Robin Cook (1946 - 2005)

"Those that advocated the war on the basis that Iraq would be a blow against terrorism have committed an immense blunder for which we will be paying the price for a long time to come.”- Robin Cook

That’s the last shred of intelligent dissent from the Labour Party gone then.

And no, Tam Dalyell doesn’t count.

The irony is that Cook, who everybody has lauded for his ‘forensic’ attack on John Major’s faltering corrupt government with the Arms to Iraq scandal was then stopped by Blair and New Labour plc for trying to implement an ‘ethical foreign policy.’ The clash between big business who wanted to flog arms around the world and Cook’s attempt at injecting a little integrity was too much. Something had to give.

Guess what won-out?

Remember this the next time you listen to some New Labour hypocrite queuing up to preach about what a great man he was. It’s not that he was that brilliant - he just stood out because New Labour is full of cretinous functionaries. People say he was ‘serious-minded’, somehow a personality disorder amongst the guffawing halfwits who inhabit the House of Commons.

Truly a giant amongst pygmies.

As soon as your dead you're everyones hero. The fact is that Cook was hung out to by his Labour colleagues as soon as he departed from the party line. Here are some extracts from his resignation speech:

“The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not Nato, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.

Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition...
None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will 'shock and awe' makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands.

“We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.”

“Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?”