Creditably for them, the British people have not given up trying to find out if the reason former prime minister Tony Blair took them into the Iraq war was what he said it was or had he lied to them. They thought the Butler and Hutton inquiries were unsatisfactory because neither of them examined the events leading to the war.
A new Public Inquiry, underway since July 30 last year, is examining the events and actions leading to the war to establish what happened. Blair is scheduled to appear before the Public Inquiry for a full day session on January 29 to give his version of the events. The version has changed over time. In the run-up to the war it was Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.
The Blair government had pressured the MI to exaggerate the Iraqi weapons dossier, even plagiarising material from an old student dissertation. He has, since, shifted his position to regime change. In a recent interview he gave to BBC1, Blair said that he would have invaded Iraq even if he knew (as he did) that there were no WMDs. He would have still thought it right, he said, to remove Saddam Hussein.
And further that, "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge". If the 'we' here refers to Britain and the US, they certainly are not better off. Not only 'we' have failed to accomplish the mission, 'we' have ended up allowing Iran (another candidate for regime change) to emerge as a big regional player. The mission now is confined to two words: safe exit.
In case the 'we' also includes the Iraqi people, only someone with utter lack of respect for human life can say post-Saddam, Iraq is a better place. Indeed, Saddam was a tyrant who brooked no dissent, and did not hesitate to use chemical weapons - acquired from western sources - to crush a Kurd rebellion. Like Bush and Blair, he was a ruthless worrier, who initiated a war with Iran, and invaded Kuwait.
But he also ran Iraq well, using the oil wealth to diversify the country's economy and modernise society, keeping also ethnic and sectarian divisions from erupting into violent conflict. The Iraqi people have paid, and continue to pay, a horrendous price of regime change in lives and limbs lost.
The last of the two studies on the Iraq invasion and occupation carried out by the highly respected international scientific journal, The Lancet, published in October 2006, put the Iraqi death toll at 601,027. Countless other Iraqi men, women and children got maimed for life. And millions of those who lived, had to leave their homes either to seek refuge in safer areas within the country or in neighbouring Syria and Jordan.
Had it not been for the invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive today, and those maimed would be living a normal life. Confessing that he would have still "thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein] if he had known that there were no WMDs," Blair went on to say "you should have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."
In other words, he was determined to join Bush's war even if that meant inventing arguments where none existed. In fact, the Public Inquiry proceedings reveal that at a meeting he had with George Bush, eleven months before the invasion, Blair had assured the latter that he was "absolutely prepared to say he was willing to contemplate regime change [if the WMDs ploy] did not work." His mind was made up to lend a helping hand to the war Bush imposed on a small Arab country in defiance of international opinion.
So why did he do what he did? It could not be the traditional relationship Britain has had with its trans-Atlantic cousin, given that it was a deeply unpopular cause within the country where the people took out 'million' marches to protest the impending war; and the 'Old Europe' firmly opposed it. A clue to Blair's real intentions is in his assertion that "the thing uppermost in my mind was a threat [Saddam posed] to the region.
Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there I thought, and actually still think, it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way." Notably, aside from the WMDs, the Bush administration had also described redrawing the map of the Middle East as one of its war aims, the unstated goal of course was to grab control of the country's oil wealth.
Hence both Bush and Blair saw Saddam as a hurdle in changing the region "in the right way." Their shared interest in changing the region arose from a shared religiosity. Bush made no secret of his born-again Christian credentials. But Blair had downplayed his religious fervour because of political compulsions, until he stepped out of office to convert to Catholicism and set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, letting it be known that this is "how I want to spend the rest of my life."
Like Bush, Blair apparently belongs to the Christian right wing, which believes that when Jews rule all of the biblical lands, the Messiah will return to the earth and defeat the Antichrist in the battle of Armageddon. Hence removing the threat Iraq, under Saddam, posed to Israel was to help Bush and Blair to expedite the fulfilment of a biblical prophesy.
It is not without significance that after he left office, Blair got himself appointed as UN Special Envoy to the Middle East, with the responsibility of 'preparing' Palestinians for negotiations with Israel. So far he has done nothing that can dispel the impression that he is not preparing the region for Armageddon.
Actually, Blair and Bush are Christian extremists, having a lot in common with their nemesis, Osama bin Laden, who like them, uses his faith to wreak death and destruction in the world to 'change it in the right way.' British people, at least, want to establish what they already know: that their prime minister misled them into an illegal, immoral war.
Sadly but unsurprisingly, Americans have no such inclination. It remains to be seen though what will happen if and when the Public Inquiry establishes the truth. Will Blair be tried as a war criminal? Not likely. Those in charge will find some whitewash to cover up his crimes.
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