Tony Blair, war criminal, testifies before inquiry

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Tony Blair, war criminal, testifies before inquiry
By Chris Marsden
30 January 2010

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s testimony before the Chilcot
inquiry into the 2003 Iraq war marks him down once more as a war
criminal. His testimony made clear that he collaborated in preparing
an illegal war of aggression, in line with the policy of pre-emptive
war elaborated by the Bush administration in the United States.

Time and again, he directly alluded to his belief that regime change
was required in Iraq, even after it was apparent that Saddam Hussein
possessed no weapons of mass destruction. His most emotive passage
defending his decision to go to war was also the most damning legally.

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception,”
he declared. “It’s a decision. And the decision I had to take was,
given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the
over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of
breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man
reconstituting his weapons program or is that a risk it is responsible
to take?... The decision I took—and frankly would take again—was: if
there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass
destruction, we would stop him. It was my view then and that is my
view now.”

The substantive issues Blair raises are that there was only a “danger”
of Saddam Hussein “reconstituting” a weapons programme, not actually
possessing weapons of mass destruction or having used them against
Britain or its allies. Instead Blair declares that the “possibility”
of Iraq possessing WMDs justified war, given that he had used WMDs in
the past against the Kurds and during the Iran War.

When Blair was asked why Britain had not stuck to the “policy of
containment through the use of sanctions, he also echoed the US
justification for war that everything had changed after the 9/11
terror attacks. It was no longer possible to “take risks” that other
attacks might be mounted. When it was pointed out that Saddam Hussein
was not involved in 9/11 or with al-Qaeda, he countered that “rogue
states” could not be allowed to develop WMDs and that the link between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was that repressive and failing states
become "porous" and therefore easier for terror groups to infiltrate.

Blair essentially asserted that there need not be an actual threat,
only a potential threat, whether in respect to WMDs or terror attacks.

Even while formally denying that the war against Iraq was in pursuit
of regime change, and that he had agreed to such a war when meeting
with President Bush at his Crawford ranch in the spring of 2002, he
repeatedly gave tacit support to the US policy of pre-emptive war. The
option of removing Saddam had "always been there", he said. After
9/11, the view was that "we can't go on like this." Asked whether the
removal of regimes had become a "valid objective" of government policy
by 1999, he said it had not. But he added that President Bill Clinton
had come out in favour of regime change as early as 1998. Britain too
wanted to deal with the threat from WMDs and if this required regime
change, then "so be it."

Blair’s only attempt to avoid explicitly sanctioning regime change as
a policy was to insist that the issue was WMDs and that Iraq it was in
defiance of UN Resolution 1441, which he continues to claim gave
authority for war to be declared. There were many regimes that he
would "like to see the back of," but there has to be a basis of a
security threat to the UK, he said. Not once did he identify any such
threat to the UK, without which there was no basis for war. Instead
there was the claim against all evidence that Saddam "definitely had”
WMDs, or alternatively that he had “believed” it was “beyond doubt”
that Iraq had WMDs as he had stated in his notorious foreword to the
2002 intelligence dossier.

When it was pointed out that it was proved that Iraq possessed no WMDs
and that UN weapons inspectors under Hans Blix had not been allowed to
complete their work, Blair again fell back on the question of a
“potential”: The Iraq Survey Group, he said, found that Saddam had the
means and "know how" to restart a weapons programme and this alone
justified war. Sometimes it is important not to ask the "March 2003
question" but the "2010 question," he said.

Blair portrays the “2010 question” as being whether the world is
“better off without Saddam.” It is far more than that. His argument
amounts to a rationale for the major powers, and the US and Britain in
particular, launching wars of aggression with the aim of regime-change
whenever and wherever they see fit. This was, he said, of continued
importance. There are "very similar issues" with Iran as with Iraq
under Saddam Hussein, he proclaimed, and Britain was in a "far better
placed" to deal with this threat now.

