Australian whistleblower David McBride just made the following statement on Twitter:

“I’ve been asked if I think the invasion of Ukraine is illegal.
My answer is: If we don’t hold our own leaders to account, we can’t hold other leaders to account.
If the law is not applied consistently, it is not the law.
It is simply an excuse we use to target our enemies.
We will pay a heavy price for our hubris of 2003 in the future.
We didn’t just fail to punish Bush and Blair: we rewarded them. We re-elected them. We knighted them.
If you want to see Putin in his true light imagine him landing a jet and then saying ‘Mission Accomplished’.”

As far as I can tell this point is logically unassailable. International law is a meaningless concept when it only applies to people the US power alliance doesn’t like. This point is driven home by the life of McBride himself, whose own government responded to his publicizing suppressed information about war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan by charging him as a criminal.

Neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair are in prison cells at The Hague where international law says they ought to be. Bush is still painting away from the comfort of his home, issuing proclamations comparing Putin to Hitler and platforming arguments for more interventionism in Ukraine. Blair is still merily warmongering his charred little heart out, saying NATO should not rule out directly attacking Russian forces in what amounts to a call for a thermonuclear world war.

They are free as birds, singing their same old demonic songs from the rooftops.

Tony Blair calls for NATO not to rule out military intervention against Russia in Ukraine

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 15, 2022

When you point out this obvious plot hole in discussions about the legality of Vladimir Putin’s invasion you’ll often get accused of “whataboutism”, which is a noise that empire loyalists like to make when you have just highlighted damning evidence that their government’s behaviors entirely invalidate their position on an issue. This is not a “whataboutism”; it’s a direct accusation that is completely devastating to the argument being made, because there really is no counter-argument.

The Iraq invasion bypassed the laws and protocols for military action laid out in the founding charter of the United Nations. The current US military occupation of Syria violates international law. International law only exists to the extent to which the nations of the world are willing and able to enforce it, and because of the US empire’s military power — and more importantly because of its narrative control power — this means international law is only ever enforced with the approval of that empire.

This is why the people indicted and detained by the International Criminal Court (ICC) are always from weaker nations — overwhelmingly African — while the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever. It is also why in 2002 the Bush administration instituted what became known as the “Hague Invasion Act”, saying military force will be used to liberate any US or US-allied military personnel from any ICC attempt to prosecute them for war crimes. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-WWII U.S. president would have been hanged.

This is also why former US National Security Advisor John Bolton once said that the US war machine is “dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply,” which “does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional.”

Bolton would certainly know. In his bloodthirsty push to manufacture consent for the Iraq invasion he spearheaded the removal of the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a crucial institution for the enforcement of international law, using measures which included threatening the director-general’s children. The OPCW is now subject to the dictates of the US government, as evidenced by the organisation’s coverup of a 2018 false flag incident in Syria which resulted in airstrikes by the US, UK and France during Bolton’s tenure as a senior Trump advisor.

The US continually works to subvert international law enforcement institutions to advance its own interests. When the US was seeking UN authorization for the Gulf War in 1991, Yemen dared to vote against it, after which a member of the US delegation told Yemen’s ambassador, “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” Yemen lost not just 70 million dollars in US foreign aid but also a valuable labor contract with Saudi Arabia, and a million Yemeni immigrants were sent home by America’s Gulf state allies.

Simple observation of who is subject to international law enforcement and who is not makes it clear that the very concept of international law is now functionally nothing more than a narrative construct that’s used to bludgeon and undermine governments who disobey the US-centralized empire. That’s why in the lead-up to this confrontation with Russia we saw a push among empire managers to swap out the term “international law” with “rules-based international order”, which can mean anything and is entirely up to the interpretation of the world’s dominant power structure.

It is entirely possible that we may see Putin ousted and brought before a war crimes tribunal one day, but that won’t make it valid. You can argue with logical consistency that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong and will have disastrous consequences far beyond the bloodshed it has already inflicted, but what you can’t do with any logical consistency whatsoever is claim that it is illegal. Because there is no authentically enforced framework for such a concept to apply.

As US law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.

You don’t get to make international law meaningless and then claim that an invasion is “illegal”. That’s not a legitimate thing to do. As long as we are living in a Wild West environment created by a murderous globe-spanning empire which benefits from it, claims about the legality of foreign invasions are just empty sounds.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

After the US troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan “government” they’d spent twenty years pretending to nation build with was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history.

But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of “obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’,” bloviating about “Radical Islam,” and asking, “has the West lost its strategic will?”

Read Tony Blair’s article on Afghanistan and what needs to happen next.https://t.co/WLy5UcxMpU

— Tony Blair Institute (@InstituteGC) August 22, 2021

It’s essentially a 2,750-word temper tantrum, authored by the same man who fed the British people this load of horse shit after 9/11:

The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.

This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

Blair promised that by helping the Bush administration usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism they could seize this unfortunate event to “re-order the world” in a way that would benefit all the world’s most unfortunate people. Mountains of corpses and tens of millions of refugees later it is clear to anyone with functioning gray matter that this was all a pack of lies.

And now, like any sociopath whose reputation is under threat, Blair has begun narrative managing.

Tony Blair is paid around £1m a year as an international advisor to an organisation called the Mubadala Development Fund in the UAE

It has been reported that Mubadala has been developing a plan to mine US$1 trillion worth of resources in Afghanistan.

Skin in the game?

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) August 22, 2021

Tony Blair is being paid £9m to advise the Saudi Arabian government. Yesterday the Saudis blew up a bus full of schoolchildren in Yemen. Reports suggest at least 29 children died. That works out at about £300,000 per child. Who says crime doesn’t pay? https://t.co/hi4m5H79Bj

— Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥 (@WarmongerHodges) August 10, 2018

This is also why George W Bush has released his own statement through his own institution. It’s also why Bush-era neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are doing media tours condemning the withdrawal, and why Bill Kristol, whose neoconservative influence played a key role in the Bush administration’s military expansionism, is now promoting the arming of proxy forces against the Taliban. They’re narrative managing.

