Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair (shown) apologized for “mistakes” surrounding the Iraq war, and admitted that the controversial regime-change operation helped spawn the rise of the savage Islamic State (ISIS). Speaking to CNN ahead of the release of the official “Chilcot” report expected to be critical of the war and those responsible for it, the ex-leader of the leftist U.K. Labour Party expressed some remorse for multiple problems, including intelligence that was “wrong.” But he continued to assert that removing Iraqi dictator and former U.S. government ally Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do. And he continued lying to the public about various issues — especially about the fruits of intervention and the ongoing war in Syria.
Unsurprisingly, Blair did not mention the accelerating extermination of Christians across the region, also the fruit of internationalists’ interventionist scheming. Just in Iraq, estimates suggest that the Christian population has dwindled from some 1.5 million before “regime change” to potentially less than 200,000 today. Many fled to Syria, where they are now being butchered, beheaded, enslaved, and crucified by Islamist “rebels” armed, funded, and trained by the Obama administration and its “anti-ISIS” allies. By any definition, Middle East Christians are facing genocide. Hundreds of thousands of people have died across the region, too, and millions are now flooding into Europe.
Instead of admitting the tragic fruits of military intervention and globalist scheming, however, Blair, sounding detached from reality, claimed the “debate” surrounding the alleged merits of military intervention by Western globalists remains inconclusive. Incredibly, despite the demonstrable horrors unleashed throughout the Middle East and beyond by their interventionism, the former U.K. leader tried to play viewers for fools, claiming that the war in Syria was an example of what happens without intervention. In the real world, Syria is a prime example of the fruits of intervention, as The New American magazine and many others have documented.
“We have tried intervention and putting down troops in Iraq; we’ve tried intervention without putting in troops in Libya; and we’ve tried no intervention at all but demanding regime change in Syria,” Blair claimed, falsely, perhaps hoping CNN viewers would be so ignorant that they were unaware of Western meddling in Syria and the ongoing support for “opposition” forces dating back to at least the Bush administration. “It’s not clear to me that, even if our policy did not work, subsequent policies have worked better.” Of course, the policies were actually remarkably similar, so to expect different results would be idiocy or insanity defined.
In the real world, Blair’s outlandish attempt at deception notwithstanding, official U.S. diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks, some going back a decade, reveal various schemes by Washington, D.C., to foment unrest in Syria. From financing “opposition” groups and “media” outlets to deliberately fanning sectarian tensions, Western intervention in the nation runs deep. Even the propaganda surrounding alleged “spontaneous protests” that supposedly sparked the war was a fraud. And more recently, an official document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) revealed that Western powers, Sunni dictators, and the Turkish government have been knowingly supporting the jihadist opposition in Syria since at least 2012.
That same DIA document exposed the fact that those same powers backing the “opposition,” which the report shows they knew was led by al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, were also hoping to see the establishment of an Islamist “principality” in Eastern Syria. Today it is known to the world as the “Islamic State.” Both Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey have admitted the crucial role played by Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition in the creation and empowerment of ISIS. To this day, the Obama administration admits it is backing Syrian “rebels,” and according to Biden, there never was any “moderate middle.” Blair claiming that Syria is an example of Western non-intervention, then, is a flat-out lie.
On the rise of ISIS, Blair again tried to deceive, downplaying the role of Western powers and their allies in the rise of ISIS while pretending to accept some responsibility. He conceded only that there are “elements of truth” in the view, widely expressed by establishment analysts, that the 2003 U.S. government-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation were the principle causes of the emergence of ISIS. In reality, again, that only scratches the surface of globalist responsibility for the rise of the barbaric group.
The interview with globalist CNN host Fareed Zakaria, which aired on Sunday and is part of the “Long Road to Hell” series, also saw Blair make multiple apologies. “Of course you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015,” he admitted, stating the obvious. “But it’s important also to realize, one, that the Arab Spring which began in 2011 would also have had its impact on Iraq today, and two, ISIS actually came to prominence from a base in Syria and not in Iraq.” Again, though, Blair is trying to deceive the public — both the “Arab Spring” and ISIS are themselves the product of globalist machinations, with Obama emerging as one of the key champions of the Islamist revolutions from Egypt and Libya to Syria and beyond.
