Iraq War Inquiry Watch: Chilcot let war crims edit stuff out

[fish5133]

Flash Gordo Saviour of the universe announces iraq war enquiry to be held behind close doors.

http://www.orange.co.uk/news/topstories/29910.htm?linkfrom=hp4&link=ti cker_pos_1_link_1&article=index

[TonyGosling]

.....Opponents said his announcement revealed the hollowness of his repeated pledges to open up the political system and rebuild trust in democracy.
The Prime Minister told MPs the inquiry would be fully independent and unprecedented in its scope, ranging over the eight years from summer 2001. He insisted that holding hearings behind closed doors would allow witnesses to be as 'full and candid as possible'.
Mr Brown, who as Chancellor supported and financed the 2003 conflict, said: 'No British documents and no British witness will be beyond the scope of the inquiry.'........

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1193167/Transparency-What-joke -Iraq-war-inquiry-sit-secret-power-apportion-blame--oh-yes-wont-report -election.html

[TonyGosling]

Generals go to war over Iraq inquiry
Secret investigation will be seen as cover-up, warn Army and intelligence chiefs
By Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent and Michael Savage
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Senior military and intelligence officers have condemned Gordon Brown's decision to hold the Iraq war inquiry in secret, warning that it looks like a cover-up.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/generals-go-to-war-over -iraq-inquiry-1706908.html

Air Marshal Sir John Walker, the former head of Defence Intelligence, said: "There is only one reason that the inquiry is being heard in private and that is to protect past and present members of this Government. There are 179 reasons why the military want the truth to be out on what happened over Iraq."

[TonyGosling]

Brown has been persuaded#
nice one
a 'u-turn' nobody willcriticise him for - except the dark forces

Brown: Iraq inquiry can be in public
Gordon Brown caved in to huge pressure today as he signalled that the Iraq war inquiry could be partially held in public.
In what critics immediately dubbed a U-turn, the Prime Minister said he had no objection to families of killed servicemen giving their evidence openly.
Mr Brown wrote to inquiry chief Sir John Chilcot to say witnesses could give evidence on oath - a key demand of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
The premier advised Sir John to "hold an open session" to explain the scope of his probe..............
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23708995-details/Brown: +Iraq+inquiry+can+be+in+public/article.do

[fish5133]

hooray, but we know what the 911 Commission produced.

[Thermate911]

[scienceplease 2]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/21/iraq-inquiry-tony-blair -bush

[IanFantom]

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, talking in Newsnight last night (Mon 22 Jun3) about the need for the Iraq inquiry to be held in public, stated "It should be like the 9/11 Commission in the US".

[scienceplease 2]

I was pretty certain it was David Milliband that mentioned the 9/11 Commission.

[illeagalhunter]

There is to be no blame game , why are we bothering? The lawyers will make a fortune , we will be no further farword .

[scienceplease 2]

[leajon]

I came across this article and i thought you may be intrested in helping them
understand the facts that led to the war in Iraq .


http://www.whitehallpages.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=ar ticle&sid=219963

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/

[fish5133]

Thanks Leajon

[TonyGosling]

I notice Royal Institute for International Affairs, Chatham House are sitting in on this. The UK equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations or CFR.

[cem]

.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6639925/Iraq-inqui ry-witnesses-could-be-given-immunity-from-prosecution.html


excerpt from: Iraq inquiry: Witnesses could be given immunity from prosecution

Witnesses at the inquiry into the Iraq war could be offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony.

by James Kirkup, Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2009

[fish5133]

Lets hope that excludes Blair

[GodSaveTheTeam]

I think it might be important to start a thread following this "Inquiry" that has promised not to be a whitewash.

Kicking it off with the latest -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8377492.stm

16:55 GMT, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

[blackbear]

The Jerusalem Post reported today that Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.

Miles said the two academics were Jewish and that Gilbert was an active Zionist. He also said they were both strong supporters of former prime minister Tony Blair and the Iraq war.

"It is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available," he added. "Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced."

The former ambassador also said that having two historians in a panel of five "seems a lot" and also questioned the Jewish academics' credentials.