They’re narrative managing because they’ve been proven wrong, and because history will remember them as men who were proven wrong. Their claims that a massive increase in military interventionism would benefit the people of the world have been clearly and indisputably shown to have been false from top to bottom, so now they’re just men who helped murder millions of human beings.

It’s about preserving their reputations and their legacies. No no, we’re not mass murdering war criminals, we are visionaries. If we would have just remained in Afghanistan another twenty years, history would have vindicated us. If we would have just killed more people in Iraq, it would be a paradise right now. The catastrophe cannot possibly be the fault of the people directly responsible for orchestrating it. It’s got to be the fault of the officials who inherited it. It’s the fault of the ungrateful inhabitants of the nations we graciously invaded. It’s the people and their imbecilic desire to end “the forever wars”.

But of course it’s their fault. None of this needed to be this way, it was made this way by stupid people with no functioning empathy centers. They can try to re-frame and spin it however they like, but history will remember them for the monsters they are. The saner our society becomes, the more unforgiving our memory of their crimes will be.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

U.S. President Donald Trump hailed the normalization of diplomatic ties between on the one hand the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and on the other Israel, as the “dawn of a new era” of peace in the Middle East. Trump said the formal detente signed on the White House’s South Lawn would “change the course of history”. He may be right, for altogether different reason.

Trump added that several other Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, would soon follow suit, thereby ending decades of Cold War between Arabs and Israelis.

The pomp and ceremony this week has only a veneer of significance. The UAE and Bahrain are the third and fourth members of the 22-member Arab League to have moved to normalize ties with Israel, following Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. The decades-long regional stand-off stems from two wars in 1967 and 1973 and the ongoing Israeli annexation of Palestinian land.

Arab League members Syria and Lebanon remain critical of the new move to normalize ties with Israel, as do Muslim-majority nations Iran and Turkey which slammed the deal this week as a sellout of Palestinian rights. Palestinians themselves were united in denouncing the UAE and Bahrain for “stabbing in the back” their aspirations for a future independent state.

The UAE and Bahrain contend that their recognition of Israel is contingent on the Israelis halting plans for further annexation of Palestinian lands which the Trump administration has green lighted in its so-called Middle East “Vision for Peace” plan, cooked up by Trump’s ardently Zionist son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Palestinians and other critics say the push to normalize ties with Israel by the Gulf Arab states is merely legitimizing illegal occupation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended the signing this week at the White House, has previously rebuffed claims that the latest Gulf Arab accords would stop future annexation.

Cynics have also pointed out that a major motive for Trump’s supposed peace deals is his desire to boost U.S. weapons sales to Arab nations, in particular the new-generation F-35 stealth fighter jet.

With a touch of Orwellian irony, the so-called new dawn of peace is more a new opening for flogging more American war machines.

But the emergence of Tony Blair as an éminence grise figure in the Arab-Israeli realignment would confirm that the whole hoopla is a sham no doubt connected to Trump’s reelection bid in less than two months. The former British prime minister was in attendance at the ceremony this week at the White House and feted as a crucial mediator in brokering Trump’s deal. One Republican pollster was quoted as saying Blair was viewed as a “rockstar” with delegates “lining up to have photos with him.”

As architect of the Iraq War, launched in 2003 along with GW Bush, the idea of Blair having anything to do with facilitating peace is a stupendous oxymoron. Arguably he should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Following Blair’s resignation as British premier in 2007, he immediately acquired a United Nations’ sinecure as Middle East Envoy, tasked with finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After eight years in that post, Blair achieved absolutely nothing for the advancement of Palestinian rights.

However, what Blair did “achieve” was a reputation for using his “peace envoy” status to promote personal business interests across the region. He became a consultant for Wall Street giant JP Morgan Chase. His so-called “non-profit” think-tank Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is bankrolled by the U.S. State Department and the rulers of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. He counts himself as a “close friend” of Israel’s Netanyahu.

So what motivates Blair is less the peace of a region and more a lucrative piece of the action. A more suitable moniker would be “éminence grease”.

Blair’s cozy relations with Arab monarchs make him an ideal broker to smooth over public relations with seeming genteel English gravitas. In that regard, his services to Trump is about selling an illusion of peace-making which is a reprise of his facilitating role for GW Bush in selling the cause for war against Iraq.

The paradox is that in the GW Bush episode the aim was openly to launch a war. In Trump’s episode, the packaging may be wrapped in the rosy rhetoric of peace, but the content would seem to be still war. This time, war against Iran.

Blair has emerged as a keen advocate of a U.S.-led alliance to confront what he calls Iran’s “totalitarianism”.

His money-grubbing institute published a paper last year stating: “The totalitarian and divisive worldview born from the 1979 Iranian Revolution… has been a driving force of instability and violence for years.” It added: “Unless Western leaders can learn the lessons from the 1979 revolution, the threat Iran poses will continue to grow.”

Blair has also backed the Trump administration in undermining the international nuclear accord with Iran. That 2015 accord has infuriated Israel as well as the Sunni Arab regimes led by Saudi Arabia all of whom want to see it binned. Indeed, the U.S.-led anti-Iran axis of Israel and the Gulf Arab oil sheikhdoms has paved the way for formal realignment, a realignment for war against Iran, in which the historic Palestinian cause has become a mere trifle to be thrown under a bus.

Tony Blair is not about peace in the Middle East. His involvement with the Trump administration is about selling war against Iran.

Johnson has transformed the Conservative Party into one that follows him in virtual lockstep. A similar situation has occurred with the Republican Party in the United States. It has been transformed into a party that worships Donald Trump as a cult leader. Traditional Republicans like former governors John Kasich, William Weld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Ridge, Christine Todd Whitman, and other former governors, senators, and US House members no longer have a political home in what has become the “Trump Party,” one that eschews the policies of past Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush.

Britain’s other major party, Labor, returned to its traditional socialist roots under leader Jeremy Corbyn. A series of “New Labor” leaders, including Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Ed Milliband, transformed Labor into a pro-multinational corporation and free trade party barely distinguishable from the traditional Tories. After being elected leader of Labor in 2015, Corbyn faced a media and political disinformation onslaught that called him everything from a Communist to an anti-Semite. That barrage of lies resulted in Labor suffering its worst defeat since 1935 in the December 12 general election. Chomping at the bit to restore Labor to its pro-corporate/pro-Israel past, former Prime Minister Blair warned against the “hard left” policies of “Corbynism.”