Speaking on weapons of mass destruction — a key allegation used to justify the war — Blair again tried to deceive. “I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought,” the former leftist prime minister said. Of course, he did not mention the fact that those WMDs used against Iraqis and Iranians were originally supplied by many the same globalists who later played a crucial role in ousting him — most notably, perhaps, the CIA, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others.
Indeed, even the notion that Bush, Blair, and others were acting on “intelligence” that later proved false appears to be a lie. Consider the story of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly, a United Nations WMD inspector in Iraq who also served as a scientist for the U.K. Ministry of Defense. Widely considered the world’s foremost expert in chemical and biological weapons, Kelly served as a proofreader on the British government’s “intelligence” report about Iraqi WMDs that supposedly justified the war. He disagreed with many of the false claims and told his superiors, only to be ignored and censored. Then he ended up dead in a suspicious “suicide” that many experts have concluded was actually a murder and half-baked cover-up.
Blair “apologized” for various “mistakes,” too, though he deceptively framed them as some sort of unforeseen blunder when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise. “I also apologize for some of the mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime,” he claimed. In the real world, though, it is now common knowledge that many of Bush’s advisors had warned about exactly what would happen — sectarian tensions flaring, extermination of Christians, and more. Even independent analysts warned publicly of what would happen long before the invasion began. The idea that Bush and Blair were just incompetent idiots duped by faulty intelligence and ignorance, then, falls flat as well.
Often described as George W. Bush’s “poodle,” Blair stuck by the decision to oust Hussein, a brutal war-mongering dictator who was installed and armed with WMDs by the same globalist establishment that eventually turned on him and had him executed. “I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam,” Blair said. “I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he’s not there than that he is there.” Why it is the legitimate business of London or Washington, D.C., to decide who ought to be “there” or “not there” was never explained.
More than a few critics, including among their own subordinates, have suggested that both Bush and Blair should face war-crimes charges for the lawless war in Iraq. Former U.S. terror czar Richard Clarke, for example, who resigned in 2003, said in a TV interview that Bush and Cheney probably perpetrated what amounts to “war crimes” in the unconstitutional attack on Iraq. He also suggested that they could be tried at the UN’s kangaroo “court” despite the fact that the U.S. government has never ratified it. The UN, of course, purported to “authorize” the war in the first place.
CNN’s Zakaria asked Blair how he felt about being referred to as a “war criminal” by critics of his decision to join Bush in invading Iraq and overthrowing its government. Blair responded that he did what he thought was “right” at the time. “Now, whether it’s right or not, that’s for — everyone can have their judgment about that,” Blair claimed, as if truth and crimes were mere subjective preferences with no basis in objective fact. The Labour Party’s current leader said in August that Blair could face war-crimes charges. Whether Bush and Blair will ever face trial over Iraq remains to be seen, but considering how many of their own minions globalists have sacrificed in the past (e.g. Saddam), it is hardly out of the question — especially if it could be exploited to boost the supposed legitimacy of the UN’s widely ridiculed “International Criminal Court” or some similar body.
Despite Blair’s fake apologies, the British people should not let him off the hook so easily. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the Iraq war was, in fact, a giant criminal operation, with Blair serving as one of its ringleaders. Nor should Americans let Bush and Obama sail off into the sunset after having launched unconstitutional illegal wars that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, thousands of U.S. servicemen killed, trillions of public dollars wasted, and a Middle East more unstable than at any point in recent memory. If crimes were committed, though, perpetrators should be held accountable by a jury in a court of law that protects due process rights — not in some UN kangaroo court packed with globalist stooges and representatives of brutal dictators.
Photo: AP Images
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Leaked British Documents Reveal Deception About Iraq War Entry
Under “Democracy,” Iraqi Christians Face Potential Extinction
Doubts Grow In Whistle-blower “Suicide”
UN Could Prosecute Bush for War Crimes, Says Ex-U.S. Terror Czar
Making of a Monster: How the U.S. Helped Build Iraq’s War Machine
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