TONY BLAIR, who is understandably opposed to the full transcripts of all of his talks with President Bush being published in the Chilcot Inquiry report into the Iraq war, has told the BBC that his illegal war with Iraq is in no way responsible for the current collapse in Iraq.
This has seen Islamist Al-Qaeda forces (which never even existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein) capturing major cities and even marching on Baghdad!
Blair, this out and out running dog for imperialism, is even implying that it is the UK people who are responsible for the disaster for imperialism that has taken place.
He says that it could have been avoided if the US and UK had launched a full attack on Syria, as had been planned, killing a lot more Arab men, women and children.
Such was the anti-war feeling in the UK amongst the workers and the middle class, the Labour Party opposition was unable to support the Tory resolution in the House of Commons that opened up the way for war with Syria.
The resolution fell and PM Cameron and then President Obama were unable to go through with the proposed action – admitting that it had no public support.
Blair is saying that this US-UK inability to engage in a mass slaughter in Syria, because of massive popular opposition, is responsible for the current US-UK crisis for imperialism in Iraq.
The line that is being implied is that the people are to blame and the mass opposition to a new war should have been ignored. No doubt he is very proud that he ignored the anti-war demonstrations of millions of people in the UK before and during his and Bush’s 2003 mass slaughter of Iraqis.
The 2003 war was based on lying wmd propaganda, and was held, even by sections of the military and the state’s legal authorities, to be illegal.
It did not have the support even of the UN Security Council and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including a former weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly, who bled to death in Oxfordshire, in an alleged suicide.
Blair knew that the UK people were opposed to the war en masse, but he pressed ahead with it regardless, as a servant of the bosses, banks and US imperialism.
Now he says that the collapse in Iraq has taken place because Obama and Cameron were unable to carry out a similar policy in Syria, because they were forced to pay some attention to the popular hostility to the action. He is still calling for military intervention in Syria!
Once again, as far as Blair is concerned, the US and UK imperialists have an innate right to intervene militarily in any part of the world to satisfy the requirements of the US-UK bosses and bankers, no matter how many people are slaughtered, and no matter whether, even by the terms of bourgeois legality, the undertaking is illegal.
However, even he has had to drop his previous odious, cynical and despicable propaganda line that the continuing post-2003, bombings, killings and destruction of the lives of millions of Iraqi people were just the ‘teething problems’ of a developing democracy.
Even Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003, has said the handling of the campaign against Saddam Hussein was ‘perhaps the most significant reason’ for the current sectarian violence.
‘We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule,’ he said in the Mail on Sunday.
The British workers will make sure that there is no UK military intervention into Iraq and Syria.
They must however make sure that Blair and Co pay for their crimes.
The UK trade unions and the TUC must take action at this September’s TUC Congress. One of their main demands must be that the Chilcot Inquiry report is published in full and includes all of the transcripts of all the Bush-Blair discussions on the war in Iraq from September 11 2001 onwards.
It must also demand that Blair, plus the principal leaders of his war cabinet, and the principal military leaders, who knew that the 2003 Iraq war was illegal are packed off to The Hague to answer war crimes charges.
