Tony Blair’s Iraq War Confessions

by Paul Austin Murphy (November 2016)

My Journey. The title is partly ironic if one bears in mind that Blair did indeed – fairly recently (e.g., October 2015) – confess his culpability in regards to Iraq and what went on to happen there post-2003 (e.g., the rise of the Islamic State, etc.). Nonetheless, these aren’t the confessions I’m referring to.

Blame

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Tony Blair attempts to legitimise his position on Iraq by using a quote from an Iraqi woman – formerly a victim of Saddam Hussein. According to Blair:

Blair continues:

“After the fall of Saddam she returned to Iraq. She was murdered by sectarians a few months later. What would she say to me now?” (479)

Following on from that, and in the same speech, he singles out the hypocrisy of the “anti-war” Left. He said:

“There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children who die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which if he is left in power will be left in being.” (426)

Tony Blair also argues that, as philosophers put it, there was no necessary connection between removing Saddam Hussein and the mass violence which followed (mainly a couple of years later, according to Blair). As Blair himself puts it:

“The notion that what then happened was somehow the ineluctable consequence of removing Saddam is just not right. There was no popular uprising to defend Saddam. There was no outpouring of anger at the invasion. There was, in the first instance, relief and hope.” (465)

Again, should Blair have known all this would have happened in a (typical?) Arab country?

United Nations Resolutions

I always found it strange when the anti-war Left said, and still say, that the Iraq intervention was “illegal.” Firstly, many people say that without having any idea what they mean by the word “illegal” (in this context at least). Secondly, if the Iraq intervention was illegal, it was illegal according to the United Nations. This is odd: the vast majority of the anti-war Left reject the UN for being, amongst other things, a “cosy capitalist club.” (One should ask, for example, the Stop the War Coalition what it thinks of the UN outside the context of the Iraq intervention and, of course, Israel.)

     

Despite his grand plans, Tony Blair also often talked about both the US and UK needing to abide by UN resolutions. Or at least to do so in specific cases.

Blair himself gives the reasons as to why he went to war with Saddam Hussein in 2003. He asked: “What did I truly believe?” He answered his own question thus:

i) “That Saddam was about to attack Britain or the US? No.

ii) “That he was a bigger WMD threat than Iran or North Korea or Libya? Not really, though he was the only leader to have used them.

iv) “That he would leach WMD material and provide help to terrorists? Yes, I could see him doing that.

v) “Was it better for his people to be rid of him? For sure.

vii) “Would a new Iraq help build a new Middle East? I thought that possible.

Of course a person who already detests Blair will think that all the above is a big bunch of “Blairite nonsense.” Nonetheless, it is an interesting list of both good and bad reasons to remove Saddam Hussein:

i) In order to accept i), one would have to believe what Blair had to say on the 45-minute document, WMD, etc.

ii) No one can deny that Saddam actually used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs (Shia Muslims) in the south of Iraq. There is absolutely no doubt that if he had such weapons, he would have used them again.

iii) There is little doubt that he might have re-invaded Kuwait. In addition, he might have gone to war with Saudi Arabia and possibly resume a state of war with Iran. He would have continued to fund Palestinian terrorists too.

iv) He did fund terrorists, as stated in iii) above.

vi) Here Blair is admitting that he knew the invasion could have led to a long war with many casualties.

Resolution 1441

Thus, in this respect, talk of a second resolution was a con-trick. Or as Blair himself puts it:

Resolution 678

So what of that previous UN resolution?

According to Blair, the “previous UN resolution in the early 1990s specifically authorised the use of force to make Saddam comply with the UN inspection regime” (421). According to to the UN itself, Resolution 678

“authorised Member States to use all necessary means to uphold and implement its Resolution 660 (1990) of 2 August 1990 and all relevant resolutions subsequent to Resolution 660 (1990) and to restore international peace and security in the area.” (421)

Importantly, Resolution 678 (just quoted) “was still extant” in early 2003 – just before the war. This meant that “from the outset the authority to use force remained in being” (421). Despite that, Blair admits “that because of the passage of time, we should have a fresh UN resolution specifying that Saddam was in breach of the UN resolutions in order for 678 to be the basis of further action” (422).

The “Dodgy Dossier”

Looking back at the “dodgy dossier” when it was first released in September 2002, Tony Blair says that it was considered “dull and not containing anything new” (406). Nonetheless, it was indeed the case that the “infamous forty-five minutes claim was taken up by some of the media on the day but not referred to afterwards” (406). Despite that, it “was not even mentioned by [Blair] at any time in the future” (406). Blair continues:

“Of the 40,000 written parliamentary questions between September 2002 and the end of May 2003 when the BBC made their broadcast about it, only two asked about the forty-five-minutes issue. Of the 5,000 oral questions, none ever mentioned it. It was not discussed by anyone in the entire debate of 18 March 2003.”

In any case, Blair happily admits that the “claim turned out to be wrong.”

