Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

Tony Blair says sorry for Iraq war and the rise of ISIS

Scroll to see replies

In the end, a clash between Islamism and Western values was always waiting to happen in this increasingly connected world, but Blair sure did make it happen far sooner and more brutally than it should have.

Are you trolling?

Reply 21

Castro Saint

Lol? It's way too late.

He needs to rot in a prison cell.

Reply 22

kka25

Original post by Bill_Gates

Of course but Christianity grew out of that. It's only when they stop going church and become full of hate and driven by profit incentive, do we see this mess unfold.

I sort of agree.

Reply 23

KingBradly

Original post by Bill_Gates

Are you trolling?

We're living in the least violent times ever and yet you think they're more violent because less people are Christian. You are pure, unadulterated, delusional insanity. You genuinely think terrorism is justified against the west because most people have grown out of Christianity. You are the monks that wanted heathens to be boiled in vats of oil in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublov. Please, never, ever call yourself a liberal. You couldn't be further from it.

Reply 24

viddy9

Blair is trying to limit the scope of the debate here, and has still failed to apologise for the war of aggression against Iraq; that is, the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" (to quote the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi officials were hanged.

You'll find much of the same language used by politicians, such as Ed Miliband, who were against the war: it was a "mistake", and a "poorly planned war", but if we had planned it better, then the "benign West" could have "brought democracy to" Iraq.

In reality, it wasn't faulty intelligence: it was a combination of lies, deceit, exaggeration and confirmation bias that was used to justify a pre-determined decision to invade and occupy Iraq in order to secure strategic resources such as oil. As Sir Christopher Meyer revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair, regime change was the primary objective of the aggression against Iraq, and had been planned long before the lie was circulated that the United States hadn't made a decision about whether to intervene.

And, as General Wesley Clark, former commander of the NATO forces in Kosovo, informs us: in actual fact, even in November 2001, the United States' military officials were "still on track for going against Iraq", but even this was being discussed as a wider five-year campaign to effect regime change in seven countries, "beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran."

This was not a humanitarian adventure, which is precisely why there was no planning for the aftermath, even after Western intelligence agencies, in January 2003, had warned Bush and Blair of the violence that would follow.

As long as Iraq was privatised and its oil secured, the consequences for the Iraqi people - and indeed our soldiers - were irrelevant. General John Abizaid, former commander of CENTCOM with responsibility for Iraq said, “of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that”, while Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel said this in 2007:“ People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are.” To round it off, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan added in his 2007 book: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”