Lies again, Mr. Blair!

IN his recent interview with BBC, Tony Blair desperately tried to justify the enormous loss of innocent lives since the Iraq invasion, which he and George Bush had engineered, by harping back to the thousands of Iraqi lives lost under Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war with Iran. The legitimacy of this comparison was destroyed by the fact that the US and Britain in particular supported Iraq in the waging of this war and provided Saddam with the weapons to sustain it, including chemical weapons that were later used against the Kurds.
Blair then tried to liken the situation in Iraq under Saddam with the situation in Syria under President Assad, but this comparison was equally unconvincing because the Iraqi people had never seriously tried to rise up against Saddam and replace him. Moreover, Saddam was not unable to impose law and order in Iraq, al beit of a harsh nature, whereas President Assad long ago ceased to be able to do that in Syria.
Even more unconvincing was Blair’s attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq as a legitimate response to the events of Sept. 11 in the US. He referred to the “perversion of religion” that had to be countered whilst seemingly oblivious that Saddam’s regime was a secular state by nature, and that it was the power vacuum that resulted from regime change in Iraq that brought extremism in Iraq in the form of Al-Qaeda. In fact as per Geneva Convention, both Bush and Blair should be held accountable for all the genocide and crimes against humanity that transpired in Iraq following Western imposed regime change there because it is the prime responsibility of an invading power to provide law and order for the citizens of an invaded country — something they both palpably failed to do. It was Bush and Blair who provided the opportunity to Al-Qaeda to enter Iraq, and they should take full responsibility for all the acts of terrorism and loss of life perpetrated by them.
The Western press have since indicated that Bush and Blair knew that Saddam had no WMD at least two weeks before they launched invasion; so by invading Iraq under false pretenses they dishonored the memory of the 3,000 US citizens who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
They further did so by pretending that Iraq was in some way implicated in Sept. 11 — any port in a storm — in order to let themselves off the hook from addressing the real causes of Sept. 11 which was the ever growing US support for the perversion of Christian Zionism that was made manifest in the Zionist policies of the Israeli state in its illegal and fascist military occupation and virtual annexation of Palestinian land.
That was the real catalyst for Sept.11; and Blair’s assertion that Zionism played no role in causing Muslim extremism shows just how dysfunctional was his understanding of the Middle East, and why his role as European peace envoy has been such a failure.
Zionism is not compatible with Israel’s claims to be a democratic state. The lesson from Sept. 11 to the US, Britain, Europe and the whole Western world should have been that support for Zionism is not compatible with support for the principles of self-determination for the Palestinian peoples that are enshrined in UN Security Council resolutions.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan therefore got it right when he called Zionism a crime against humanity just recently. Only when the US and the international community realize the truth, and the reality of what he said, will they realize that their continued support of the Zionist leaders of Israel is synonymous with sponsoring Israeli-state terrorism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians based on religious and racial discrimination. Only when the US realizes that its democratic obligation to support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem is incompatible with its support for the fascist policies of the Israeli government will the US become part of the solution rather than continue to be a major part of the problem.
It was the perception of the Arab world at the time of Sept. 11 that equated Zionism with fascism — without that equation Sept.11 would not have taken place. The tragedy remains to this day that no one in Washington or London, or in Europe for that matter, is any wiser for it, least of all it would appear, Tony Blair himself.

- Chris Ryecart