Tony Blair has strongly rejected claims that the 2003 US-UK invasion ofIraq was to blame for the current crisis gripping the country, pointing the finger instead firmly at the Maliki government and the war in Syria.
In a passionate essay published on his website, the former prime minister said it was a "bizarre" reading of the situation to argue that the US-British invasion of Iraq had allowed the growth of Sunni jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), whose fighters have swept through towns and cities north and west of Baghdad over the past week.
"We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not: and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.
"We have to put aside the differences of the past and act now to save the future," says Blair, adding that force may be necessary. "Where the extremists are fighting, they have to be countered hard, with force."
Behold the unrepentant war criminal, who has learned precisely nothing from the last 12 years.
In a defence of his actions in Iraq, Blair attacked as "extraordinary" any notion the country would be stable if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power.
"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.
He said it was inevitable that events across Iraq had raised the arguments over the 2003 war. While admitting that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, he said: "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, knowing what we now know about Assad, that Saddam, who had used chemical weapons both against the Iranians in the 1980s war – that resulted in over a 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?"
To recap, Syria's civil war in 2011 justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and justifies going back into Iraq in 2014.
There really isn't anything these ghouls wouldn't say or do in order to send us back into Iraq, guns blazing.
It sounds more like the classic defense of conservatives everywhere - that conservatives are never responsible for the results of their own policies. Notice how it's rude to ask whether George W Bush should have paid more attention to the "Bin Ladin Determined to Attack the US" memo, yet it's a patriotic duty to investigate Benghazi?
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't mean it, though. You can tell.
ReplyDelete(I acquired this divinatory skill by cruising loudly-self-identifying progressive blogs,)