Editor's Pick

Blair lied … thousands died

4 February 2010, 18:00 PM
EDITORIAL
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
FORMER British Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared before a British inquiry panel last Friday to defend his decision to go to war in Iraq. What an unrepentant Blair blared in his six hours of testimony was nothing we didn't hear already. Saddam was a menace, and it was necessary to deal with him after 9/11. We heard that one before. Then Blair offered a little iddy biddy speck of dust concession. Mistakes were made both before and after the invasion of Iraq, he said. We know that for sure. Believe me, I know what Blair means when he says that. I had once made a similar mistake many years ago. I woke up at night to the sound of footsteps in the house and jumped on the intruder with a cricket bat. The intruder turned out to be my cousin on his way to the toilet. Mistake of false alarm happens. But the invasion of Iraq wasn't a mistake made by mistake. It was calculated and cold-blooded. The United States and Britain jumped on Saddam as a means to their end. Every stone was turned to implicate Saddam. The story of his weapons of mass destruction was invented. He was purportedly linked to 9/11 attacks in order to prime him up as a target. He was also blamed for abetting and sheltering al-Qaeda operatives, which couldn't be proved till today. Everything was done to find, and I say it again, to find an excuse to go after the Iraqi menace. But was it really Saddam they were after, or was it Iraq that they wanted? Here comes the mother of all logic, which nobody likes to talk about. Couldn't Saddam be removed through an engineered coup or assassination, something the CIA and MI6 are capable of doing with surgical precision? Couldn't they avoid the loss of nearly a million lives and a disastrous war that has trashed a cradle of great civilisations? Understood, that would have given them Saddam, not Iraq. That's why the invasion was planned. Smart people cuddle the baby to fondle the mother. The United States and Britain went after Saddam to get into Iraq. They fattened this obedient Iraqi stooge as a menace, and slaughtered him when they were done. Such is the way of gangland crooks. An accomplice becomes a menace when he knows too much. What kind of a menace was Saddam? He let invaders take his country almost without firing a shot or flying a bomber. As it turned out, his big-mouthed propaganda minister was the deadliest weapon he had in his arsenal. He would probably go down in history as the only potentate who would be dragged out of a spider hole, looking like a street bum. How was Saddam a menace? Because he used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1987? Who provided those weapons to him? And, why didn't the US and Britain protest right after it happened? Besides, if that made Saddam a menace, then what about all the napalms the United States sprayed in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam? What about all the genocides the British committed in Asia, Africa and the Middle East? Saddam could be tried 20 years after his crime. Why not the US after 70 years, or Britain after 100? Tony Blair may not be the right person to ask. He may not have all the facts because he was simply doing George Bush's pleasure. The media in his own country taunted him as America's lapdog. He maintained that uncannily canine loyalty during the hearing last week. He saw nothing wrong in doing what he was told. Blair's only lucid moment came when he said that after 9/11, other nations, particularly Europe, didn't share the American and British concern about the threats posed, amongst other countries, by Iraq. Did he ever ask why? The answer is that the leaders of those countries didn't have Tony Blair and George Bush's jaundiced eyes. They had no axe to grind with Saddam. Nether did they have their eyes on Iraq. An Iraqi court manipulated by the invaders sentenced Saddam to death in 2006. Two years later last Friday, Tony Blair appeared in a different kind of court. This court was held in his own country, organised by his own countrymen who wanted him tried and jailed. A British mother, whose 19-year-old son died in the Iraq war, said that she felt revulsion at Blair's presence. "Actually, I felt sick," were her exact words. This column's title was a slogan shouted by demonstrators during the hearing. Taryn R Brochetta writes in her poem Worse Than Death, "You'll always be a disgrace/…Worse than death/When they hate you." If Blair was listening, Saddam whispered his revenge. Iraq taken, Saddam gone, he will be a disgrace for as long as he lives.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com.

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