Editorial: Blair shows no remorse

TONY Blair, the former British prime minister, who joined President George W. Bush in the ill-starred invasion of Iraq, 10 years ago next month, has admitted that a decade on, Iraq is not as he hoped.
The ouster of Saddam, he insisted to the BBC in an interview broadcast on Tuesday to mark this pivotal event in recent Middle East history, had still been justified. However he added: “I have long since given up trying to persuade people that it was the right decision.”
It remains Blair’s contention that had Saddam not been overthrown, the Middle East would have been far more dangerous and many more lives would have been lost in violence generated by the Iraqi regime. What he did not address is the stark reality that since US, British, Australian and Polish troops began the invasion on March 20, 2003, at a conservative estimate, some 100,000 mostly Iraqi lives have been lost, a great deal in terrorist violence.
The destruction of Saddam’s dictatorship opened up Iraq as a new battlefield for Al-Qaeda, so recently driven from their bases in Afghanistan. Saddam was guilty of many evils but though he had toyed with the idea of using Osama Bin Laden’s killers to further his own regional ambitions, for reasons that may never now be known, he rejected the idea. Indeed it does seem clear that he realized that giving Al-Qaeda any sort of a home could be a double-edged sword. Thus in his tightly run police state, the terrorists were kept out.
All that changed when Bush and Blair ordered the invasion. In the chaos that followed the dictator’s overthrow, the terrorists moved in, initially making common cause with fugitive members of Iraq’s Baathist machine and Sunnis who believed that their community was now threatened by the country’s resurgent Shiite majority.
The inability of Washington to institute immediately proper governance, the triumphalist expulsion of all the old regime’s police and army, the importing of Iraqi exiles as political leaders, who had little following in the country, were all grievous errors that contributed directly to the appalling campaign of murder and violence, to which ordinary Iraqis were exposed on a daily basis.
It was not simple miscalculation by Bush and Blair; it was a complete lack of understanding of the consequences of Saddam’s downfall and thus no clear strategy to deal with the resulting turmoil. Instead US troops rode into town as conquerors, sure that they were the good guys. They were then by turns, mystified and then angered by the lackluster reception they received after the heady first few days of their entry into Baghdad.
Moreover this was an attack that was justified by a tissue of lies. British intelligence supposedly told Blair that Saddam had chemical weapons almost armed and ready to fire. This justified the attack. Yet months later, after conquered Iraq had been scoured by international weapons inspectors, no evidence whatsoever of weapons of mass destruction was found.
Before the invasion, one million Britons took to the streets demanding that no attack take place. Blair ignored them. Americans by contrast, pleased at the apparently easy overthrow of the Taleban in Afghanistan, were more relaxed about the deployment of overwhelming firepower to destroy Saddam’s forces in Iraq.
It is the lies, deceptions and half-truths that London and Washington used to cover the real purpose of the invasion, that stick in the craw for so many people around the world, not least the Iraqis themselves. The truth remains that the attack on Iraq was for George W. Bush to finish his Daddy’s unfinished business with Saddam, because Gen. Schwarzkopf, having driven Iraqis from Kuwait, had the road to Baghdad wide open but decided not to press on. A key decider was the immense slaughter of Iraqis fleeing Kuwait, carnage which appalled a watching world.
Thus the awful reality is that the second attack on Iraq was purely personal. So blinded by this single motive was Bush, that he stood on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared that the fighting was over — when it fact it had only really just begun, though he and his neocon advisers had neither the knowledge nor intelligence to perceive this.
The chances are that Bush would not have moved alone. Blair played an important role in bolstering the US political campaign in the run-up to the invasion. It was the British who worked out, to their satisfaction anyway, that a UN Security Council resolution backing the assault was not necessary. It was the British who provided the false WMD intelligence. And all this happened on Tony Blair’s watch. The man is still without remorse.