"In December 2004 Sir Martin, while pointing out that the 'war on terror' was not a third world war, wrote that Bush and Blair 'may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill' - an eccentric opinion that would seem to rule him out as a member of the committee. Sir Lawrence is the reputed architect of the 'Blair doctrine' of humanitarian intervention, which was invoked in Kosovo and Afghanistan as well as Iraq,"

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/get-ready-for-another-whitewash.html

UK diplomat questions post of Jews on Iraq panel
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1259010973336&pagename=JPos t%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

9/11 and the Invasion of Iraq......Cui Bono......ZIONISM.....doh

[TonyGosling]

One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the revelation that Chilcot himself is picking and choosing, cherry picking who is allowed to appear at the enquiry. Well, that won't be an enquiry then. Extra judicial in this case just means this is a formal spectacle for the press. Planned for years cynicaly to bring down Labour and give the Nazi Eurocrats a perfect opportunity to rip the constitution apart.

Iraq and the sarin gas of spin: An extraordinary eyewitness account of the regiments of spin doctors sent to Baghdad
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1231767/Iraq-sarin-gas-spin- An-extraordinary-eyewitness-account-regiments-spin-doctors-sent-Baghda d.html#ixzz0YHyL7bUx

[xmasdale]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tony Blair
by Matthew Carr / December 3rd, 2009

At some point in the New Year Tony Blair will appear before the Chilcot Inquiry established by the British government to assess the historical ‘lessons’ of the Iraq war. Few individuals bear more responsibility for the invasion and its calamitous aftermath than Blair. Not only was his single-minded determination crucial in bringing his own country into the war, but his close political relationship with the Bush administration, also helped US hawks present the case for war to a sceptical American public.

The consequences of this intervention are well-known; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and four million refugees and internally displaced persons; thousands of British and American soldiers killed or wounded; an Iraqi society devastated by war and counterinsurgency, by criminal and terrorist violence, ethnic cleansing and death squads; a neo-colonial occupation marked by torture and brutality and barely-credible levels of financial corruption and incompetence.

All these consequences constitute one of the most extraordinary disasters – and one of the greatest crimes – in British political history. Yet the man who did so much to make this disaster possible has yet to be made accountable. The Chilcot Inquiry is unlikely to make much progress in this direction. Sir John Chilcot has already made it clear that his inquiry does not intend to ‘apportion blame’ and his commission contains two of Blair’s self-professed admirers. Blair himself will undoubtedly be at his slickest and most Teflon-like best, indignant at any suggestion of lowly motives behind his actions or slurs on his ‘reputation’. But accountability is necessary, and not only because of Iraq. As one of the most militaristic prime ministers in British history, Blair is an emblematic symbol of the new imperial violence of the 21st century. More than any other Western leader, he embodies the oxymoronic fantasy of ‘humanitarian’ warfare and the doctrine of liberal interventionism that makes such wars possible.

The Liberal Crusader

Posterity will struggle to unravel the disconcerting combination of evangelical moral fervour, cynicism and narcissism, and duplicity that marks Blair’s trajectory on the world stage. Blair has always attributed his decisions as a leader to a principled determination to ‘do the right thing’. Like Margaret Thatcher before him, he has often presented himself as a conviction politician, but Blair has shown an almost plaintive desire to be admired as a noble and heroic figure, grappling with difficult decisions at the lonely summits of power. At a ‘National Prayer Breakfast’ for Barack Obama earlier this year, he told the incoming president:

When I was Prime Minister I had cause often to reflect on leadership. Courage in leadership is not simply about having the nerve to take difficult decisions or even in doing the right thing, since oftentimes God alone knows what the right thing is. It is to be in our natural state – which is one of nagging doubt, imperfect knowledge, and uncertain prediction – and to be prepared nonetheless to put on the mantle of responsibility and to stand up in full view of the world, to step out when others step back, to assume the loneliness of the final decision-maker, not sure of success but unsure of it.

The mixture of fake humility, narcissism and self-congratulation is vintage Blair. At no time in his premiership did he give any indication that the knowledge that informed his actions might be ‘imperfect’ or incomplete. His speeches and interviews are punctuated with expressions such as ‘I believe that…’ or ‘I have absolutely no doubt that…’ to presage even the most dubious or tendentious claims, as if the mere fact that he believed them was sufficient proof of their truthfulness.