Blair drove additional knives into Corbyn in stating that Corbyn “personified an idea, a brand of quasi-revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy with deep hostility to western foreign policy, which never has appealed to traditional Labor voters, never will appeal and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.

No sentient political party goes into an election with a leader who has a net approval rating of -40 percent.”

Yet, it was Blair who was behind the concerted media and propaganda campaign against Corbyn. Corbyn suffered from the same sort of insidious attack from Labor’s right-wing tendency as that suffered by past traditional baseline socialist Labor politicians like Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, and Tony Benn. Individuals like Blair and his ilk conveniently forget that the Labor Party was formed at the turn of the last century by colleagues of Karl Marx, someone who definitely saw no place in a workers’ party for those that sought their exploitation.

After the end of World War II, Labor’s right-wing faction saw to it that any Labor leader that voiced opposition to NATO and American foreign policy was drummed out of the party’s leadership ranks. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s opposition to the Vietnam War helped seal his fate, as did Bevan’s initial opposition to Britain’s nuclear weapons. Foot favored unilateral disarmament, resulting in Kinnock taking over as Labor leader after the party’s electoral defeat in 1983. Benn always remembered Labor’s socialist past and it prevented him from ever becoming prime minister. Not only did Britain’s MI-5 and MI-6 intelligence services constantly place Benn under surveillance, but the US Central Intelligence Agency propaganda, distributed in British media, made false allegations that Benn was a Soviet KGB agent. The same sort of CIA disinformation targeted Wilson, Foot, and Bevan.

When Corbyn attempted to restore Labor’s former mayor of London Ken Livingstone to Labor party ranks, Corbyn was accused of being an anti-Semite, merely because Livingstone compared some of Israel’s policies against the Palestinians to those of the Nazis in occupied nations. Livingstone, nicknamed “Red Ken” by his detractors, was seen as part of the same Labor left faction as Corbyn. There are a number of Labor officials vying to succeed Corbyn. Although they have been part of Corbyn’s team, most of these heirs apparent are negotiating for support from the Blairite faction. Chief among them is Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s Shadow Brexit Secretary, who the anti-Corbyn faction favors as the new Labor leader.

Benn’s recognition of Labor’s Marxist roots was demonstrated by the following passage:

“The Communist Manifesto, and many other works of Marxist philosophy, have always profoundly influenced the British labor movement and the British Labor Party, and have strengthened our understanding and enriched our thinking. It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labor Party without Marx as it would be to establish university faculties of astronomy, anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously.”

Australia’s governing Liberal-National Coalition has steadily moved to the extremist right under two fundamentalist Christian prime ministers – Tony Abbott and the current prime minister, Scott Morrison. Similar to the leadership of the US Republican Party and the Conservative Party of Canada, the “Coalition,” as it is known, has become a home for xenophobes and climate change deniers. Morrison’s ignorance of the dangers of climate change were recently on full display as the hottest temperatures in recorded meteorological history were registered in Australia. As Australians with respiratory and other health issues suffered from the extreme heat and as a massive outbreak of brush fires swept Australia, Morrison decided to cut short his mid-December family vacation in Hawaii. Unlike past Coalition prime ministers, including Malcolm Fraser and Malcolm Turnbull, Morrison is totally beholden to Australia’s mining interests, including the coal industry. As far as Morrison is concerned, there is no climate change and Australians suffering from its effects can be damned.

As for the Australian Labor Party, it has not exercised a socialist mandate since 1975, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was ousted in a constitutional coup brought about by the CIA, Australia’s security services, and the Australian Governor-General. Never again would there be a Labor government like that of postwar Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who attempted to nationalize Australia’s banks, or Whitlam, who moved Australia into a more non-aligned foreign policy. Today, Australia’s Labor and Coalition parties differ only slightly in foreign policy and seek campaign donations from the same vested business interests and consortiums.

The steady drift of traditional conservative parties to the far right and neo-fascism and the insistence by traditional social democratic and working-class parties to adopt pro-business and anti-labor positions is why large blocs of voters feel abandoned. It is precisely because labor and social democratic parties have purged from their dogma any mention of state control of utilities, transit, health care, and other key public sectors that they are now at their lowest electoral strength in recent history in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, and Finland. And it is because traditional conservative parties have eschewed bedrock principles of conservation and environmental protection; multilateralism as practiced by postwar conservative leaders; and inflation-free economic stability that has many conservatives wandering aimlessly between the neo-fascists who have taken over conservative parties and progressive parties that do not seem to stand for anything.

The point here is that the chaos in London is no parochial British, Brexit affair. It reflects something wider at work. Recognition of ‘plate’ movement already has been politically leveraged in the US (by Trump), and almost certainly the similar symptoms will present themselves across Europe too. These symptoms are here now (though they may not always be recognised as such, as one commentator already has noted – see later).

“The last Conservative MP in the seat of Newcastle-under-Lyme was Charles Donaldson-Hudson”, Daniel Capurro writes. “A JP [a local Judge] and member of the landed gentry, he held it from 1880 to 1885. Yet, when the autumn election finally arrives, Newcastle [a Labour bastion, ever since] will be one of the Tory party’s top target seats. The targeting of such seats is not the madness it might first appear. It is, in fact, part of Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings’ masterplan for the future of the Conservative Party”.

A little back-context is required: In the late 1990s, the then leader of the Labour Party started to move the Party away from its roots in the Trade Union and labour rights movement, towards a ‘Washington Consensus’, neo-liberal stance, as epitomised by Tony Blair (who was drawing on the then Clinton winning experience). Labour had begun to understand that the endorsement of Wall Street and the City of London was a perquisite for any return to Office, and that in any case, the factory-based politics of the past, in this shiny, new cosmopolitan world of the urban and suburban élite, simply would not propel the movement into power.

