Pretty Straight Guys

Apparently, the head of an authoritarian, corrupt, torturing regime which happens to be useful to us is no longer a sonofabitch, but our sonofabitch. Instead, they are "immensely courageous and a force for good". I suppose it's typical of Blair's massive solipsism that he cannot differentiate between what is on the most charitable reading, the very unfortunately necessary evil of Hosni Mubarak, and the individuals willing to sacrifice everything in order to bring an injustice to light you would typically describe as 'immensely courageous'. It's not as if ordering your security services to shoot unarmed protestors against your autocratic rule displays the same sort of deep commitment to human dignity that, say, protesting against that regime, knowing the risks you're running, does. Everyone has a tendency to claim that what they want is in fact what's morally required, but in Blair it seems to have been elevated to a principle of statecraft.