Where George Bush cultivated a more folksy sincerity, Blair was always more eloquent, sure-footed and plausible, with an ability to appeal to very different audiences and constituencies. These qualities already evident during Blair’s first appearance as a principled liberal interventionist during the NATO bombing of Serbia in March 1999 – a war that Blair described in typically Manichean style as ‘a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism.’ In his famous ‘doctrine of international community’ speech delivered in Chicago in April 1999 he described the NATO campaign as a the product of a new concept of ‘international community’ in which states no longer pursued the selfish national interests of the past but were ‘guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish’. These principles ignored the fact that the war had been launched by NATO in order to bypass the United Nations that represented the ‘international community.’ When Blair evoked ‘the tear stained faces of the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming across the border’ from Kosovo as a justification for intervention, he did not mention that this exodus had taken place after the war had begun, when the Serbian president Slobodan Milosovic with characteristic ruthlessness ordered the mass expulsion of 800,000 Kosovars in retaliation for the NATO bombings.

Blair’s statement of principle also ignored the fact that the war was essentially a gamble – even a reckless one – that was relatively cost-free to those who launched it. Both Blair and Clinton had assumed that air power would force Milosovic into an early surrender without the need to commit troops on the ground. When this did not happen, NATO began to escalate its bombing raids and air strikes on Serbian cities and economic ‘infrastructure’. Had Milosovic not capitulated on 11 June, NATO would have been forced to intensify the bombing of Serbian cities and carry out a ground invasion, and the notion of a humanitarian war might have looked even more threadbare.

Coming at the end of a grim decade punctuated by bloody catastrophes in the Balkans and Rwanda, the war was nevertheless widely supported across the British political spectrum. Kosovo crystallised an emerging consensus amongst conservative and liberal writers alike, which argued that Western – and more specifically American – military power could be used for moral and humanitarian purposes.

Few people were more seduced by what he called the ‘imperfect instrument’ of military power than Blair. It was in this period that Blair’s self-belief began to mutate into something more messianic, and his sense of his own greatness was matched by equally grandiose aspirations for his country. In December 1999, he called for Britain to become a ‘beacon’ to the rest of the world that would ‘stand up for justice and carry the torch of freedom everywhere where there is injustice and conflict, whether in Kosovo or East Timor.’

Even then, there were contradictions in this agenda. In 1997, Blair overruled an attempt by his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to ban the sale of Hawk fighter jets to Indonesia as part of an ‘ethical foreign policy’ limiting arms sales to regimes with poor human rights records. Few countries had records as bad as Indonesia, but Cook’s interpretation of ‘ethical’ was at odds with Blair’s commitment to British Aerospace (BAE) – a commitment that would later lead him to block an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into alleged malfeasance in the company’s dealings with Saudi Arabia. In 2000, BAE sold Hawks to Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. Two years later, Blair personally helped persuade India to buy sixty Hawk jets at a time when India and Pakistan were on the brink of full-scale war. Nor did Blair’s moral commitment to human rights prevent him from supporting Vladimir Putin’s brutal assault on Chechnya, as a quid pro quo for Russian acquiescence in NATO’s war in Kosovo.

Blair himself had always qualified the idealistic component of his ‘doctrine of international community’ by arguing that the decision over whether to take military action should be dependent not just on whether force was morally desirable, but on whether it was practically feasible and in the national interest. Both conditions appeared to be present in the fortuitous British intervention in the Sierra Leone civil war in May 2000, when a small contingent of 1,000 troops was sent to evacuate British nationals and inadvertently helped to stabilise the country and bring its deposed president back to power.

The Road to Iraq

Blair’s sense of what was possible and desirable was radically altered by the 11 September attacks on the United States. The attacks brought all Blair’s messianic instincts to the fore, so that he seemed to see himself as an indispensable figure in a world-historic drama. In the weeks after 9/11, he briefly became the Pied Piper of the war on terror, travelling back and forth across the world in an attempt to rally international support behind US military action against what he called the ‘new evil’ of ‘mass terrorism’.

