Weapons Of Mass Distraction

Tony Blair The War Criminal Suspect

It seems so long go, yet the ghastly wound the whole Iraq War inflicted not just on Iraq and the Middle East but to our own polity is still suppurating. It's so long ago that it dates back to even before the original entries of this blog. In many ways this blog began amid the rancour in the post-invasion days - what the hell were we doing there'd just how justified was this bit of military adventurism worth? The eventual hanging of Saddam Hussein in 2005 left a bitter after-taste that basically destroyed any pretence that the invasion was anything but the Bush family vendetta against Saddam and his family.

The Chilcot Report has landed and the world is awash with the notion that basically Tony Blair ignored expert advice and took the UK to war with Iraq. The ramification being, he is a war criminal. Certainly the Chilcot Report places him squarely as a suspect, if only the Hague could work up the gumption to sign an arrest warrant that Interpol can then put into action. Of course, Tony Blair is 'defiant'. One imagines that if an arrest warrant is issued by Interpol, the British establishment will tighten the huddle, standing should to shoulder claiming that Heads of States can't be brought to the Hague for War Crimes trials. It sure didn't stop Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic respectively ending up at the Hague so we'll sure see about that one.

Paul McGeough has a pretty good rundown over at the shake-my-head:

The former British Prime Minister earns a rare place in history's crosshairs as one of just two on the planet who might have stopped crazy man Bush – the other being Bush's hapless Secretary of State, Colin Powell. By not restraining the US president, each was an enabler in Washington's worst-ever foreign policy blunder. 

And the Australian PM? Howard's was a bit part, but it was important – as the patsy from Down Under, his eagerness to sign on made it possible for Bush to dress up his miscalculated need to go after Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as an imposing "Coalition of the Willing".

Now the arrogance – Donald Trump would call it stupidity – of this trio, in unleashing their mind-boggling incompetence on the world, is revealed in a damning critique by the Chilcot Report, which was released in London on Wednesday. 

Chilcot can write as he does, because of the exhaustive, forensic nature of his seven years' work – and I can concur because for much of the last 15 years I have seen, first-hand, the brutal impact of their ignorance and indifference, in particular, on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and consequentially, on populations great and small, from the Mediterranean all the way to the Hindu Kush.

Chilcot's unambiguous findings include:

• There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein
• A strategy of containment was preferable to military intervention
• There was no justified certainty to London's judgments on the severity of any threat imposed by Iraq's WMD
• Blair was warned explicitly, but chose to underestimate the consequences of the 2003 invasion
• Planning for managing post-Saddam Iraq was inadequate

In all of Chilcot's 12 volumes that comprise 2.6 million words, just a few hundred words in Blair's "I will be with you, whatever…" letter to Bush are as self-incriminating as they are revealing. 

And there it is, the cat is out of the bag at long last. The world's worst kept secret that was the outrageous conglomeration of pseudo-facts and blurry pictures and underwhelming presentations to the UN that Saddam Hussein was this massive threat with 'weapons of mass destruction'. He didn't exactly have nukes or Fuel-Air Bombs like the Americans, Europeans and Russians did, but he had mustard gas! ("Run for the hills!")

Yes, the Iraqis had mustard gas that they bought from the CIA who organised the German recipe  from World War I so Iraq could use against Iran in chelate 1980s. Of course after the Gulf War, UNSCOM went in to chase him around for them and he kept playing hide-the-sausage with his chemical weapons but ultimately they were found and blown up by Bill Clinton's Operation Desert Fox. Queue the irony because Operation Desert Fox only came about because Bill Clinton was neck deep in the breaking scandal of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. It's oddly ironic that all these years later the Democratic candidate for the POTUS elections this years Hillary Rodham Clinton. The more things change, the more they stay the same. You've been warned, America!

By the time George W. Bush and Tony Blair were pimping this notion that Saddam had really dangerous WMDs, Saddam Hussein's capability to actually use them were too far degraded to be any serious threat. And let's all be honest here; if there was one thing that was proven by the Gulf War, it was how far war technology had come, and if Saddam Hussein wasting to unleash his World War I tech of mustard gas, it sure as heck wasn't going to change the tide of the war. In short, the case of Saddam having WMDs worth calling WMDs were slight at best.
Yet in they went and the rest is history.

When Tony Blair denies culpability, the punchline that springs timing is "he who denied it supplied it." It's a shame the Iraq War is a much, much bigger tragedy than mis-told schoolyard fart jokes.

George W. Bush "Hasn't Read The Report"

Some things never change. George W. Bush has led off his defence with the fact that he hasn't read the Chilcot Report. As if his not reading it somehow invalidates its contents. It's curious how the mind of George W. Bush works to come up with that, but that's what we've got.

