He Almost Had Me

So Tony Blair is going to resign within a year as British Prime Minister, allowing his probable successor Gordon Brown to take over and head the Labour Party.

I’ll give Blair credit for holding his own during the memorable “question and answer” sessions with the prime minister facing Parliament (I think Clinton and many other presidents could have been able to handle the relentless give-and-take, but Dubya would have had no shot).

What I will probably end up remembering the most about Tony Blair is his statement to Parliament in February 2003, after the runup to the Iraq war had accelerated. It came on the heels of Dubya’s infamous State of the Union address the month before, as grotesque a document of wall-to-wall lies as mankind has ever seen.

The key difference that separated Blair’s speech from Dubya’s is that Blair made his case with what a reasonably intelligent adult could assume was the best evidence at hand, which made me think that somehow this escapade could be justified. I remember this passage in particular:

There are two paths before the UN. Yesterday the UK along with the US and Spain introduced a new Resolution declaring that "Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in Resolution 1441".

But we will not put it to a vote immediately. Instead we will delay it to give Saddam one further final chance to disarm voluntarily. The UN inspectors are continuing their work. They have a further report to make in March. But this time Saddam must understand. Now is the time for him to decide. Passive rather than active co-operation will not do. Co-operation on process not substance will not do. Refusal to declare properly and fully what has happened to the unaccounted for WMD will not do. Resolution 1441 called for full, unconditional and immediate compliance. Not 10 per cent, not 20 per cent, not even 50 per cent, but 100 per cent compliance. Anything less will not do. That is all we ask; that what we said in Resolution 1441 we mean; and that what it demands, Saddam does.

Of course, as it turns out, Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector assigned to verify that Saddam Hussein had destroyed the WMD he was reputed to have, took issue with Blair’s statement.

By the way, one of the most popular freeper defenses of the Iraq war is that it was OK because it wasn’t Blix’s duty to locate the WMD, only make sure that Saddam Hussein had complied, and he did not do that; it would be unrealistic for Blix and his team to search Iraq for the WMD instead. I think you can guess what I think of that argument when it comes to sacrificing the lives of Americans, troops of other countries also and innocent Iraqi nationals, given the fact that the rest of the rationale for the war has folded like toilet paper tissue in a stiff wind (and Scott Ritter shoots more holes in the Iraq WMD inspection process here, in particular this excerpt).

One of the key historical questions being asked is what if Hans Blix had been given the three additional months he had requested in order to complete his program of inspection? Two issues arise from this scenario: would Blix have been able to assemble enough data to ascertain conclusively, in as definitive a fashion as the Duelfer ISG report, a finding that Saddam's Iraq was free of WMD, and thus posed no immediate threat; and would the main supporters of military engagement with Iraq, the US and Britain, have been willing to accept such a finding?

The answer to the first point is that Blix and his team of inspectors were saddled with a complicated list of "cluster issues", ironically assembled by Duelfer during his tenure as head of the UN weapons inspectors, that would have needed to be rectified for any finding of compliance to be made. These "clusters" postulated the need for Iraq to prove the negative, something that is virtually impossible to do. We now know that Iraq's WMD were destroyed in 1991. The problem wasn't the weapons, but verification of Iraq's declarations. The standards of verification set by Duelfer-Blix were impossible for Iraq to meet, thus making closure on the "cluster" issues also an unattainable goal. This situation answers the second point as well. Since the inspection process was pre-programmed to fail, there would be no way the US or the UK would accept any finding of compliance from the UN weapons inspectors. The inspection process was rigged to create uncertainty regarding Iraq's WMD, which was used by the US and the UK to bolster their case for war.

My point is that Blair didn’t argue links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda existed, didn’t invoke the image of a mushroom cloud over New York City, didn’t hold up a vial of what was supposed to be sarin at the U.N. one day and state that Saddam Hussein could poison us all with it (it was really baking powder), and didn’t allege that Saddam Hussein had the capability to deliver WMD from some kind of unmanned aircraft that an Air Force general described as “a weed whacker with wings.”

I think Blair was duped by Bushco and is paying the price for it, as he should. I consider Blair to be further collateral damage from the illegal Iraq war. It’s sad that that is likely to be his epitaph, but it was his choice.

Update: Speaking of Iraq, I don't know how anyone can read this story and not favor Impeaching Bush for lying this country into the Iraq war.