Add Me to the List, Mr. Blair

The terrorists are winning. Gradually but perceptibly, the USA and the United Kingdom (UK) are shedding their liberal democratic veneer, axing their traditions, reinterpreting their constitution (USA) and case law (UK) and, thus, becoming police states.

Both the US Patriot Act, recently extended by Congress and Tony Blair's newly acquired powers to exclude and deport not only active terrorists but also people who disagree with his foreign policy suspend long-standing and hard-won human and civil rights. The right to privacy has been all but eradicated in both countries.

Blair and Bush exercise self-defense through moral suicide. Visitors to the UK as well as residents and naturalized Britons must adhere to Britain's set of values and observe them, thunders the former. Presumably, it is the same set of values that Blair is so bent on bending and ignoring. And as for Bush - remember Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib.

The UK will maintain a registry of undesirables. Please add me to the list, Mr. Blair. I believe that the terrorist attacks in London were a desperate and criminal response to your own war crimes throughout the world and, lately, on a monstrous scale, in Iraq. Terrorism is deplorable and red in tooth and claw. It should be fought with determination and imagination - not with oppression and slaughters of the innocent.

Your mother should have taught you that hanging around bad company invariably ends badly. Evidently, she failed in this particular respect. You cast your obsequious lot with a narcissistic, thuggish, gun-toting, trigger-happy, bible-thumping, and dangerously violent nation, the United States of America. Violence breeds counter-violence and profound contempt. You found yourself on the receiving end of both in ample doses in July 2005. The taste of one's medicine is always bitter.

In a string of uninterrupted and unpunished war crimes, the UK and the USA (and Israel and France) taught Muslim militants that civilians are potential warriors and merit no special treatment or protection. International law has become the self-interested and biased "justice" of the victors, a policy tool, a discriminatory travesty, worthy only of condemnation.

From Dresden to Hiroshima, through Vietnam and Yugoslavia, and down to Palestine and Iraq, the hectoring and hypocritical West itself made no distinction between peaceful population and combatants. Lately, it took to invading or threatening to invade Muslim territories, occupying holy places, and massacring tens of thousands of innocents in the process. More than 100,000 civilians died in Iraq since the American-British led "liberation".

Yet, as New-York and Madrid and London can attest, ignoring one's own rules of engagement in warfare is a recipe for recurrent disaster. By courting the USA, Blair is courting a pernicious transformation in the nature of his people and country that generations of future patriots and compatriots are bound to mourn.