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Tony Blair

Hildegarde The Arena
“THE civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect. Iraq is now in mortal danger. The whole of the Middle East is under threat. We will have to re-think our strategy towards Syria; support the Iraqi government in beating back the insurgency; whilst making it clear that Iraq’s politics will have to change for any resolution of the current crisis to be sustained.”
These are introductory remarks from an essay penned over the weekend by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and published on his website, tonyblairoffice.org.

We hear you prime minister, and while we see nothing new in your pronouncements, we also wonder which planet you reside in and whom you think is that daft to buy into your argument about the Iraq crisis — then and now.
Why are you exonerating yourself when Iraq and the region are burning?

In the essay, Blair washes his hands and those of George W. Bush of any responsibility as he painstakingly argues that the Iraq war of 2003, has nothing to do with the current conflict that threatens to tear apart Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions.

Blair fails to realise that the current crisis is not only very fluid for the Middle East, but that it has the potential of engulfing the whole world.

A mix of the United States, UK, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia can create an explosive situation considering the relationship of any one of these with the state of Israel.

A world which has watched the Iraq conflict and others evolving at such a dramatic pace cannot afford to hear the former British premier arguing his case so insensitively because the conflicts have not yet played out in Europe or the US, affecting innocent people.

Instead, they have been on-lookers and grandmasters of destiny, deciding whether or not they should intervene militarily or otherwise.
When they resolve to evacuate a few dozen of their nationals in the affected countries, or to have boots on the ground or, better still, send unmanned drones to kill and maim innocent people, it is as if the nationals of these countries have ceased to be human.

Not only have they become self-appointed masters of the universe but also demi-gods who have to be worshipped by hapless citizens of the so-called less developed world, which they run as they did before the collapse of colonialism.

Blair claims, “As for how these events reflect on the original decision to remove Saddam (Hussein), if we want to have this debate, we have to do something that is rarely done: put the counterfactual i.e. suppose in 2003, Saddam had been left running Iraq. Now take each of the arguments against the decision in turn.

“The first is there was no WMD (weapons of mass destruction) risk from Saddam (Hussein) and therefore the casus belli was wrong. What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the West, was manufacturing chemical weapons.

“We only discovered this when he used them. We also know, from the final weapons inspectors reports, that though it is true that Saddam got rid of the physical weapons, he retained the expertise and capability to manufacture them. Is it likely that, knowing what we now know about Assad, Saddam, who had used chemical weapons against both the ‘Iranians in the 1980s war that resulted in over 1 million casualties and against his own people, would have refrained from returning to his old ways? Surely it is at least as likely that he would have gone back to them.

“The second argument is that but for the invasion of 2003, Iraq would be a stable country today. Leave aside the treatment Saddam meted out to the majority of his people whether Kurds, Shia or marsh Arabs, whose position of ‘stability’ was that of appalling oppression.

“Consider the post 2011 Arab uprisings. Put into the equation the counterfactual — that Saddam and his two sons would be running Iraq in 2011 when the uprisings began. Is it seriously being said that the revolution sweeping the Arab world would have hit Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, to say nothing of the smaller upheavals all over the region, but miraculously Iraq, under the most brutal and tyrannical of all the regimes, would have been an oasis of calm?”

Even a jury of his peers has refused to be fooled by his naked insincerity and double standards.
London mayor Boris Johnson hit him below the belt, and openly said that Blair “had finally gone mad”.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Johnson says, “Blair and his ‘unhinged’ attempt to rewrite history is undermining arguments for Western intervention in Iraq.”

Johnson further says, “In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help. Blair is now undermining the very cause he advocates: the possibility of serious and effective intervention. Somebody needs to get on to Tony Blair and tell him to put a sock in it, or at least to accept the reality of the disaster he helped to engender. Then he might be worth hearing.”

This writer also feels that Blair needs to be reminded that in as much as he can try to absolve himself, the world has not forgotten that together with former US president George W. Bush, they were the co-authors of the on-going Iraq crisis including the instability in the Middle East and North Africa.

The global community also knows that the escalation of the jihadist movement in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Africa, North Africa and now West Africa is a result of their interventionist policies. How does Blair explain the multiple branches of Osama bin Laden-led Al-Qaeda?

This is why there has been that backlash against Blair’s weekend remarks because he is the last person the world expects to explain why the Iraq they claimed to be saving from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship is now falling apart.

The falling apart is also taking place in all the regions they went in to impose their will and Western-style type of democracy.
People opposed the Iraq war in 2003, and they have been vindicated because nothing of value has been reaped from that war except death, destruction, chaos and instability.

It is an insult to everyone’s intelligence for Blair to try and deny that they have a hand in the Iraq crisis.
It is also an insult for the former British premier to try and apportion blame. As special envoy to the Middle East, has Blair ever stopped to think why things have turned out the way they have, or was this a treatise admitting absolute failure?

We agree with Blair that “Iraq is part of a much bigger picture”, but in as much as he is calling for new strategies, there is also need to examine the “bigger picture” that the Iraq war of 2003 created. Who likes a bigger picture where violence and death are the order of the day? Who also likes a bigger picture where people look for flimsy excuses that enable them to pillage and plunder your natural resources as has happened with the oil in Iraq and Libya?

When the United States and its allies attacked Iraq in 2003, Blair was one of the most trusted allies in this so-called war on terror. He earned himself a nickname — Bush’s “poodle”.

But eleven years on, it is not the US, Britain and their allies who are on the receiving end. Ordinary people in the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan have become the victims of this senseless violence and wanton killing.

However, Blair should wake up and smell the coffee and realise that what goes around comes around. On Monday, Britian’s foreign affairs secretary William Hague told the House of Commons that close to 400 British nationals could be fighting with terrorists in Syria.

This is the paradox of the Iraq (Syria) conflict. A number of the militants fighting in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Nigeria are from Western countries and analysts argue that soon, they will take that jihad back to Europe and the United States.
Maybe this is why Blair wants new strategies, and also desires that the conflict goes on ad infinitum.

The story carried by RT on June 16 gives that stark reminder of the dangers that lie ahead for those who created Al Qaeda. They should run scared.

Headlined “‘Black flag of jihad will fly over London’: Alarm over UK-born Iraq fighters’ threat”, the article raises the alarm: “Terror alerts, 9/11-style bombings and murders of British citizens will soon come to London’s streets, according to chilling threats from UK citizens fighting alongside Islam’s most violent terrorist group operating in Syria and Iraq… The message comes from three such fighters, all youngsters in their teens and twenties. According to the Times, these aren’t regular disenchanted youths at all: one is a 20-year-old hacker from Birmingham, who once stole Tony Blair’s details and posted them online, later serving time for an unrelated violence charge.

“The “black flag of jihad” will fly over Downing Street, Junaid Hussain warned on June 4, spelling out the horrors to come. He’s been fighting in Syria for over a year now.”

Maybe this is what Blair is worried about. It has been difficult to charge him with crimes against humanity, but when the jihad is in his backyard, it will be another story.