British politicians blast Bush and Blair’s War on Terror

Two senior British officials have recently created a sensation by contradicting the party line on the "war on terror."

Lord West, the security minister of Britain’s Labor government (equivalent to the US Homeland Security chief), dropped a bombshell by declaring that his nation’s military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan had actually fueled global radicalism against Britain and the US, as well as domestic "terrorism" in the United Kingdom.

This comes soon after Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, urged an end to the use of the term "war on terror," which he called deceptive and misleading.

Many Britons are calling for war crimes trials against their former leaders and are angered by plans to send more British troops to Afghanistan.

Obama’s dismaying eagerness to expand the war demonstrates political inexperience and a faulty grasp of events in Afghanistan. The bill for an intensified war will likely reach $4 billion monthly by midyear at a time when the United States is bankrupt and running on borrowed money from China and Japan.

The Afghan War will have to be ended by a political settlement that includes the Taliban-led nationalist alliance that represents over half of Afghanistan’s population, the Pashtun people. There is simply no purely military solution to this grinding conflict – as even the Secretary General of NATO admits.

[Excerpt of an article by Eric Margolis, Sun National Media Canada]