Liar Liar Pants On Bliar

You should make up your own minds about Tony Blair and his cohorts and the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War. Their statements are on the Iraq Inquiry website. It remains to be seen what conclusions Lord Chilcott draws, and we should remember that this was not a trial, but an exercise intended "to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned." But I think I have concluded that:

• It had been American policy to secure regime change in Iraq since at least1998 but Clinton wasn't prepared to go to war. Dubya Bush and his neo-con cronies, however, were all too keen to remove Saddam and were merely waiting for a pretext for military action. The atrocity on September 11 provided that, notwithstanding that there was never any link between Al Qaeeda and Saddam.
• Blair had said to Bush that he would be stand with him in taking military action for regime change whatever happened, but he wanted to seek approval via the United Nations and his own Parliament. He likes to present himself in a cloak of righteousness. Blair had convinced himself that Saddam was a security risk for 'the West', although there was no evidence that Saddam had the slightest intention of attacking anyone except Iran and the Kurds (and maybe Israel). The Blair machine then set about producing a basis on which to justify an invasion of Iraq.
• Lord Goldsmith was 'persuaded' to change his view on the legality of military invention without a clear mandate from the United Nations. The Security Council was in a quandary; whilst Iraq might have been in breach on UN resolutions so were other states, such as Israel. So there was never going to be a 'second resolution'.
• Military planning had begun fairly early in 2002 and once troops and so forth were mobilised and in place, there was no way Blair and Bush were going to pull back.

Essentially, the decision to go to war had been taken early on and the rest was window dressing. Who knows what it is about Blair's psychological make up that made him so determined to stick with Bush and the USA. I don't think this makes Blair a 'war criminal' although it does make him a duplicitous, and self-deluding, bastard. The result has been that far from making the world a safer place, the Iraq War has made it less secure and empowered Al Qaeeda and Iran. Meanwhile, lives and resources have been squandered. What makes it doubly annoying is that there were those who were telling Blair at the time that he'd got it all wrong - but he wouldn't listen. So the lesson to be learned? Be careful who you vote for...you always elect a politician.