In a statement, Bush spokesman Freddy Ford explained that the former president hasn't had the chance to read the Chilcot report and that "despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously, President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power". 

"He is deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in the war on terror. And there was no stronger ally than the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair," Ford said.

Somehow principle of the law escapes George W. Bush as well as the obvious fact that just because he hasn't read it doesn't mean it's not right. Where do you start explaining this to a functional idiot - even if he was once POTUS?

The years have not been kind to his administration. There is no revisionism that makes his administration look any good. Even Donald Trump is running on the platform that the Iraq War was a bad idea This merely adds the frosting on the cake that was  his terrible two terms as POTUS, an early harbinger for the kind of politics that results in Donald Trump being the GOP nominee. Oh, and Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee. We're a morass of stupidity and mendacity, thanks to the slipstream of stupid that GWB created, that is still curdling politics around the world.

John Howard Defends The Indefensible

And this little guy is doing the same, sticking to form, for if there's one thing John Howard is known for is his ability to defend the indefensible, like Pauline Hanson the first time around. So here he is, John Howard defending his decision to go to war.

At the time, Mr Blair said intelligence showed that dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but after the invasion none were found.
Critics of the war have said that amounted to lies, but Mr Howard today disagreed with that assertion. 

"There was no lie. There were errors in intelligence, but there was no lie," he said.
Mr Howard said one of the most relevant findings to come out of the report was that there was no evidence to support claims that intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq had been doctored by Western governments. 

"The joint intelligence committee, which is the broad equivalent in the United Kingdom of the Office of National Assessments in Australia, accepted ownership of the dossier and agreed its content," he said.

The indelicate hair-splitting going on there is John Howard to a tee. The first claim that there was lie and there were errors in intelligence flies utterly in the face of the Chilcot Report. Just blindly insisting that his recollection is different doesn't make the findings exactly ... go away.

It's lovely how he states thing that just fly in the face of the Chilcot Report's salient points.  The Intelligence was there; Andrew Wilkie could tell you all about it.

Mr Wilkie, who quit as a government intelligence analyst in 2003 because of concerns about the invasion, said it had been "the biggest security and foreign policy blunder in our country's history".

He claimed neither the Lindt Cafe siege nor the 2005 Bali bombings would have happened if not for the 2003 Iraq invasion because it had "created the circumstances for the rise of the Islamic State". 

He accused then Mr Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer of taking the country "to war on a lie". He added there was a "pretty compelling case" that Mr Howard along with then US president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had committed war crimes and should face an international court. 

Mr Wilkie called for a full Australian inquiry and vowed to raise the issue with whoever became Australia's next prime minister when election counting has concluded.

Where intelligence wasn't was between the ears of these guys.

Also, here's Paul Keating on John Howard and his denials of culpability:

On Thursday evening, Mr Keating gave a scathing assessment of Mr Howard's justification, saying it was a "stubborn and unctuous denial" that should be "held in contempt by every thinking Australian". 

"Could you imagine the woebetidings of Howard and the Liberal Party, had it been [Bob] Hawke or I who had committed Australia to such an un-mandated assault on another country?" Mr Keating said in a statement. 

"We would never have heard the end of it. The Liberals would have been wringing their hands for decades. 

"The incompetent management of Iraq following the invasion, fractured that country and with it, Syria and the region around it, casting millions adrift from their lives and homes. A sea of refugees. Yet Howard has no shame of it. And no responsibility.
"Howard has visited on Australia the whole spectre of terrorism, through his craven and ill-judged support of the United States and its invasion." 

Mr Keating said Australia was "perhaps the most successful multicultural society in the world", with the settlement of a large Muslim population, but "John Howard put the torch to that". 

"Now we live perpetually with the spectre of terrorism and racial strife, visited upon us by his prejudices and lack of judgment," he said.
"In the face of the Chilcot Report, John Howard should atone for his actions and those of his government. He should, at least, hang his head in shame."

And that would be the least of it. 

'Here, Hold The Leash Lynndie'

For my musical mates and I, if there ever was a moment that politics fractured in the Western World, it would have been under George W. Bush's watch as POTUS. You don't expect the massive political edifice that is the US Government, the UK Government and even the Australian government to jointly descend into a Punch-and-Judy farce to pitch a war to the world. Frankly, we were horrified and appalled.

Which drove us to creative overdrive. The mid-2000s were fruitful with songs. One of which was our take on just how badly the farce went down. The Chilcot Report essentially underlines what were real concerns at the time of the invasion.
So, here's the song by Coelacanth to commemorate that horrible moment history:

That's right. If you look hard enough at the photos, you can almost imagine it.