Black Mamba1
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/07/blair-chilcot-war-in-iraq-not-blunder-crime
Tony Blair is damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time. The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating verdict on any modern prime minister.
Those of us who marched against the Iraq calamity can feel no vindication, only misery that we failed to prevent a disaster that robbed hundreds of thousands of lives – those of 179 British soldiers among them – and which injured, traumatised and displaced millions of people: a disaster that bred extremism on a catastrophic scale.
One legacy of Chilcot should be to encourage us to be bolder in challenging authority, in being sceptical of official claims, in standing firm against an aggressive agenda spun by the media. Lessons must be learned, the war’s supporters will now declare. Don’t let them get away with it. The lessons were obvious to many of us before the bombs started falling.
For what Chilcot has done is illustrate that assertions from the anti-war movement were not conspiracy theories, or far-fetched, wild-eyed claims. “Increasingly, we appear to have a government who are looking for a pretext for war rather than its avoidance,” declared the anti-war Labour MP Alan Simpson weeks before the invasion. And indeed, as Chilcot revealed, Blair had told George W Bush in July 2002: “I will be with you, whatever.”
This, as Chilcot puts it, was no war of “last resort”: this was a war of choice, unleashed “before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted”. Simpson said: “We appear to produce dossiers of mass deception, whose claims are dismissed as risible almost as soon as they are released.” And now Chilcot agrees that the war was indeed based on “flawed intelligence and assessments” that were not “challenged, and they should have been”. Nelson Mandela was among those who, in the runup to war, accused Blair and Bush of undermining the United Nations. Mandela lies vindicated. As Chilcot says: “We consider that the UK was … undermining the security council’s authority.”
So many warnings. A month before the invasion the US senator Gary Hart said that war would increase the risk of terrorism. “We’re going to kick open a hornet’s nest, and we are not prepared in this country,” he warned.
Consider this, from the anti-war Dissident Voice website a month before the conflict: “A US attack and subsequent occupation of Iraq will provide new inspiration – and new recruitment fodder – for al-Qaida or other terrorist groups, and will stimulate a long-term increased risk of terrorism, either on US soil or against US citizens overseas.” It is not to belittle the authors to point out this was a statement of the obvious, except to those responsible for the war and their cheerleaders. Then read Chilcot: “Blair was warned that an invasion would increase the terror threat by al-Qaida and other groups.”
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Tony Blair is damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time. The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating verdict on any modern prime minister.
Those of us who marched against the Iraq calamity can feel no vindication, only misery that we failed to prevent a disaster that robbed hundreds of thousands of lives – those of 179 British soldiers among them – and which injured, traumatised and displaced millions of people: a disaster that bred extremism on a catastrophic scale.
One legacy of Chilcot should be to encourage us to be bolder in challenging authority, in being sceptical of official claims, in standing firm against an aggressive agenda spun by the media. Lessons must be learned, the war’s supporters will now declare. Don’t let them get away with it. The lessons were obvious to many of us before the bombs started falling.
For what Chilcot has done is illustrate that assertions from the anti-war movement were not conspiracy theories, or far-fetched, wild-eyed claims. “Increasingly, we appear to have a government who are looking for a pretext for war rather than its avoidance,” declared the anti-war Labour MP Alan Simpson weeks before the invasion. And indeed, as Chilcot revealed, Blair had told George W Bush in July 2002: “I will be with you, whatever.”
This, as Chilcot puts it, was no war of “last resort”: this was a war of choice, unleashed “before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted”. Simpson said: “We appear to produce dossiers of mass deception, whose claims are dismissed as risible almost as soon as they are released.” And now Chilcot agrees that the war was indeed based on “flawed intelligence and assessments” that were not “challenged, and they should have been”. Nelson Mandela was among those who, in the runup to war, accused Blair and Bush of undermining the United Nations. Mandela lies vindicated. As Chilcot says: “We consider that the UK was … undermining the security council’s authority.”
So many warnings. A month before the invasion the US senator Gary Hart said that war would increase the risk of terrorism. “We’re going to kick open a hornet’s nest, and we are not prepared in this country,” he warned.
Consider this, from the anti-war Dissident Voice website a month before the conflict: “A US attack and subsequent occupation of Iraq will provide new inspiration – and new recruitment fodder – for al-Qaida or other terrorist groups, and will stimulate a long-term increased risk of terrorism, either on US soil or against US citizens overseas.” It is not to belittle the authors to point out this was a statement of the obvious, except to those responsible for the war and their cheerleaders. Then read Chilcot: “Blair was warned that an invasion would increase the terror threat by al-Qaida and other groups.”
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