This urgency was not accompanied by any evidence of original or independent insight into the phenomenon that he described. In a speech to the Labour Party conference on 2 October 2001, with NATO only days away from a military assault on Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, Blair raised the question of whether an attempt should be made to ‘understand the causes of terror’. He immediately rejected the ‘moral ambiguity’ that such an effort might involve, since ‘nothing could ever justify the events of September 11 and it is to turn justice on its head to pretend it could.’

Very few people were attempting to ‘justify’ the attacks, but not everyone was prepared to attribute them to metaphysical evil. Some of Blair’s own party had reservations about the impact of NATO bombings on Afghan civilians. Blair insisted, ‘The action we take will be proportionate; targeted; we will do all we humanly can to avoid civilian casualties.’ His rhetoric then reached visionary heights, with the promise that

The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of North Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountains of Afghanistan: they too are our cause. This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.

These pronouncements were partly intended to legitimize an American-led military operation whose objectives were not nearly as ambitious or utopian as he described. Blair’s invocation of a new 21st century white man’s burden was strongly influenced by the more hard-headed ‘defensive imperialism’ propounded by the Foreign Office intellectual Robert Cooper, one of the few British foreign office officials in Blair’s inner circle. Cooper first came to public attention in April 2002, when he published an article in The Observer newspaper in which he argued that ‘post imperial, postmodern states’ were obliged to use ‘double standards’ in dealing with rogue or failed states in ‘zones of chaos’ such as Afghanistan, which might require ‘the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.’

This was a fairly exact description of Blair’s own worldview. In a speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London in November 2002, he argued that the war on terror was a ‘new kind of war’ that could be directed against specific states as well as terrorist groups, since ‘States which are failed, which repress their people brutally, in which notions of democracy and the rule of law are alien, share the same absence of rational boundaries to their actions as the terrorist.’ Stripped of its contemporary references to terrorists, rogue states and WMD, Blair was reprising an old trope from British imperial history – that of the ‘mad’ foreigner who can only be subdued by civilising violence. One of the states where Blair observed an ‘absence of rational boundaries’ was Iraq, in an early indication of his willingness to comply with the new agenda that was beginning to take shape in Washington.

There is no space here to analyse in detail the devious and duplicitous strategies through which Blair manoeuvred his country into the Iraq war, but it is worth recalling the broad contours of this process. Blair’s support for American military action in Iraq was already evident as early as March 2002, according to the leaked memo by his special foreign policy adviser David Manning on a recent visit to the White House. In it Manning informed Blair that he had assured the Bush administration that ‘you would not budge in your support for regime change, but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different from anything in the United States’.

These differences are crucial to understanding Blair’s political strategy in the long build-up to war. For more than a year, he repeatedly denied that military action in Iraq was inevitable and insisted that he was merely trying to get the United Nations to pressure Saddam to disarm. Subsequent leaked documents, such as the ‘Downing Street memo’ make it clear that the ‘UN route’ was not intended to avert war, but to create the conditions in which war became inevitable. To ensure this outcome, Iraq policy was directed by Blair and a small coterie of special advisers, who systematically and relentlessly set out to terrify the British public and present Iraqi as a clear and present danger to British national security. In the September 2003 ‘dodgy dossier’ entitled “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: the Assessment of the British Government,” Blair declared:

What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued in his efforts to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to produce nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme… I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current.

It is impossible to know if Blair really believed these declarations, partly because it is difficult to disentangle what he actually believed from what was politically convenient, and also because his own slippery and often contradictory explanations often shifted once it became apparent that these claims were false. Carne Ross, a diplomat with the UN with long experience of Iraq who resigned in protest at the war, later told a parliamentary committee ‘I knew that evidence they were presenting for WMD was totally implausible… All my colleagues knew that too.’ Blair’s disenchanted Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short also claimed that she was told by Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) officials that any chemical or biological material that Iraq possessed ‘almost certainly wasn’t weaponised’. In his resignation speech in protest at the war, Robin Cook declared emphatically that no intelligence information he had ever seen had claimed that Saddam possessed WMD.

Why was Blair so certain when others so doubtful? Why was his government forced to draw on intelligence material of dubious and even laughable quality, from crude forgeries to an outdated Phd thesis plagiarised from the Internet to prove its case? Why did it control the flow of information to the point when Blair’s own cabinet was barely informed on a range of crucial issues, such as the 13-page opinion piece by the Attorney General on the legality of the war that was whittled down to a 300-word summary?

