Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s attempt at exonerating himself from the unimaginable cesspool that is the present situation in Iraq and his saying the 2003 invasion, in which he supinely followed the then US President George W Bush, shouldn’t be blamed for the current crisis, is just pathetic. Blair’s 2,848-word essay, claiming that it is ‘bizarre’ to hold the dispensations responsible for the quagmire in the form of the Sunni jihadist group Isis badgering Iraq and massacring Shia’ite soldiers and civilians in the northern reaches, is historical revisionism at its worst.
That the man who led UK into believing there were weapons of mass destructions in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, when he had clear intelligence of Libya harbouring the more clear and present threats, is now trying to pull himself out of the nightmarish circumstances in the country, and is also the ‘Middle East peace envoy’ from UK, is a slap on the hideous face on international diplomacy.
Blair’s public posturing has dwindled from manic incredulity to absolute delusion. In fact, the soon-to-be-published Chilcot report on the former PM’s role in fomenting the crisis talks about chilling evidence on how both Blair and Bush were briefed on the possibilities of Iraq witnessing an infrastructural and institutional collapse in case Hussein, who held the sectarian forces in check for 24 long years, was suddenly overthrown.
The former PM’s ravings and rants on his blog have been dismissed as exactly that: self-aggrandising rhetoric aimed at coming ‘unhinged’ from a mess that he, along with, the ex-US president, had jointly engineered. Fortunately, the British public and the media, far from being carried away by the latest heap of fabrications unleashed by Blair, have not just been scathing and unsparing of the former premier, they have in fact, through the mouth of the London mayor Boris Johnson, pretty much asked him to ‘put on a sock in it.’ Moreover, even stalwarts of the Labour party have distanced themselves from the utter embarrassment caused by Blair’s essay, his lack of remorse and his ‘eel-like’ ability to evade both responsibility and culpability.
Hopefully, the Chilcot report will be able to put an end to British misgivings and offer up enough damning proof to prosecute Blair as a war criminal should be.
That the man who led UK into believing there were weapons of mass destructions in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, when he had clear intelligence of Libya harbouring the more clear and present threats, is now trying to pull himself out of the nightmarish circumstances in the country, and is also the ‘Middle East peace envoy’ from UK, is a slap on the hideous face on international diplomacy.
Blair’s public posturing has dwindled from manic incredulity to absolute delusion. In fact, the soon-to-be-published Chilcot report on the former PM’s role in fomenting the crisis talks about chilling evidence on how both Blair and Bush were briefed on the possibilities of Iraq witnessing an infrastructural and institutional collapse in case Hussein, who held the sectarian forces in check for 24 long years, was suddenly overthrown.
The former PM’s ravings and rants on his blog have been dismissed as exactly that: self-aggrandising rhetoric aimed at coming ‘unhinged’ from a mess that he, along with, the ex-US president, had jointly engineered. Fortunately, the British public and the media, far from being carried away by the latest heap of fabrications unleashed by Blair, have not just been scathing and unsparing of the former premier, they have in fact, through the mouth of the London mayor Boris Johnson, pretty much asked him to ‘put on a sock in it.’ Moreover, even stalwarts of the Labour party have distanced themselves from the utter embarrassment caused by Blair’s essay, his lack of remorse and his ‘eel-like’ ability to evade both responsibility and culpability.
Hopefully, the Chilcot report will be able to put an end to British misgivings and offer up enough damning proof to prosecute Blair as a war criminal should be.