Labour, at that moment, wished to become a typical Euro Centre-Left party, representing middle class voters who wanted to display their decency by voting for a party that espouses some, albeit quite restricted, notion of ‘social concern’.

But, as the preoccupations of the élite, metropolitan consciousness turned more and more ‘globalist’-espousing ‘disadvantaged’ groups, such as ethnic minorities, women, and gender non-conformists, rather than show empathy for the stresses of ordinary working men and women (whom they came to regard with contempt, as Ludite backwoodsmen and racists), so the Party’s internal gap opened wide.

This is the opening Cummings and Johnson have espied. The new demographics they believe, require rewriting the electoral landscape. Out is the Conservative electoral coalition of the recent past, which married urban and suburban social liberals with rural small-c conservatives (a marriage which was itself a cause of an internal tension, not dissimilar to that in the Labour Party – and as witnessed by the Tory 21 ‘Remainer’ rebels who were expelled from the Party). Centrism, in short, is no longer seen as advantageous. And, in comes a working-class, socially-conservative politics targeted at non-graduates in the Midlands and the North of England – i.e. at the Sixty-percenters as a whole.

“In this viewing, an extraordinary array of Labour seats [most of whom voted Leave] from Wrexham and Wakefield to Stoke-on-Trent Central and North could tumble into the Tory column on election night, and send Mr Johnson into Downing Street with a commanding majority”, Capurro suggests. Yes, the price may involve the loss of Conservative seats in London and the South East, but in practice the former electoral prize contested by both the main parties – the urban middle class – is itself suffering stress from globalist dynamics, as it bifurcates into the truly rich élite, and a struggling, belt-tightening Middle Class.

The Establishment élite sees the threat: This might – in the long game – end with the enthronement of the politics of the ‘deplorables’, and the eclipse (or ‘obsolescence’ in President Putin’s terminology) of liberalism.

Hence the bitter counter-revolution being mounted by the Establishment in the UK Parliament and the media. And hence the deep Establishment distrust of Johnson, for although he may represent the epitome of Establishment in one sense, he has always tried to position himself as the archetypical ‘outsider’.

The Northern working-class votes are those which Johnson wants to capture most dearly. Dominic Cummings knows from the ‘Leave’ campaign, and from Trump’s successes in US states not traditionally regarded as voting ‘Red’, that a focus on the culture ‘war’ – on issues such as transgender rights and ‘political correctness’ – can mobilise today’s voters, more than traditional family party affiliations. Cummings precisely intends to lever the toxicity of globalism not just with the ‘deplorables’, but with a Middle Class increasingly fearful of slipping into the abyss.

There are many problems to this evolving contestation of prevalent liberal millenarianism. A major problem is much more subtle, and less amenable to solution, than just the outbreak of ‘culture war’ – and it applies to all western economies: How – in this post-heavy-industry era – to maintain large-scale employment particularly for those with low (or no) skills.

Globalism unquestionably has contributed to the off-shoring of jobs to other parts of the globe, but the reality is that many of those jobs are not coming back ‘home’. They are assimilated elsewhere. They are lost for good.

The ‘new normal’ being touted by the US Administration is one that is not particularly concerned to re-capture, and bring home, mundane manufacturing processes. It wants for the US, the ultra high-tech end of manufacturing mainly, or only. This, it views, will represent the commanding heights of the new economics. And this view evidently is orientated more towards the objective to maintain US hegemony, than rather than for concern for the welfare of the US people. Such an economy – even if it were feasible to achieve – concentrated in the ultra high-tech, would face the issue of the 20% of Americans who then would become ‘unnecessary’ – surplus to needs, as it were. Do we really want to go there …?

Globalisation has had a great deal to do with this, but the decline of the factory-based economy in the West lies right at the very heart of our troubled political landscape (as Trump’s appeal to the ‘deplorables’ from a stance on the Nationalist-Right, rather than the globalist Left, strongly suggests).

Thibault Muzergues, European director of the International Republican Institute, warns that a structural divorce between the people and their representatives is in play. This happens once state institutions are viewed as a brake to preserve a status quo that is already in dispute, and in crisis. In other words, the Establishment counter action, and its rhetorical flourishes (i.e. describing the prorogation of the UK parliament as (literally) a coup d’état) in order to facilitate the crushing of the threat of ‘deplorablism’, precisely sets the ground for more bitter internal European strife.

“Some extol the unwavering will of the British leader [Johnson] to do what is necessary (within the limits of his constitutional rights, at least as long as the British courts will not block him) to put an end to the debate on Brexit by respecting the popular will … whilst others [in juxtaposition], praise the virtue of the [Italian] President for saving parliamentary democracy – in the face of the risk of a Salvini government … [coming to power].

“In both cases we are confronted with a conflict between direct democracy and parliamentary democracy, but this is not necessarily what is played out in the minds of actors, let alone citizens. For them, it is not so much a crisis of the institutions; but rather that of a crisis around Brexit, or in the person of Matteo Salvini.

“The problem is that the politicians in each camp (and with them their supporters) will be able to radically change their discourse on this question of legitimacy according to their own interests …

“This is a very dangerous game because it prepares the excessive politicization of institutions in a context of polarization of debates, and their use for partisan ends only – which undermines their legitimacy a little more. Without these institutions to manage or even settle our political conflicts, there is little that separates us from civil war or, as Hobbes described almost four centuries ago, from bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The slope we are currently following is therefore necessarily dangerous.”

But in comparing Johnson to Viktor Orban —as Austrian newspaper Der Standard did, with its London correspondent writing “Johnson and his henchmen clearly think Brexit is more important than democracy and the rule of law”; with Germany’s international public broadcaster DW calling “Boris Johnson, the UK dictator,” and Yascha Mounk in France’s Le Monde newspaper writing that suspending Parliament constituted the “most flagrant attack on democracy that Britain has ever known”, there is a distinct whiff of that old Viet Nam axiom of ‘destroying a village to ‘save’ a village’ metamorphosing into one of having a constitutionally legitimate British government overturned and destroyed, in order ‘to save democracy itself’ (and to save Britain from elections which might not produce the ‘correct’ outcome’).

