Again, the issue of Tony Blair and the war on Iraq comes to light. The Inquiry committee headed by Sir John Chilcot is now in its fourth week, and with every new day, something new condemning the former Prime Minister and his partner in crime George W. Bush is revealed. And when the committee does not reveal something new on a given day, Blair himself does: in an interview with the BBC, Blair said that he would have gone to war in Iraq anyway, even if he had known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, because the world would be a “better place” without him. This talk is not merely a statement; it is a confession that Blair had lied to the Parliament and the British people when he, on the eve of the war on Iraq, affirmed that Iraq had WMDs, while it has now become certain that the British intelligence services concluded, on the eve of that same war, that Iraq was free of such weapons. Some of the families of the British soldiers who perished in the war refused to shake hands with Blair, and accused him of being a war criminal, and of having the blood of those killed on his hands. While the British suffered a few hundred casualties between Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on Iraq ended with one million Iraqis dead, and five other millions displaced, while the terrorist attacks are still taking place. Blair was complicit with the Bush administration which had committed the original crime; all I want to do today is draw the reader's attention to the “discovery” of 22 million “lost” e-mails between 2003 and 2005, or in other words, the time when the premises for the war were being falsified. The Obama administration found those lost e-mails, following the lawsuit filed by two civil groups against the Bush administration in 2007, and in which they demanded the unveiling of those disappeared messages. In my opinion, these e-mails are as significant as the Nixon administration tapes during the Watergate scandal. Furthermore, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former British Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote in the London-based newspaper The Times this week that Blair engaged in subterfuge with his partner George Bush, and in misleading the British people into a war that they did not want. He also said that the hypocrite [Blair] became megalomaniac, and was ensorcelled by Washington. Meanwhile, some of the other writers said that with Blair's confession that he would have gone to war even without the existence of WMDs, the Chilcot inquiry bears the responsibility of referring him to the judiciary for trial on counts of war crimes, especially when the international law prevents the intervention of one country in the affairs of another country with the aim of changing its regime, if the latter does not pose a direct threat to others. Moreover, Max Hastings said that letting Blair off the hook would be a betrayal to the entire British people. The threat posed by Saddam receded following the expulsion of his forces from Kuwait and the destruction of his military capabilities, to the extent that a no-fly zone was imposed over a large part of the Iraqi airspace, effectively rendering the North of Iraq, or Kurdistan, separate from Baghdad. Yet, Tony Blair suppressed a British Intelligence report dated 10/3/2003, i.e. only eight days prior to the invasion, and then claimed in the British Parliament that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Now, the Stop the War Coalition, which includes in its ranks many prominent public figures, wants Blair to be put on trial as a war criminal on the basis of his confession; nonetheless, I do not expect him to be tried in the end, because indicting him means indicting the system which he manipulated to lie and to take the country into war. Not only will Blair survive, but he will also thrive as he is now the wealthiest among all former prime ministers, and he seems to be on his way to raise millions more pounds through speeches, and through his consultancy services to banks in the United States and Europe. He received 4.6 million pounds to write his memoirs, and yet, he did not hesitate to deliver a speech in Azerbaijan in return for 90 thousand pounds, with the occasion being the opening ceremony of a factory. This in fact prompted a British commentator to say that Blair attacks all dictators except when the price is 90 thousand pounds. Furthermore, the Guardian launched a contest in which prize money was offered to anyone who can explain the motivation behind the companies and the accounts that Blair set up to administer his revenues. There seems to be a complex web of such structures, and I read that perhaps the aim behind these is to bequeath his wealth to his children while avoiding paying taxes. What angers and hurts me most about this whole issue is not that Blair has lied in order to take his country into the war, or that he is now earning millions of pounds despite his crime. Rather, what angers me most is that the entire campaign against Blair was motivated by the hundreds of Britons killed (and the five thousand Americans who perished because of Bush), while hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani victims perished without anyone demanding for justice for them, and not even the governments and peoples of their own countries. Arabs and Muslims have thus become like birds in a hunting season. They are even less lucky than some birds, since many species of the latter are protected and hunting them is strictly prohibited, while hunting other birds is only allowed in limited numbers, sometimes not exceeding two or three, in each hunting season. Then there are birds, or game, that are said to be in an open hunting season, or in other words, that there are no restrictions on the timing of the hunt or the number of birds. These include doves, and rabbits, because these species are plentiful and are thus not endangered. Arabs and Muslims are such doves and rabbits in an open hunting season against them. [email protected]
