Airstrip One

Oi, Nutter

Michael Meacher hasn't seen a cause that he has wished to curse. This is the chap who got on to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party on a hard left ticket and provided crucial casting vote after crucial casting vote for Neil Kinnock's rightward lurch. It is the man who as environment secretary opined that people should not be allowed to own a second home, while he owned three. The man sued a newspaper who said he was middle class, and lost.

If you want any evidence for the fact that Labour is desperately short of real political talent, this man is it. So it is no surprise that he's launched a suicide attack on the antiwar movement.

His piece in the Guardian argues that the war on terror is a pretext for a hundred and other things. So far, so good. After all only the tin foil hat brigade and neoconservatives, but it doesn't do to repeat oneself, seriously contend that Saddam was a serious player in Islamic terrorism. However he then claims that the Administration let the terrorists bomb the World Trade Center (and the Pentagon) to give them a pretext for war.

Now that's plain crazy. I can imagine a foreign government doing this to someone else's citizens, but domestic governments do tend to be different. Does anyone seriously contend that the CIA and the State Department, both stuffed full with non-neocons from the Henry Kissinger mould (like George Bush Snr, the former head of the CIA) would not notice this and do something to stop it? Are a bunch of columnists and second rate policy analysts really that powerful?

And why did the Alcoholic in Chief have to fly around the fruited plane like the draft dodging rich jerk that he is? Don't you think that they may have got him to do reading lessons close to, well you know, a bunker or something? It didn't sound like they were very prepared.

Which brings us on to Afghanistan. What's that got to do with oil? Oh, the pipeline. Like it's better for a pipeline if you take away a centralised government that may drive a hard bargain but at least controls its territory and put it in the hands of fifty seven variety of mountain dwelling Aryan moon worshipping nutball chiefs?

Yes the neocons did do far better than their numbers would suggest because they had a plan before 9-11. So did the isolationists - and one that was both easier to understand and more in tune with American political traditions. But no-one, not even the barking moonbats on National Review, accuse Pat Buchanan or Justin Raimondo of being behind the two towers.

There are questions, and anything that involves twenty men plotting in secret is by definition going to involve conspiracies - but Meacher just gives us conspiracists a bad name.