If populism blighted “the most entrenched of democracies,” said an editorial in Le Monde, it “would be terrible news for the entire continent.” Well … welcome to the new Grand Inquisition: Does the prisoner (Johnson) confess before the Holy Inquisition that Parliament was suspended for heretical motives; or will he deny it, and face being burnt at the stake?

With the unedifying spectacle of «trousergate» shedding a light on how petty, thin skinned and juvenile the current Tory Prime Minister is (as well as her aides such as the former football journalist Fiona Hill and the Tory MP Nicky Morgan) one yearns for the days of substantive «big beast» intellectual heavy weight politicians with real gravitas such as the former Chancellor Ken Clarke. I recall having a conversation many years ago with a former Deputy Director of the Conservative Party’s «Research» Department (which in fact is not exactly a research department more of a propaganda outfit) who described Mrs. May as a «lightweight». The spectacle of the Prime Minister spending nearly 1000 pounds on a pair of leather trousers, which for all the money involved looked rather tacky, and then another Tory MP, the former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, making remarks about it was bad enough. Mrs. May to then show such a thin skin and dis-invite Ms. Morgan from a meeting was playground politics at its worst and reveals worrying insecurities in the Prime Minister over such frivolous matters. As too was the manner in which it was carried out by her equally lightweight, insecure and obnoxious Joint Chief of Staff Fiona Hill.

The spectacle of three women politicians acting like cats over a pair of trousers has sadly reinforced all the worst stereotypes about female politicians. It has also reinforced the vacuum of gravitas at the top of British politics. In many ways British Government would be so better off if it was led by a political figure such as Ken Clarke. I first met Ken Clarke when I was debating on the same team as him alongside the former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind at the Cambridge Union back in January 2007. We were debating a motion regarding the use of force in world affairs and we were up against the former diplomat Craig Murray and Mick Jagger’s ex-wife Bianca. We won the debate. I was extremely impressed with Ken Clarke, and indeed Malcolm Rifkind. I found Mr. Clarke to be an extremely warm, down to earth and charismatic politician with a great manner and temperament. No airs, no graces, no pretentious nonsense. And also a brilliant debater and clearly an intellectually substantive individual with deep knowledge and a super brain. 

Ken Clarke first entered the House of Commons in 1970. He has always been in the centre ground of British politics, a moderate «One Nation» Tory committed to market economics but not enthralled with the more extreme and wilder aspects of free-market Thatcherism. He has also been a passionate and committed pro-European, believing strongly in the cause of European unity and of Britain leading in the European Union. He has had the strength of his convictions and has always stood by them, even when it would have been expedient for his own political advancement to jettison them. On foreign affairs he is a sensible, pragmatic, realist who has never embraced the wacko doctrine of neoconservatism. Indeed, he was one of only a handful of Tory MPs to vigorously oppose the Iraq War. It is this deep common sense and rejection of ideology in favour of pragmatism which sets him apart from some many of his more extreme Tory colleagues. 

Clarke enjoyed a stellar Cabinet career serving as Margaret Thatcher’s Health Secretary and Education Secretary and then John Major’s Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. After the Tory wipe-out in the General Election of 1997 at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, which resulted in a massive Labour landslide with an astonishing majority of 179 in the House of Commons, Ken Clarke put himself forward for the leadership of the Tory Party. Sadly and stupidly the Conservatives were blinded by their prejudice and hostility regarding all things European including Clarke’s support for Britain joining the European single currency, the Euro. Instead of going with the «big beast» of the Conservative Party with a huge amount of political and Government experience and an endearing personality personified in his love of jazz and hush puppy shoes, the Tories opted for the 39 year old William Hague. Hague’s only Cabinet position before he became leader of the Tory Party was Secretary of State for Wales. He had only been an MP for 8 years or so. He also was the ultimate caricature of the Tory boy having given an excruciatingly cringe-worthy speech at the Tory Party conference of 1977

He was also not extremely adept at public relations deciding the best way to present himself to the public after his election was to go to Alton Towers wearing a baseball cap with his surname emblazoned on it. Hague would go on to run an extremely Europhobic and homophobic regime. He took anti-Europeanism and xenophobia to new levels. Hague made opposition to all things European including further European integration and the Euro the single issue of his General Election campaign of 2001. He also unleashed a campaign of demonising asylum seekers and refugees and campaigned to keep Section 28, an extremely nasty and bigoted piece of homophobic legislation introduced by the Conservative Government in 1986 and rightly repealed by the Blair Government. Hague made an infamous and truly vile speech in the run up to the 2001 General Election in which he said Britain had become a «foreign land». Hague’s leadership of the Tory Party which reached its ugly climax in 2001 was a forerunner for the campaign that Donald Trump would run. 

The Tories went down to another crushing defeat under Hague and Tony Blair was re-elected with another huge majority of 166 in the Commons. The Conservatives were then offered once more a great choice in the form of Ken Clarke. But yet again they rejected him in favour of the deeply objectionable Iain Duncan Smith. The less said about that appalling individual the better. As John Stuart Mill once remarked: «Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives». Duncan Smith was one of the most disastrous leaders of the Tory Party in its history, lasting only 2 years. Under his leadership the Tories supported Tony Blair over Iraq while Ken Clarke opposed it passionately. If the Conservatives had elected Clarke over Duncan Smith in 2001 and opposed the Iraq War they could very well have won in 2005 defeating Tony Blair. And then again they rejected Clarke in 2005 after another massive defeat at the hands of Tony Blair’s Labour Party and went instead for David Cameron who was unable to deliver them a full majority in the 2010 General Election despite the economy being in its deepest recession since the Second World War and facing a deeply unpopular Labour leader in the form of Gordon Brown. Clarke went on to become a elder statesman in the administration of David Cameron and became Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, fitting for a Cambridge trained Queen’s Counsel barrister. 

