{"id":56601,"date":"2016-07-15T15:46:32","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T22:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=56601"},"modified":"2016-07-15T15:46:32","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T22:46:32","slug":"tony-blair-a-war-criminal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/07\/15\/tony-blair-a-war-criminal\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Blair A War Criminal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0By Jonathan Power\u00a0Courtesy The Daily Mirror<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n
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The crime of aggression (planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression\u201d) was described by the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders as the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole\u201d.
\nPresident George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been accused by many as war criminals for starting the war against Iraq and, second, for not watching carefully enough to make sure that war crimes carried out by individual soldiers were not covered up, and for the torture that Bush initiated and Blair appeared to tolerate.<\/p>\n

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\nDid Blair lie over the reason for going to war with Iraq – the supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It depends on how you define a lie. If you define lie as saying this cat is black when in fact it\u2019s white he didn\u2019t on the big issues. But what he did do was to give the impression the cat was assuredly white when in fact it was a sort of greyish one.<\/p>\n

But as the just published government commissioned report made by a distinguished civil servant, John Chilcot, has made clear the caveats were left out of intelligence briefings and the presentation was polished by the Prime Minister\u2019s office. We in the public didn\u2019t have the pre-polished version but Blair did and he must have known in his mind, if not his heart, he was taking a gamble with the evidence. Why he was not prepared to persuade George Bush to wait a few more weeks until the evidence that Hans Blix, the Chief UN arms inspector, was in the midst of collecting on the ground inside Iraq, was available, was gravely irresponsible. Moreover, sanctions had Saddam Hussain boxed in. He was able to harm no one outside his country. The UN policing and inspecting, imposed after the first Gulf War, had led to ridding Iraq of all the weapons of mass destruction. The war itself had effectively wiped out Saddam\u2019s air force and navy and broken the back of his army.<\/p>\n

Evidence has come to light that Bush, with Blair\u2019s knowledge and support, had given the green light for going to war long before Blix got to work. Blair covered this up.<\/p>\n

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\nYes, the word lie\u201d cannot quite be used, although it was pretty near it. The Conservative Party, then in opposition, banded the word around. But in a related matter it can. It concerns the controversy over the naming of the Ministry of Defence\u2019s weapons\u2019 expert, David Kelly, who shortly after he was ousted in the press as the source of reports claiming the government\u2019s public dossier on Iraq\u2019s weapons had been sexed up\u201d, committed suicide. Although an inquiry exonerated Blair of any blame for precipitating the suicide, a BBC interview much later caught Blair out, lying in a way we could all understand. He told the interviewer, I don\u2019t believe we had any option, however, but to disclose his name [to the press].\u201d<\/p>\n

Until that interview Blair had always maintained that it was completely untrue\u201d that the government had done this.<\/p>\n

A.N. Wilson, the acerbic novelist and literary critic, wrote in the Financial Times in January 2014 that the obvious lesson is that the war brought more disasters than it solved. It is not one that we\u2019d expect many politicians to have learnt, for politicians get drunk on war; they enjoy it. Witness the obscene expression on Tony Blair\u2019s face, to this day, when he defends the invasion of Iraq\u201d.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s ambassador to the US during the run up to the war, Christopher Meyer, wrote a scathing attack on Blair, who he served, in his book DC Confidential\u201d. Meyer argued that Blair could have secured a delay to start military action and thus bought time for post-conflict planning that might have avoided much of the violence now plaguing Iraq. A delay would also have made it possible for Blix to properly finish his job and prove beyond all doubt that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Meyer wrote that Blair was seduced\u201d by the glamour\u201d of US power and failed to take tough negotiating positions. As a result, the Premier let himself be taken for granted\u201d by the White House. We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to do it alone\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meyer\u2019s colleague Rodric Braithwaite, former UK ambassador to Moscow and later chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee that prepares intelligence for the prime minister, wrote in the Financial Times in August 2006, whilst Blair was still in power, saying much the same thing: Blair\u2019s total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself. Who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?\u201d He then added: A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud\u2019s\u201d.
\nNever have I read such a vicious attack on a prime minister by a former top diplomat. Braithwaite continues: Stiff in his opinions, but often in the wrong, Blair has manipulated public opinion, sent our soldiers into distant lands for ill-conceived purposes and misused the intelligence agencies\u201d.
\nBlair and Bush were responsible for starting an unnecessary war that claimed half-a-million lives. Isn\u2019t this an evil big enough for them to be charged with war crimes?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

– See more at: http:\/\/www.dailymirror.lk\/112621\/Tony-Blair-A-War-Criminal-#sthash.CoYywTPY.dpuf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0By Jonathan Power\u00a0Courtesy The Daily Mirror The crime of aggression (planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression\u201d) was described by the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders as the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole\u201d. President George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}