These questions have yet to be conclusively answered. On 30 September 2003, amid mounting criticism of the post-invasion chaos in Iraq, Blair attempted to explain his decision to support military action by asking the Labour Party conference to imagine the dilemma in which he found himself after 9/11:

I believe the security threat of the 21st century is not countries waging conventional war. I believe that in today’s interdependent world the threat is chaos. It is fanaticism defeating reason. Suppose the terrorists repeated September 11 or worse. Suppose they got hold of a chemical or nuclear dirty bomb; and if they could, they would. What then? And if this is the threat of the 21st century, Britain should be in there helping confront it, not because we are America’s poodle, but because dealing with it will make Britain safer.

It is impossible to know how much this explanation really described his state of mind before the war. But it did not explain why military action was necessary against a regime that did not have the weapons he described. Even as Blair’s inner circle talked up the threat of Iraq publicly, they often struggled to understand the urgency themselves. In a diary entry on 3 September 2002, Blair’s pugnacious press officer Alastair Campbell records a discussion about Iraq which raised the questions ‘Why now? What was it that we knew now that we didn’t before that made us believe we had to do it now?’ The answer comes from Blair, who says that ‘dealing with Saddam was the right thing to do’ and was ‘definitely worth doing.’

According to Campbell, Blair was convinced that ‘it would be folly for Britain to go against the US on a fundamental policy, and he really believed in getting rid of bad people like Saddam’. Blair may have been sincere in his detestation of Saddam’s regime. But such loathing was not matched by any awareness of the politics and history that made his regime possible – or the potential consequences of its downfall. The Guardian correspondent Jonathan Steele describes how Blair was visited at Downing Street shortly before the war by three leading British Middle East experts, who tried to impress on Blair that Iraq was a ‘very complicated country’ with ‘tremendous inter-communal resentments’ that might not be containable if Saddam was overthrown. According to Steele, these arguments made little impact on Blair, who merely replied, ‘But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?’

The three academics were reportedly dumbfounded by this simplistic response. One later described Blair as ‘someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc’. Another recalled his ‘weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour.’ This was not the only occasion when Blair was warned of the potentially negative consequences of military intervention, but they did not affect his belief that regime change was ‘right’ or that it would be successful.

Catastrophe

In The March of Folly, a collection of essays on disastrous historical decisions from the Trojan horse to the Vietnam war, the historian Barbara Tuchman noted a recurring tendency to ‘wooden-headedness’ on the part of governments and rulers – a phenomenon she defined as ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.’ These observations can certainly be applied to the Iraq war – and to Blair’s contribution to it. His diplomacy was partially successful in persuading the Bush administration to override its more unilateralist instincts and accept the return of the UN inspectors to Iraq. But things went awry when the other members of the security council refused to accept that Iraq was in breach of its resolutions and asked for the inspectors to be given more time – an objective that clashed with the US military timetable.

At this point Blair was forced at last to declare his hand. Blaming the pusillanimity of the French and Germans in not committing themselves to military action, he argued that Iraq was now in breach of the security council’s resolutions and that war had become unavoidable. While millions of people marched against the war worldwide, Blair prepared to ‘liberate’ a country he knew almost nothing about, a country that was not a real place but a fantasy onto which he and his acolytes projected their dim sense of moral purpose. In a speech in November 2002 announcing the beginning of NATO’s war in Afghanistan, he insisted that ‘no country lightly commits forces to military action and the inevitable risks involved.’

But few wars have ever been undertaken with such a serene and blissful disregard for the consequences than the Iraq invasion. Blair’s supporters have described the British participation in the war as a noble and principled intervention, but there is little evidence of nobility or principle amongst the coterie of special advisers and officials who made it possible. The Times editor Peter Stothard’s fly-on-the-wall portrait of Blair and his circle before and immediately after the war reveals men and women with no obvious motives at all, beyond an unquestioning loyalty to their superiors and to ‘Tony’ in particular. They are minions and war flies, floating in the slipstream of American military power, whose excitement at the drama of vicarious warfare is matched by a pervasive cynicism that reveals itself their own in-house jargon, such as the verb ‘to Kofi’ – a semantic device based on the UN Secretary-General which Stothard translates as meaning ‘we had better obscure this bit of military planning with a good coat of humanitarian waffle.’