Ken Clarke has once again shown his political strength and conviction by being the only Conservative MP to oppose the Government’s timetable for triggering Article 50 for withdrawal from the EU in a recent Commons vote on Britain’s doomed expedition out of the European Union. It is a tragedy for the country that it has no leadership equivalent to a Ken Clarke to guide it through these precarious and tumultuous times. Theresa May, like her successor David Cameron, is clearly out of her depth. If Ken Clarke had of been prime Minister in 2003 Britain would never have gone to war in Iraq. If Ken Clarke had been prime Minister in 2016 there would never have been this nightmare of referendum of Brexit in the first place. So, Ken Clarke will go down in British political history as one of the greatest Tory Prime Ministers that never was. 

This week’s Chilcot report on Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq was as polite and guarded as a proper English tea party. No direct accusations, no talk of war crimes by then Prime Minister Tony Blair or his guiding light, President George W. Bush. But still pretty damning.

Such government reports and commissions, as was wittily noted in the delightful program ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ are designed to obscure rather than reveal the truth and bury awkward facts in mountains of paper.

And beneath mountains of lies. The biggest lie on both sides of the Atlantic was that the invasion and destruction of Iraq was the result of ‘faulty intelligence.’ The Bush and Blair camps and the US and British media keep pushing this absurd line.

This writer, who had covered Iraq since 1976, was one of the first to assert that Baghdad had no so-called weapons of mass destruction, and no means of delivering them even if it did. For this I was dropped and black-listed by the leading US TV cable news network and leading US newspapers.

I had no love for the brutal Saddam Hussein, whose secret police threatened to hang me as a spy. But I could not abide the intense war propaganda coming from Washington and London, served up by the servile, mendacious US and British media.

The planned invasion of Iraq was not about nuclear weapons or democracy, as Bush claimed. Two powerful factions in Washington were beating the war drums: ardently pro-Israel neoconservatives who yearned to see an enemy of Israel destroyed, and a cabal of conservative oil men and imperialists around Vice President Dick Cheney who sought to grab Iraq’s huge oil reserves at a time they believed oil was running out. They engineered the Iraq War, as blatant and illegal an aggression as Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

Britain’s smarmy Tony Blair tagged along with the war boosters in hopes that the UK could pick up the crumbs from the invasion and reassert its former economic and political power in the Arab world. Blair had long been a favorite of British neoconservatives. The silver-tongued Blair became point man for the war in preference to the tongue-twisted, stumbling George Bush. But the real warlord was VP Dick Cheney.

There was no ‘flawed intelligence.’ There were intelligence agencies bullied into reporting a fake narrative to suit their political masters. And a lot of fake reports concocted by our Mideast allies like Israel and Kuwait.

After the even mild Chilcot report, Blair’s reputation is in tatters, as it should be. How such an intelligent, worldly man could have allowed himself to be led around by the doltish, swaggering Bush is hard to fathom. Europe’s leaders and Canada refused to join the Anglo-American aggression. France, which warned Bush of the disaster he would inflict, was slandered and smeared by US Republicans as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’

In the event, the real monkeys were the Bush and Blair governments. Saddam Hussain, a former US ally, was deposed and lynched. Iraq, the most advanced Arab nation, was almost totally destroyed. Up to one million Iraqis may have been killed, though the Chilcot report claimed only a risible 150,000. As Saddam had predicted, the Bush-Blair invasion opened the gates of hell, and out came al-Qaida and then ISIS.

The US and British media, supposedly the bulwark of democracy, rolled over and became an organ of government war propaganda. Blair had the august BBC purged for failing to fully support his drive for war. BBC has never recovered.

Interestingly, this week’s news of the Chilcot investigation was buried deep inside the New York Times on Thursday. The Times was a key partisan of the war. So too the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the big TV networks.
Without their shameful connivance, the Iraq War might not have happened.

Bush and Blair have the deaths of nearly 4,500 US soldiers on their heads, the devastation of Iraq, our $1 trillion war, the ever-expanding mess in the Mideast, and the violence what we wrongly blame on ‘terrorism’ and so-called ‘radical Islam.’

The men and women responsible for this biggest disaster in our era should be brought to account. As long as Bush and Blair swan around and collect speaking fees, we have no right to lecture other nations, including Russia and China, on how to run a democracy or rule of law. Bush and Blair should be facing trial for war crime at the Hague Court.

ericmargolis

The long-awaited official Chilcot report into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War – the UK’s most controversial military engagement since the end of the Second World War – was finally published on July 6.

The report is named after Privy Councillor Sir John Chilcot, who has chaired the investigation, which has taken place for the last seven years into the United Kingdom’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. It covers political decisions made between 2001 and 2009 relating to the run-up to the UK’s intervention, the military action itself, and the aftermath of the conflict.

The paper of 2,6 million words in total (four times the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace) says, 2003 Iraq intervention was «unnecessary», the war was not the «last resort» and Saddam Hussein, the dictator ruling Iraq at the time, was «no imminent threat». Great Britain chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair presented the case for war in 2003 with «a certainty which was not justified» based on «flawed» intelligence about the country’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The decision for the UK to take charge of four provinces in south east Iraq was taken «without a formal ministerial decision» and without ensuring that the UK had the capability it needed. Planning for post-war Iraq was «wholly inadequate». The report says the legality of the war can only be decided by an international court. Indeed, the conflict in Iraq was followed by a period of diplomacy in which the UK was unable to secure United Nations authorization for military action. This sequence of events gave rise to debates about whether the war was even legal.

Scottish National Party (SNP)’s Alex Salmond says, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for involving the country in the 2003 invasion of Iraq if an inquiry reveals that Blair made a secret commitment to Washington to support the war.

A number of lawmakers want to use the impeachment procedure to hold Blair to account for his role in the invasion of the Arab country.

By the time British combat forces left in 2009, 179 British troops, almost 4,500 American personnel and more than 100,000 Iraqis had been killed. The intervention put an end to the reign of dictator Saddam Hussein but failed to bring stability to the region once he was removed. Today, Iraq is one of the most troubled nations on Earth.

According to Amnesty International’s report, the international terrorist organization Islamic State (IS) is the direct result of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The origin of IS can be traced directly to the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The report states that «following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent fall of President Saddam Hussein, a number of insurgent armed groups composed largely of Sunni men emerged in opposition to the occupying forces and the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government».

