans that they're actively planning a terrorist attack (if so how many)?

6. How did someone who was so recently under investigation as a terrorism suspect allowed to pass through a UK airport on the way back from Libya?

7. The French Interior Ministry says that they have evidence that Abedi was also in Syria. What evidence does the UK have about his involvement with Islamist extremists in Syria, and was this information considered when the decision was taken to drop the investigation?

8. Was Salman Abedi himself given dispensation by the UK secret services to travel to Libya to fight in the civil war there?

9. How many British-Libyans in total were given dispensation by the UK secret services to fight in the Libyan civil war (or is the number unknown)?

10. Was the then Home Secretary Theresa May aware of this policy of giving British-Libyan extremists dispensation to travel to Libya to fight in the war, or was it going on behind her back?

11. How many of these British-Libyan fighters have now returned to the UK (or is the number unknown)?

12. What action was taken (if any) when Abedi was reported to the police counter-terrorism hotline five years ago, and again one year ago?

13. What action was taken (if any) when Abedi was reported as an extremist by the Didsbury mosque two years ago?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Check out this brilliant Twitter thread

This is a brilliant Twitter thread from a middle East expert called David Wearing. I'm reproducing it here for the benefit of people who don't do Twitter.

Follow him on Twitter here if you do: David Wearing

Remember what you've read here, and remember to follow David Wearing if you found what he said interesting.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Would Syria be better under ISIS rule?

The situation in Syria is appalling beyond words. The scale of human suffering has been absolutely enormous for years and in December 2016 the battle for Aleppo has caused even more death, destruction and misery.

A common human response to human suffering is to look for someone to blame, but in Syria the situation is too complicated to fit simplistic "good vs evil" narratives about how Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government are the bad guys, and the insurgents as the good guys.

An awful lot of media commentators are using the suffering in Aleppo to push "good vs evil" narratives as a concerted propaganda drive. The majority of the Western media are focusing on criticising the Syrian government, the Russians and the Iranians. While the Russian media focus on criticising the Islamist terrorists, their Western and middle eastern backers and the opportunistic involvement of Turkey.

Perhaps the best way to look at the ongoing tragedy in Syria is to consider any armed participants as the "baddies" no matter which side they're on, and the poor unarmed civilians still trapped in the middle of the violence as the only "goodies".

Anyhow, there are always a few cold-hearted cynics who can look at a vast human tragedy like Aleppo solely as a convenient excuse to push their own warped political agendas. To this kind of person all of the appalling human suffering is easily worthwhile because it gives them a wonderful opportunity to settle old political scores and rewrite history the way they would have liked it to have been.

In 2013 David Cameron became the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782 when Westminster MPs (including a large number of Tory party rebels) derailed his ill-conceived rush to war.

This humiliating historical defeat still rankles with a lot of Tories of the neo-conservative persuasion, and these sickening opportunists are now crawling out of the woodwork to use the terrible suffering in Aleppo to try to redefine David Cameron's failed rush to war as some kind of brilliant "missed opportunity" to secure peace.

The problem with this kind of absurd historical revisionism (as exemplified in this appalling article) is obvious to anyone with even the remotest understanding of the region and its recent history.

In 2013 David Cameron was pushing the same interventionist ideology that created the vast humanitarian disaster in Iraq from 2003 onward, and another huge humanitarian disaster in Libya from 2011 onward. The lesson that should have been learned from both of those catastrophes is that the removal of an authoritarian dictator may be a noble intention in itself, but the creation of political power vacuums is a very dangerous game to play and can make bad situations very much worse.

The power vacuum in Iraq resulted in years of dangerous instability and sectarian violence, eventually culminating in the rise of ISIS. And the power vacuum in Libya has empowered and emboldened a load of Islamist extremists there too. Only a fool could have thought that weakening the Assad regime when the region was being flooded by Saudi-backed Jihadists would be a good move from a humanitarian perspective.

One of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails dated August 17th 2014 admitted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar "are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region".

