Anyone expecting a Frost-Nixon moment when Tony Blair appeared in front of the Iraq Inquiry was sorely disappointed, and an unfeasible optimist.
It seems Nixon had a heart that at least eventually confessed, in a way that Blair's is entirely black.
If Iraq was about WMD, there is precedent for this kind of action. During Blair's own reign, he was involved in a previous bombing of Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, which was ostensibly about weakening Saddam's WMD capability. Bill Clinton when attacking Sudan also that year said he was targeting weapons, though that turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory.
So what this establishes is that WMD were a concern previously and action was taken on it. What changed after 2000 was the neoconservative ideology of occupation.The problem of course is that there were no WMD. If the evidence was actually "extensive, detailed and authoritative" those sites could easily have been hit directly.
I don't think despite Blair and Campbell's strenuous protestations that anyone seriously thinks this was the reason for war anyway. Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell told the Iraq Inquiry that more time for weapons inspectors wouldn't have made any difference as there were no WMD. What makes Blair's situation even more egregious, is not just the way Iraq has appeared like a classic war of exploitation for big business, but that Blair himself has become so personally enriched on the back of it.
His bank directorships and six-figure lecture deals in America are payback for his shoulder-to-shoulder wars with the draft dodger Bush. He'd not be raking in anywhere near the sums over there had it not been for the spotlight he generated for himself over there through Iraq. So no, he's not going to be sorry.
Comments