Tony Blair himself has said he was sorry for the «mistakes».

It’s worth to remember that the mistake drove the wedge into the West’s unity. NATO was not unanimous. Those days Russia was on the same side of the fence with France and Germany – the states strongly opposed to the Iraq war. «Punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia». That was the pithy summary of American policy towards Europe attributed to then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2003, during the peak of the transatlantic bust-up over Iraq.

The inquiry is not a court of law and nobody is on trial. The key point of the report is to identify «lessons that can be learned», so governments can act accordingly in future. When speaking to the BBC on the eve of its release, Chilcot told that individuals and institutions would be criticized.

Mr Chilcot is right about the need to learn the lessons. Indeed, few recall that David Cameron led Britain into one war in Libya that overthrew Gaddafi, but was disastrous for most Libyans. Without this conflict, the flows of refugees from Libya would not be rushing to Europe today. On August 29, 2013 Cameron lost the vote which would have opened the door to British military intervention in Syria. It would have had an effect only if it had turned into a Libyan-type air campaign to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. There is every reason to believe that jihadist movements would have filled the vacuum and Syria would have descended even deeper into chaos. Still a smaller scale British intervention there is taking place right now.  

The operation is proceeding despite the fact that some time ago the Prime Minister said he ruled out having boots on the ground in Syria.

And it’s not Great Britain only; the lessons should be learned by all, especially the US, who was in the driving seat leading the 2003 invasion.

The United States fought in Iraq for nine years. With the exception of the war in Afghanistan, it was America’s longest combat engagement ever: longer than the American Civil War, the two World Wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Any country that enters into a war emerges from it changed but not the United States. 

US Democratic presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, takes no responsibility for Islamic State’s rapid gains in Libya in the wake of the American-led «coup-by-air» to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. President Obama, who caved in to Hillary’s pressure to oust Gaddafi in 2011, is now thinking about going back into the country, as he has into Iraq (with the war against the Islamic State in Syria to boot), to clean up the previously US-made mess. 

It happens against the background of the continuing messes in Afghanistan and Iraq – the states where the US and its NATO allies got bogged down in «nation-building».

America is presently waging wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia and the US military is itching to expand the activities in Libya.

The lesson of Iraq must be remembered when it comes to Syria. The 2003 invasion of Iraq influences the position of Russia on the conflict. For Moscow the issue is not sympathy for Syrian President Assad, economic interest or the access to the Tartus naval base. Russia is certain that if continued crushing of secular governments in the Middle East is allowed just because the US and its allies such as the UK support «democracy», it will lead to such destabilization that will overwhelm all, including Russia. It’s therefore necessary for Moscow to resist, especially as the West itself experiences increasing doubts. Besides, Russia is in Syria upon the invitation of the Syrian government, while the US-led coalition, including the UK, is not. Without the authorization of the United Nations, coalition’s military involvement in the Syrian conflict is illegal just like the 2003 Iraq invasion was. The lessons of the 2003 invasion tell us the overthrow of the Syrian government may plunge the country into the same chaos as Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. An international effort coordinated with the Syrian government and based on the authorization of the UN is the way to manage the conflict. Acting in accordance with the international law, not in violation of it, would show that the US and the UK – the countries responsible for the 2003 intervention – are serious about learning at least some of the lessons in question – something the Chilcot report is calling for.

If the “Remainers” had an ounce of sense Blair should have been ditched in a nano-second. He is not “Toxic Tony” for nothing.

However, since the long awaited Chilcot Inquiry in to the Iraq invasion is to be published just thirteen days after the referendum (6th July) it is worth revisiting more of the mistruths of which he is capable.

On 18th March 2003, Blair stood in Parliament and listed the times Saddam Hussein’s government had said they had no weapons of mass destruction (1) dismissing them all, including the 11,800 pages or 12,200 pages of accounting of that which they did not possess and delivered by the Iraqi delegation at the UN to the UN UNSCOM offices on 8th December 2002.

Lest it be forgotten, the reason for the uncertainty of the length of the volume is that the US delegation simply appropriated it and returned less than 4,000 pages so heavily redacted as to be indecipherable – and without the hefty index at the back listing the Western arms companies who had, prior to the first Gulf war, sold them weapons.

Blair told Parliament loftily:

“… the 8^th December declaration is false. That in itself is a material breach. Iraq has made some concessions to co-operation but no-one disputes it is not fully cooperating. Iraq continues to deny it has any WMD, though no serious intelligence service anywhere in the world believes them … We … will back it with action if Saddam fails to disarm voluntarily.”

Iraq of course, was telling the truth. Blair had appointed himself  Judge, jury and executioner.

And here is a real whopper: “I have never put our justification for action as regime change.”

And another: “Iraq is a wealthy country that in 1978, the year before Saddam seized power, was richer than Portugal or Malaysia.

“Today it is impoverished, 60% of its population dependent on food aid.

“Thousands of children die needlessly every year from lack of food and medicine.”

What he omitted was stated in a piece I wrote back in 1998 (2) addressing the ever repeated propaganda. The conditions were caused directly by the US-UK driven embargo, overseen by Blair’s envoy to the UN, Carne Ross, who headed the Sanctions Committee after the August 1991 imposed embargo:

“In 1989 the World Health Organization recorded Iraq as having 92-per-cent access to clean water, 93-per-cent access to high quality health care and with high educational and nutritional standards.

“By 1995 the World Food Program noted that: ‘time is running out for the children of Iraq’. Figures – verified by UNICEF – record that 1,211,285 children died of embargo-related causes between August 1990 and August 1997. A silent holocaust in the name of the UN. These numbers are similar to those lost in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. It is three times the population of Kuwait in small lives.”

‘ “After 24 years in the field, starting with Biafra, I didn’t think anything could shock me,” wrote Dieter Hannusch of the World Food Program in l995. “But this was comparable to the worst scenarios I had ever seen.” ‘

The day after Blair’s address to Parliament, Operation Iraqi Liberation began, to which he had committed the country in his visit to George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in April 2002, without telling Parliament.

