Last Straw

Tony Blair has admit­ted on TV his inten­tion was to com­mit the inter­na­tional crime of uni­lat­eral war for regime change. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Asked if he would have gone on had he known there was no WMDs, he replied:

I would still have thought it right to remove [Sad­dam Hus­sein]. I mean obvi­ously you would have had to use and deploy dif­fer­ent argu­ments about the nature of the threat.

Two world wars, tens of mil­lions dead, the sub­sequent entrench­ment of inter­na­tional law under the Charter of the United Nations and Tony Blair thinks that the decision to go to war should come down to his own per­sonal beliefs about right and wrong.¹

I sym­path­ise with the people who were against [the war] for per­fectly good reas­ons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision.

But he didn’t. All he had to do was com­ply with inter­na­tional law. Not doing so has makes him a war crim­inal. The UN Charter out­laws the use of force with only two excep­tions: self-defence in response to an armed attack and action author­ised by the secur­ity coun­cil. Regime change is not a jus­ti­fic­a­tion for war, for all the reas­ons we’ve learnt over the past century.

So, twelve years of crip­pling sanc­tions, half a mil­lion Iraqi chil­dren dead as a res­ult, a full-blown inva­sion and occu­pa­tion, an unknown num­ber dead because the invaders didn’t bother to count those they murdered, and Sad­dam Hus­sein and his fate­ful decision to con­clude the nation­al­isa­tion of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972 is gone and the cap­it­al­ist “gold rush” on Iraqi oil is back under way.

1. You might argue that by say­ing “remove” Sad­dam Hus­sein he didn’t neces­sar­ily mean through armed con­flict but, as we know, Blair did indeed know that there were no WMDs and did indeed carry on to invade Iraq. [↩]