Dr David Kelly

This is where Dr David Kelly enters the picture.

2003 to 2005

In early 2003 (from March to May), Tony Blair says that “the reception accorded to the forces, if not that of garlands of flowers, was certainly more like that extended to a liberating force than an occupying one” (449). Blair goes into more detail. He writes:

“Towards the end of April [2003], a million Shia pilgrims attended the main Shia festival in Karbala, something Saddam had forbidden to them.” (449)

More generally, even by May of 2003, Blair claims that the “humanitarian disaster had not happened” (450). By that he meant that the “oilfields had been protected” and the “resistance of Saddam elements had crumbled”. Indeed: “The warnings of doom had been wrong.” (450) Blair admits, however, that between March and May 2003, 8,000 Iraqis had died.”

Moving on to July 2003, in Baghdad “the traffic was busy” and Mosul and Kirkuk “were generally clam” and the “Kurdish areas naturally felt liberated” (465).

The Iraq election was, of course, the most important event in of 2005.

At the end of January, 2005, Iraqis elected the Iraqi Transitional Government in order to draft a permanent constitution. There was some violence and a large-scale Sunni boycott. However, most of the eligible Kurds and Shia Muslims voted.

2005 to 2007

Tony Blair challenges the many opponents death-count of the Iraq War. Or at least from its beginning to 2005/6 or 2009. He writes that the usual figure which was banded around was 500,000 or 600,000 between, as I said, 2003 and 2009. The Brookings Institution, which came to a similar figure as the anti-war Iraq Body Count group, says that the figure was “just over 100,000 and 112,000” (380).

More relevantly:

“In 2006, according to the Iraq Body Count, almost 28,000 Iraqis died and almost as many were to die in 2007. Most were dying in terror attacks and reprisals, killed not by US or UK soldiers but in sectarian violence. But we, as the coalition forces, got the blame.” (472)

Blame: Al-Qaeda and Iran

As stated, Tony Blair blames much of the post-2003 Iraq violence on al-Qaeda and Iran. He tells us:

“Suppose we had not had al-Qaeda and Iran as players in the drama would it have been manageable? Without hesitation, the answer is yes.”

Of course very many commentators have said that the claims that al-Qaeda were in Iraq was false.

Clearly, then, the “US system” (as Blair puts it) claimed to have knowledge of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion of March 2003. Blair, on the other hand, uses the past tense when he says “it later emerged” that al-Zarqawi had a presence in Iraq. Two questions arise from this.

i) Did Blair accept the intelligence from the US system and see it as a reason for intervention?

ii) Why was Saddam so keen on having terrorists within his country?

Most Arab states, from Saudi Arabia to Jordan, come down hard on both home-grown terrorists and terrorists within their territory from other countries. In other words, what would Saddam have wanted or gained from al-Qaeda? (At least when he sent money to Palestinian suicide bombers, those bombers did their work a long way from Iraq itself.)

Blair also writes:

Blair elaborated on the imposition of democracy and freedom motive by saying that

“what [neoconservatism] actually was, on analysis, was a view that evolution was impossible, that the region [the Middle East and elsewhere] needed a fundamental reordering.”

“The categorisation of policy into foreign and domestic has always been somewhat false. Plainly a foreign crisis can have severe domestic implications, and this has always been so.” (223)

And in order to deal with these “foreign crises,” Tony Blair argued for a “new geopolitical framework.” That new geopolitical framework, according to Blair, “requires nation-building.” More relevantly, it

As stated, “nation-building” is a vital part of neoconservatism and Blair was very keen on such a thing. He believed/believes that the UK and US were/are in a “position of nation-builders.” That means that the UK and US “must accept that responsibility and acknowledge it and plan for it from the outset.” Though, he believes, none of this really occurred “in respect of Iraq” (474).

Neoconservatism, of course, pre-dates 2002. Nonetheless, that date – or speech – was an important one in the progression of neocon doctrine.

Blair himself says that he knew, at the time, that “Saddam could not be removed on the basis of tyranny alone” (400). What gave Blair a stronger reason than resisting tyranny, apparently, was “non-compliance with UN resolutions” (400). Nonetheless, it can be said that those UN resolutions on the subject of Iraq and Hussein existed in part for reasons of his tyrannous rule (which included the his past use of WMD).

Blair, in his autobiography, also comes clean about what can be called extreme neoconservatism. Or, at the very least, he comes clean about Dick Cheney.

Blair tells us that Cheney “was unremittingly hard line.” He was a man who “was not going down the UN route” (408). Then Blair becomes very honest indeed. He writes:

“[Cheney] would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. In other words, he thought the world had to be made anew, and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, not buts, no maybes.” (408)

Therein lies a fundamental problem with neocon foreign policy: possible intervention overload or overkill.

Afterwords: Blame Again

i) Either an Islamic Shia/Sunni state.

American Thinker, Think-Israel, Liberty GB, Broadside News, Human Events, Faith Freedom, etc.

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