THE Fern Britton interview with Tony Blair on the BBC yesterday, squashed all of the notions that are being peddled that Blair was just a George Bush poodle, as far as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were concerned.
He was in fact Bush’s partner, a junior partner it is true but none the less a partner, both materially, in the movement of armies, and ideologically as a fervent Christian crusader, full of enthusiasm for overthrowing the ‘evil’ Saddam Hussein by any means necessary, and then of course grabbing Iraq’s oil.
The Prime Minister, who went to bed with a bible by his side, is a Christian crusader with no time for the dove of peace, but with a taste for imperialist wars and slaughter, of which he engaged in four – Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan.
His impact on world affairs preceded that of President George Bush.
The first Blair government began in May 1997. It was after both Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s attempts to destroy the USSR had given the imperialist powers the idea that the hour had struck for building a ‘New World Order’.
Blair’s period in office coincides with the major offensives of this campaign, which were billed as the struggle between good and evil, good Kosovars against evil Serbs, and, of course against the ‘diabolically evil’ Saddam Hussein.
Blair’s first partnership was with President Clinton, in which the war aim was to complete the destruction of Yugoslavia, allowing Nato to push further eastwards.
His second was with Bush, who greeted the 9-11 attack, as the perfect excuse to attack Iraq.
Tony Blair, in the guise of a Christian fighting evil, made a secret pact to do just that with George Bush in June 2002, at a secret Texas dinner, whose agreements were never made public.
Blair, who left the premiership to join the Roman Catholic Church, believes and practices the Jesuit maxim that the end justifies the means.
To organise regime change in Iraq and the overthrow of the elected regime, he kept the Labour cabinet in the dark as to what he had agreed with Bush, and kept the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith away from the cabinet, until he had been pressured to give up his position, that a military attack on Iraq without the support of the UN would be illegal.
Blair wrote the foreword to the ‘dodgy dossier’, which was the basis of the House of Commons vote to go to war. He wrote that it was definite that Iraq possessed wmds that could be delivered to a target within 45 minutes notice, despite the fact that the available British intelligence did not say this.
There were no wmds. When confronted with this fact Blair said that if he had known this ‘I would still have thought it right to remove him,’ adding that ‘Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat.’
Blair was not interested in the truth. His ‘Jesuit’ interest was in assembling the means that could get imperialism closer to achieving its ends. He wanted a war with Iraq, the arguments to be deployed were secondary.
This war and its consequences has seen over one million Iraqis murdered, four million exiled in Syria and Jordan, and has seen the Iraqi infrastructure smashed and destroyed. All so that Christian imperialism could get its hands on Iraq’s resources.
Apparently it has already been agreed that Blair will give secret evidence to the Chalcott inquiry.
This must not be allowed to happen. In fact, Blair must be transported to the Hague to face war crimes charges, with a number of his cabinet colleagues standing beside him.
At the same time the trade unions must demand that all British troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan and that reparations are paid to Iraq for the hideous imperialist assault made on it, under the banner of Christian imperialism.