Apology of Tony Blair

Having watched Blair's inteview to Fareed Zakaria, I didn't believe my eyes (well, rather ears) first. Tony Blair did publically admit and say apologies they had been misinformed by their intelligence about Iraq, and they had had bad plans about Iraq's future after Saddam was thrown away.

(As soon as the CNN uploads the full video, I'll replace this short extract.)

Some of his words as written by the Daily Mail:

... I apologise for the fact that the intelligence I received was wrong.

Because even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people against others, the programme in the form we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought. So I can apologise for that.

I can also apologise, by the way, for some of the mistakes in planning and certainly our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you had removed the regime.

Of course you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.

As far as I see it, the British ex-PM says, simply speaking, "I was a stupid bloody moron, and all the shit of today is firmly based upon those bricks I with my boss from the White House shitted out in 2003."

Who Is to Get out of Ukraine?

On Saterday Mr. Joe Biden (for those who do not care, he's vice-president of the USA). Even the CNN noted that speaking at the Munich Security Conference he "served up some blunt talk".

The American diplomacy looks unbound.

Though the AP does not show his 'blunt talk', and neither does ABC, there are some sources that are not so peculiar and let people hear Biden's unmanipulated words. Listen very attentively from 0:40.

President Putin has to make a simple, stark choice. Get out of Ukraine, or face continued isolation and growing economic costs at home.

What? Who are you, Mr. Biden, to fucking tell Russia or Putin what to do?

They Say - 8 (Barack Obama)

On January 27 Barack Obama, the President of the USA, gave a remarkable interview to CNN's Fareed Zakaria, aired on February 1. One part of this interview was devoted to Russia, Putin and the Ukrainian crisis.



Here I go to draw your attention to some points that make the 'Russian part' of the interview that remarkable in my eyes (full transcript you can find here).

OBAMA: ... And since Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine — not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protests in the Maidan and Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine — since that time, this improvisation that he's been doing has getting — has gotten him deeper and deeper into a situation that is a violation of international law, that violates the integrity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, has isolated Russia diplomatically, has made Europe wary of doing business with Russia, has allowed the imposition of sanctions that are crippling Russia's economy at a time when their oil revenues are dropping. There's no formula in which this ends up being good for Russia.
The annexation of Crimea is a cost, not a benefit, to Russia. The days in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great nation status is over. The power of countries today is measured by your knowledge, your skills, your ability to export goods, to invent new products and new services, your influence, and…