For Blair and his acolytes the moral uplift of humanitarian war cannot be disturbed by dead and wounded bodies, destruction, grief and terror. Their war is a war of memos, emails, and press briefings by mobile phones fought by bureaucrats, spin doctors, and apparatchiks obsessed with avoiding negative newspaper headlines and dictating the news agenda. At the same time these carpeted combat zones are dominated by male officials intoxicated by the long-distance drama of bloodless telegenic conflict. Blair himself demonstrates an almost boyish enthusiasm for the war. When he asks for ‘bigger maps’ of Iraq to be pinned up in his Downing Street ‘den’, even the faithful Sally Morgan observes that ‘he would really have liked a sandpit with tanks.’ Asked by Stothard how he feels about the ‘deaths of children’ caused by the ‘avoidable act’ of the Iraq invasion, Blair once again manages to turn other peoples’ tragedies into a testament to his own moral grandeur:

He puts down the fountain pen. Behind his gaze there is a momentary blankness. Aides have spoken of how much he has felt the responsibility of shedding blood. He speaks of being ready ‘to meet my maker’ and answer for ‘those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions’. He accepts that others who share a belief in his maker, who believe in “the same God”, assess that the last judgement will be against him…. He talks of how he has to isolate himself when people are dying from what he has decided he must do. He talks of how he has to put barriers in his mind.

These ‘barriers’ were also evident in the aftermath of the invasion. In January 2004, with Iraq slipping into a vortex of chaotic violence and insurgency, the British ambassador to Iraq Jeremy Greenstock later recalled how Blair ‘didn’t want to understand the full horror of what he was hearing from us.’ When the horror became unavoidable, Blair refused to accept any responsibility for it and blamed anyone else, whether it was al Qaeda, local terrorists or neighbouring countries such as Syria and Iran. In April 2004 fifty-two former British ambassadors wrote an unprecedented open letter to the prime minister in April 2004, which pointed out that

The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement. All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case. To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful.

Blair has never accepted such criticisms. Year after year, he continued to reiterate the same refrain that ‘he was not sorry for getting rid of Saddam ’ while ignoring or downplaying the consequences that followed. He showed a similar dishonesty as the repercussions of the Iraq war began to reach Britain. In 2004, a Home Office and Foreign Office report concluded that the risk of terrorist attacks in the UK had significantly increased as a result of the Iraq war and that many British Muslims had become disillusioned by ‘a perceived “double standard” in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US’.

These conclusions were echoed by both mainstream security analysts and intelligence agencies – but routinely rejected by Blair himself. On 7 July 2005, these predictions were proven brutally accurate by the suicide bombings on the London Underground during the G8 Summit in Gleneagles. At a press conference that day, Blair delivered his ritual interpretation of such events:

Our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.

The ‘martyrdom videos’ released by the 7/7 attackers left no doubt that their actions were intended as a response to western military action in the Muslim world and Iraq in particular. Whatever else can be said about this ‘justification’, it had nothing to do with Blair’s sonorous platitudes. His refusal to accept that his own actions may not have made his country ‘safe’ may have been due to genuine conviction, but there was always a suggestion of something more cunning and devious behind Blair’s description of himself as ‘a pretty straight guy’.

Blair has always been an unwavering supporter of Israel. Throughout Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon in July-August 2006 he publicly deplored what he called the humanitarian ‘catastrophe’ caused by the war, while refusing to support a ceasefire that might have brought this catastrophe to an end, in order to give Israel more time to achieve its war aims and crush Hezbollah.

On 18 July 2006 a microphone at the G8 Summit inadvertently recorded a conversation between Blair and George Bush, in Lebanon, in which the two men criticized Kofi Annan’s attempts to broker a ceasefire. When Bush tells Blair that his Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will shortly be going to Lebanon to discuss ways of bringing the war to an end, Blair offers to go himself to ‘prepare the ground’ and argues that ‘if she goes she might have to succeed, as it were, whereas if I went I could just talk.’

