So Blair would have invaded Iraq anyway
December 13th, 2009Blair’s admission that he would have invaded Iraq even without any evidence of WMD and would simply have found some other rationale to justify it really says it all. Presumably this confession comes at this time in order to preempt the obvious question when he appears before the Chilcot inquiry next month: “Since you were advised by MI6 and the JIC that evidence of Iraqi WMD was patchy and uncertain, how do you justify invading Iraq?” But getting his retaliation in first in this way opens him up to the even more serious charge that, whatever the evidence might indicate, he was determined for his own reasons to take Britain to war and was quite prepared to fall back on whatever other arguments he might be able to construct to persuade Parliament and the public. In other words, exactly as was said about the Bush Administration in the leaked Downing Street memo of July 2002, the facts were created to fit the policy which was already predetermined. This raises several key questions. Would he have got away with it if he had told the truth about the evidence then made available to him or come up with some other explanation to justify war? How can power be made properly accountable so that one man, any future Prime Minister, cannot deliberately dupe the nation into going to war on false pretences? And what actually were his real motives that led him repeatedly to lie to get his way?
