A top political strategist for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended the war in Iraq as a “just war” amid calls from a leading weapons inspector for both Blair and President George W. Bush to face war crimes tribunals.
Despite apparently misleading the public as to the state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme in order to justify invading Iraq in 2003, there is no need for Tony Blair to apologise to the nation, John McTernan said, as he defended Iraq as a “just war.”
“What to apologise for? For liberating Iraq? Defending the United Nations’ weapons inspectorate regime?” Blair’s ex-director of political operations said on GB News this week.
When pressed on the political turmoil in the Middle East that resulted from the invasion and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, McTernan replied: “This the extraordinary situation of modern British politics. Tony Blair stood down as prime minister in 2007 and yet everything is apparently his fault.
“The Iraq War was a just war. The Iraq War, 20 years on, we know, was not an illegal war, it was a legal war, and the Iraq war was actually in defence of the United Nations weapons inspectors,” he said in reference to Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow in UN inspectors to determine whether or not he still had weapons of mass destruction.
In 2003, then-Prime Minister Blair, despite leading the left-wing Labour Party, joined forces with U.S. Republican President George W. Bush to whip up the frenzy for war against Iraq in the wake of the September 11th terror attacks. Blair, alongside Bush, falsely warned the public that Saddam Hussein was actively building up his cache of so-called “weapons of mass destruction”.
A dossier published by the Blair government at the time also pushed the false narrative that such Iraqi weapons could be used to strike UK territory within 45 minutes, which later turned out to be the fabrication of an immigrant taxi driver whose tall tale was picked up by UK intelligence operatives.
An independent report into the intelligence failures in the lead-up to the war found MI6, pressured by the Blair administration to find justifications for the war, submitted dubious information to the government despite having “reservations” about the info that was later fed to the public as gospel.
Blair’s move to throw the country into war on faulty intelligence resulted in over a million people pouring out on the streets in 2003, in what is believed to have been Britain’s largest political protest in history, while also seeing the left-wing leader voted as the worst living Briton that same year. The UK’s involvement in the war saw some 179 British soldiers lose their lives with thousands more injured and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left dead.
Meanwhile, as world leaders clamour for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to face war crimes trials for the invasion of Ukraine, the former head of the United Nations weapons inspector programme in the lead-up to the Iraq War has called for Blair and President Bush to face war crimes tribunals for their roles in pushing the war.
Swedish diplomat and the former chief of the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from 2000-2003, Hans Blix told MSNBC on Tuesday that “in principle” the two leaders should face the same treatment as Putin.
“I think they will not come, and nor will Putin come for a tribunal, but nevertheless holding a tribunal and going through the evidence will be of value.
“We hear very much from the Western world about the ‘rule-based international order’ – well that is the one that the US, the UK and the others broke in 2003.”
Blix, who personally oversaw the investigations into Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme and who openly challenged the U.S.-UK narrative at the time, said that while he believed Blair “had a feeling that this was an evil regime and that it was a moral thing to do away with it”, he nonetheless “did not represent the reality” when putting forth his justifications before the public.
He argued that there should be penalties for violating the “principle rule” of the UN charter prohibiting the “use force against the territorial integrity and independence of other states”.
Just over one month before the 2003 invasion, Blix openly contradicted the statements from both Bush and Blair, stating in his report to the UN Security Council that his inspectors had “not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions.”
It was later reported that as a result of his contradicting the war narrative, under the direction of then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the CIA began to monitor Blix in 2002 with the hopes of being able to undermine him, however, the investigation failed to uncover any ammunition against the Swede.
In the end, Western forces were unable to find the fabled weapons of massive destruction programme of Saddam Hussein, however, they did find some stockpiles of often expired or corroded chemical weapons that had been manufactured prior to 1991, with the vast majority of his weapons programme being destroyed before the 2003 invasion.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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