It is worth pausing to consider the implications of this astounding statement Here is Blair the great humanitarian crusader, offering himself as a peace envoy, not to secure a peace agreement, but so that he can ‘just talk’ – and prolong the war. The same devious duplicity has been evident in his role as the Quartet Envoy to the Middle East. Though Blair has presented himself as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he has remained as supportive of Israeli interests as he was during his time in office.

Given the task of ‘strengthening Palestinian institutions’ he colluded in the American-Israeli-EU blockade imposed on Hamas in Gaza. The man who had once hailed the ‘slums of Gaza’ as ‘our cause’ often expressed his concern at the impact of Israeli restrictions on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, but his few public pronouncements on this issue made it clear that he believed that Hamas, not Israel, was ultimately responsible for them. In December 2008 he gave an interview to the newspaper Ha’aretz which made it clear that he was aware that a major Israeli military action in Gaza was being planned. When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in January the following year, his silence was broken only by the usual expressions of humanitarian concern, which studiously avoided any criticism of the military action itself.

Such behaviour may explain why Blair was awarded a £1million award from Israel’s Dan David Foundation in 2009 for ‘his exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict’. In January that same year, he received a presidential medal of freedom from the departing George Bush in recognition of his efforts to promote “democracy, human rights and peace abroad”, together with a Congressional Gold Medal bearing his own slogan ‘our real weapons are not our guns but our beliefs.’ Blair has also accrued less symbolic rewards for his advocacy of the former. Within months of leaving office he was recruited as an advisor to JP Morgan Chase, with an annual salary of £1m, followed by a similar appointment at the Zurich Financial Service that netted another £500,000. That same year he was appointed special envoy for the UN- US-Russian-EU Quartet to the Middle East. Today he is reportedly the highest-paid public speaker in the world, charging up to £400,000 for half hour speeches on the international lecture circuit.

In addition to appearing on tv chatshows and radio programs and delivering lectures on various continents, Blair has maintained a frenetic international schedule that at times seems to make him a ubiquitous presence. Blair also has a cyber-presence on MySpace and also on Facebook, where visitors can buy copies of an imprint of his hand to raise money for charity (‘an awesome item for fans of Tony’). His two charitable institutions, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Sports Foundation have been associated with a range of issues, from climate change and malaria to child obesity and interfaith dialogue.

Faith has become a dominant theme in the new career of a politician who famously did not ‘do God’ while in office. Shortly after his resignation, Blair converted to Catholicism – a conversion that has dovetailed seamlessly with his relentless acquisition of wealth. In April 2009, he explained the purpose of his Faith Foundation to the Toronto Star in the following terms:

It is true there are two faces of faith: one reactionary, extreme, occasionally violent; the other, compassion, love, fellowship and solidarity. So the task for the foundation is: first, to help people understand different faiths better so they can understand different cultures more fully; and, second, to promote faith as part of progress and reconciliation, not a focus for conflict and sectarian divisions.

Which of these two ‘faces’ belongs to Blair himself is open to question. In April 2009, he delivered an unrepentant speech in Chicago that revisited his ‘doctrine of international community’ and accused Iran of sponsoring or ideologically supporting terrorism across the world, from Mumbai to Somalia. Blair insisted that the West should continue to use hard and soft power against a terrorist enemy that ‘kills the innocent’ and ‘creates chaos in a world which increasingly works through confidence and stability.’ Nowhere in Blair’s speech was there any recognition of the chaos generated by the ‘interventions’ that he had promoted so avidly and continued to insist on. There were only the same simplistic binary formulations, the same sanctimonious paeans to ‘our’ values, the same ability to harness grand moral principles to current American propaganda tropes.