Regarding the issue of UN authorisation and the requirement for a
second UN resolution, he baldly insisted that Resolution 1441—passed
in 2002—gave war legitimacy. But he was forced to acknowledge that the
US was always ready to act unilaterally. He too eventually gave up on
a second UN resolution because it was “very clear" that France and
Russia would not agree to such a resolution, which had "disintegrated”
the possibility of securing a majority on the Security Council. This
was an admission that Britain had also acted unilaterally because it
could not get what it wanted from the UN, which is in contravention of
the UN Charter.

Blair was left to fall back on the fact that he had secured the
approval of the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith for war on the basis
of 1441, repeatedly dismissing the fact that this was only at the
eleventh hour and was against the "consistent and united advice" of
the Foreign Office legal team that fresh UN authorisation was required.

Blair’s testimony, his kid-gloves treatment by the inquiry and his
closing declaration that he had “no regrets” over the war was greeted
with cries of “liar” and “murderer” by some of those in attendance.
With relatives of some soldiers who died in Iraq present, one woman
broke into tears.

His arrogant performance was facilitated by Blair’s knowledge that the
Chilcot inquiry is not merely toothless, but has every reason to skate
over the criminal character of his actions. Many commentators have
noted that there was not a single probing question put to Blair by the
panel. Not one of his startling and incriminating statements was ever
challenged. The discussion on the legality of the war, for example,
took just 35 minutes of the six hours of testimony. The inquiry’s
addressing of last month’s televised interview with Fern Britton was
typical. Britton had asked, "If you had known then that there were no
WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair replied that he would still
have invaded Iraq and “thought it right to remove” Saddam Hussein and
would have only “had to use and deploy different arguments about the
nature of the threat.”

The inquest allowed Blair to declare without challenge that he had not
used the words “regime change” and that “It was in no sense a change
of position. The position was that it was the breach of United Nations
resolutions on WMD. That was the cause. It was then and it remains.”

Nothing else should ever have been expected. The Chilcot inquiry was
set up by the government as a means of avoiding any genuine accounting
for Britain’s participation in the Iraq War. Even as yesterday’s
proceedings began, the inquiry chair Sir John Chilcot cautioned those
in attendance, “This is not a trial.” That it most certainly is not.
Not only does the inquiry have no legal powers, but it is staffed by
trusted representatives of British imperialism, members of the Privy
Council, some of whom have intimate ties to the government.

Chilcot himself sat on the 2004 Butler inquiry into the intelligence
used to justify the Iraq war, which refused to hold Blair or anyone
else accountable for the “dodgy dossier” culled from old Internet
reports or false claims such as the assertion that Iraq had weapons
that it could deploy against Britain within 45 minutes. It was a
report that allowed Blair to declare in parliament, “No one lied, no
one made up intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier
against the advice of the intelligence services.”

Sir Lawrence Freedman was a foreign policy adviser to Blair and a
staunch advocate of the Iraq war. The historian Sir Martin Gilbert
describes himself as a Zionist and his appointment to Chilcot was
criticised by four MPs because he compared George W. Bush and Tony
Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill in the same year he was appointed to
the Privy Council. He recently praised Prime Minister Gordon Brown for
being “totally committed to Israel.” Sir Roderic Lyne was British
ambassador to the Russian Federation and is an adviser to JP Morgan
Chase, which operates the Trade Bank of Iraq, and was a special
adviser to the oil conglomerate BP.

In addition to facing a toothless inquiry, Blair also knows that he is
not the only man with blood on his hands. During his testimony, he
noted that Goldsmith supported the war, as well as the cabinet, the
Conservatives and parliament as a whole. If he is proclaimed a war
criminal, then he will be in company with many other leading figures
in Britain and in the Bush administration.

For Blair and his fellow criminals to be brought to justice means
placing no confidence in empty charades such as the Chilcot inquiry
and in limited protests such as those organised by the Stop the War
Coalition. It demands the independent political mobilisation of the
working class in Britain, the US and internationally against the
warmongers heading the governments of the world’s major powers.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/blai-j30.shtml

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