It was always beyond obvious that ISIS was being bankrolled by our so-called allies in the region (and now we have the evidence to prove that the American have known it perfectly well for several years). It's also obvious from Western interventionist disasters in Iraq and Libya that terrorist groups like ISIS thrive in political power vacuums.

In light of this information it's obvious that destabilising and removing the Assad government would have ended up handing control of Syria to Islamist fanatics. This kind of catastrophic outcome was so obvious even in 2013 that Westminster MPs saw the stupidity of Cameron's rush to war and rightly voted it down.

Now the people who supported David Cameron's failed neo-con warmongering efforts back in 2013 are brazenly trying to rewrite history. They want people to believe that Cameron's rush to war wasn't a dangerous folly that was rightly stopped in its tracks, but actually the most noble of endeavours.

These opportunists are using the suffering in Aleppo as if it constitutes evidence that David Cameron was right to want to create a power vacuum in Syria for ISIS to occupy.

In making this argument these people are demonstrating a fundamental unwillingness to ask themselves how much worse the situation might have become if ISIS had taken advantage of the power vacuum to take control of the whole of Syria.

Maybe these people crying over the failure of David Cameron's rush to war really do imagine that the world would somehow be better if the Western powers had actively helped ISIS to take over Syria? Perhaps these people actually think that a bunch of barbaric Islamist fanatics bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar would somehow make better rulers of Syria than the (admittedly awful) Assad regime?

When faced with scenes of appalling suffering it's natural for people to think "what could have been done to avert this tragedy?" but trying to pin blame on the level-headed opponents of David Cameron's failed rush to war in 2013 is utterly ludicrous. Things would almost certainly have ended up even worse in Syria had David Cameron got his way.

If people are looking for somewhere to point the finger of blame, then a much more logical place to start is looking at the unyielding Western support for the autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have fuelled and escalated the conflict in Syria.Even the Tory Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has admitted that the Saudis are malign influence in the middle east, but still this unrelenting Tory support for Saudi Arabia remains so unbreakable that Theresa May humiliated Britain by prostrating herself in front of them right in the middle of the siege of Aleppo.

If we're going to wring our hands about what could have been done to avoid the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, firstly we should be thankful that David Cameron was denied the opportunity to make the Syrian situation very much worse, and then ask the question of why the UK government has continued its unbreakable support for Saudi Arabia and Qatar despite their bankrolling of Jihadi terrorist groups in Syria.

If David Cameron,Theresa May or the Tories actually gave a damn about the suffering in Syria, they could have de-escalated the conflict by putting diplomatic pressure on Saudi Arabia and Qatar to stop their involvement. But they didn't do this because British arms companies are making fortunes selling weapons to these autocratic Islamist states and the Tories didn't want to upset the apple cart by pissing-off their head-chopping Islamist customers.

We all know that profit comes before people in the Tory ideology, and we should all be able to see the cynical right-wing crocodile tears over Aleppo for what they are.

If these opportunists really gave a damn about human suffering they would have done everything in their power to scale-down the Saudi and Qatari backing for the Jihadi militias that have been destabilising the country (and the entire region), thus ensuring the fall of Aleppo could never have become such a bloody disaster in the first place.

If we want to ask questions about Aleppo, perhaps some of the most important ones are these:

• Why, in the middle of the siege of Aleppo, did Theresa May humiliate Britain by prostrating herself in front of the Islamist autocracies that have actually been funding the Jihadis in Syria? 

• Why the undying Tory support for the brutal autocratic Islamist regimes that have caused such chaos and misery by flooding Syria with weapons and Jihadi fighters?

• Are British arms contracts with countries like Saudi Arabia so important that the Tories and the establishment media are willing to turn a total blind-eye to their involvement in Syria?

• Why are so many right-wingers so intent on rewriting history to exonerate David Cameron for the failure of his ill-conceived rush to war when the squalid relationship between the UK and Islamist regimes like Saudi Arabia is very much more relevant to what has been going on in Aleppo?

• If the right-wing warmongers had got their way in 2013 and David Cameron had intervened to destabilise the Assad regime and help ISIS take over the country, would Syria now be a better place?

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