Blair’s sense of his own greatness is clearly impervious to self-doubt and he now appears to believe that he is God’s instrument on earth. Others appear to see him in the same way. In August 2009, he took time off from a holiday on the software millionaire Larry Ellison’s yacht to deliver a speech to the prestigious Communion and Liberation conference at Rimini in which he condemned ‘the restless search for short-term material gain in a globalised economic system’. Incredibly, in October 2009, Blair was proposed by the British government as a candidate for the first president of the European Council. His supporters claimed that Blair’s star quality would create a ‘motorcade effect’ that would be beneficial to Europe. Many of Blair’s compatriots breathed a sigh of relief when European leaders took a different view, but his supporters are clearly as besotted with their hero as they ever were. And whatever conclusions the Chilcot Inquiry reaches, the triumph of this vain, hollow and dangerous man is a bleak reflection of his times, in which as Yeats once wrote in a different context:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Matthew Carr is an English writer, journalist, and the author of three books, two of which have been published in the US: The Infernal Machine: a History of Terrorism from the Assassination of al-Qaeda and the just-released Blood and Faith: the Purging of Muslim Spain, both published by New Press. Read other articles by Matthew.

This article was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 9:01am and is filed under (Ex-)Yugoslavia, Colonialism, Corporate Globalization, Corruption, GWB, Imperialism, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Military/Militarism, NATO, Neoliberalism, Religion, Right Wing Jerks, United Kingdom.

[TonyGosling]

Our parrot BBC etc. media calling it:
The Iraq Enquiry
keep missing out the 'extra-judicial' context
shouldn't they be calling it
The Rolling Tory Election Broadcast

[SHERITON HOTEL]

One thing I'd like cleared up when Blair is brought to justice is the 'tanks round Heathrow' security incident on the eve of the 2 million person anti Iraq war march February 2003, coincidence but for real or more lies? One of the smaller charge sheet charges against the 1 million dead meat and counting war crim',but if proven, a clear abuse of his position of trust, am I right?

[redkop]

Schadenfreude is the wrong emotion iam trying to express after reading this excellent piece of journalistic work,but i cannot help enjoying watching this dispicable man loose what he treasures most,his image.
I dont hold my breath for the courts to interview him prior to locking him away for the rest of his life for what he has contributed to the chaos that is the middle east,but for the time being this will do.
I also thought it would take a little longer for the bodies of Tonys victims to float past but it does appear that the stream is gathering pace.

Also i agree with you Sheriton regarding the `the heathrow aiport' debacal a disgraceful piece of propaganda if i ever seen one.

[scienceplease 2]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8408918.stm?ls

He's confessed that he's a war criminal as far as I'm concerned....

[fish5133]

[fish5133]

[Frank Freedom]

In reply to a question about converting to Catholism while still in office,Bliar managed to wangle the words "whole new order" into his reply to Fern Britton

Also a classic answer to whether he prayed about his decision for war on Iraq he said "No",having already stated prayer was a part of his life!

Strange not to, for such an important decision affecting so many peoples lives.

Quite amazingly he also stated the problems that islam bring to the world,yet has set up a "foundation" to bring faiths together which on the face of it public opinion may not be against, it clearly is part of the set up towards the one world religion agenda,be it small time at the moment.

Bliar is still a dangerous puppet.

For those who missed the Fern Britton- Bliar interview it is on BBC's I player (best viewed on an empty stomach).

The time has come that this Iraq enquiry,the coverage of, along with replayed footage of non-evidence of wmd's,and these another satellite programs are designs to massively push the boat out for ...er..."change",
and the general public will concur,as will the truth movement.

What do we want?

CHANGE

When do we want it?

NOW

[item8]

http://painfultruths.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/12/intoxicated-by-powe r-blair-tricked-us-into-war--times-online.html

[TonyGosling]

Today's geezer 'fessing up' in this rolling Tory press conference was Blair's foreign policy adviser, who knew nothing about Iraq but advised there should be an invasion, Nigel Sheinwald.
Sheinwald is of a hard right Zionist Jewish family so, perhaps, it is not too surprising to see him encouraging the ilegal invasion of one of Israel's near neighbours.
Ever since World War II Zionists (who are often freemasons too) have infiltrated the Foreign Office as well as GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
The way these people, who have no interest in UK security, stay embedded as moles is because the Zionists also appear to have infiltrated the various security mechanisms. Anyone who speaks out about this will either be smeared and sacked or assassinated.
And all of this for the utterly ruthless takeover by secularists of the holy land.
Also our cabinet minister moles represent City of London interests over the people and British political discourse goes into a nose dive.

[xmasdale]