Moreover, in 2009 The Mail on Sunday disclosed (3) that: “Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote (a) letter to Mr. Blair in July 2002 – a full eight months before the war – telling him that deposing Saddam Hussein was a blatant breach of international law.

“It was intended to make Mr. Blair call off the invasion, but he ignored it. Instead, a panicking Mr. Blair issued instructions to gag Lord Goldsmith, banned him from attending Cabinet meetings and ordered a cover-up to stop the public finding out.

“He even concealed the bombshell information from his own Cabinet, fearing it would spark an anti-war revolt. The only people he told were a handful of cronies who were sworn to secrecy.

“Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign – and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down.”

The then Prime Minister did not alone ignore the Attorney General’s legal advice. In November 2002 “six wise men” gave Blair “bloody warnings” as to the outcome of an attack on Iraq. (4) They were: “ … all academics, expert on Iraq, the Middle East and international affairs. They had been called to the Cabinet Room to outline the worst that could happen if Britain and the United States launched an invasion.

“This was a meeting that could have changed the course of history and, with better planning for the aftermath, saved countless lives – if only the Prime Minister and his advisers had listened and acted on the bloody warnings on that day in November 2002.”

Dr. Toby Dodge, then of London’s Queen Mary University foresaw with extraordinary clarity the near certain outcome, warning: ‘… that Iraqis would fight for their country against the invaders rather than just celebrate the fall of their leader. A long and nasty civil war could follow. “My aim that day was to tell them as much as I could, so that there would be no excuses and nobody saying, ‘I didn’t know.’ ”

Others who shared their extensive expertise were Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London and a Blair adviser, Professor Charles Tripp of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Steven Simon, Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Professor Michael Clarke, then of Kings College, London. Before the gathering they were warned: “Don’t tell him not to do it. He has already made up his mind”, Dr. Dodge told The Independent.

Blair and his Cabinet had: “…no plan for what would happen after the invasion. The approach was, ‘The Americans are heading this up. They will have a detailed plan. We need to follow them’ ”, said Professor Joffe. However in reality, a year’s planning by the State Department for the invasion’s aftermath: “was junked. They were making up policy on the hoof.”

Professor Joffe also explained the complexities of Iraq’s power structures with Tony Blair seemingly disinterested in the potential cultural, societal and political minefields, responding with kindergarten simplicity (re Saddam Hussein) “ But the man is evil isn’t he?”

A chameleon-like absorption of George W. Bush, his political circle and his Generals’ simplistic “good guys”, “bad guys” rhetoric.

Steven Simon had little faith in bringing democracy to Iraq at the barrels of guns and deliveries of 30,000-pound bunker busters: “If everything had been done differently, there might have been some small shot at avoiding disaster. But only a small shot.”

Incredibly, according to Professor Joffe: “The people who were put in charge in Iraq had very little knowledge or experience of the Middle East.”

Professor Clarke commented that Blair’s attempt to justify the invasion was mistaken: “We knew there was no nuclear stuff in Iraq.” Moreover, he believed: ‘Blair did not actually decide to go to war on the basis of intelligence, but made it look as if he had with his two “dodgy” dossiers. “He presented the case to the public as if they had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That was rubbish. They were ridiculous documents, both those documents.” ‘ (Emphasis added.)

Late last year, Blair made what was described as a “qualified apology” for “mistakes” made in Iraq – among them: “our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime”. In the light of the above, blatantly untrue.

Blair’s dodging and weaving over the years since 2003 – in spite of his millions, numerous properties, jet (seemingly leased) and a yacht, accrued from advising some of the world’s most despotic leaders – seems to have worn him down a bit, though.

In an extraordinary television outburst (5) attacking Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn who said of Blair on BBC’s Newsnight last August:

“If he has committed a war crime, yes (he should stand trial.)  Everybody who has committed a war crime should.” Blair responded: “I’m accused of being a war criminal for removing Saddam Hussein… and yet Jeremy is seen as a progressive icon as we stand by and watch the people of Syria barrel-bombed, beaten and starved into submission and do nothing.”

No mention of the US’ illegal “coalition” which includes the UK which has made 4,024 strikes to 1st June this year, according to the US Department of Defence. Strikes remarkably inept at affecting the countless foreign terrorist groups, but which have caused devastation to the Syrian people whose plight was caused by US plotting (6.)

46,615 bombs and missiles have been dropped Syria and Iraq in the seeming non-fight against ISIS and other criminal groups. (airwars.org)

Apart from his ongoing economy with the truth, Tony Blair also seems to be well past his sell by date. In Northern Ireland, probably the only place on earth which has a tenuous reason to give him some credit for the “peace process”, where he went to speak on the referendum at Ulster University, he was less than welcome.

Derry anti-war campaigner Frankie McMenamin said the former Labour leader was “not welcome” in Derry, telling the Derry Journal:

“I was involved in protests about the Iraqi War which Tony Blair was responsible for, Tony Blair is hated throughout the world and he has blood on his hands over Iraq.

“I will be voting for the U.K. to remain on June 23rd but I think someone like Mr. Blair (urging the stay in vote) will put a lot of other people off.

“Tony Blair is not welcome in our city and the people who organized this visit obviously knew this” – the meeting had not been publicly advertised and the address was to a specially selected audience. The co-speaker was Blair’s former Chancellor, Gordon Brown, near equally unpopular, who wrote the cheques for years of UK bombings before the invasion and then for the invasion’s destruction. Had the meeting been publicly advertised, assured Mr McMenamin, protesters would have been out in force.

On 17th June, Blair was a signatory to an open letter, signed by two former deputy Prime Ministers and a number of MPs and public figures urging voters to stay in the European Union. It included the words:

“…public life, whether in politics or elsewhere, should be about something else – something better.

“It should be driven by a desire to bring people together when it would be easier to tear them apart. A wish to build bridges rather than erect walls.” To promote that which is “Peaceful, tolerant, compassionate.”

As he added his signature, did he reflect on Iraq’s destroyed bridges – literally and metaphorically, on a nation of walls erected by US and UK troops over one of the most open landscapes anywhere to be found and on the accompanying destruction of peace, tolerance and compassion at the hands of US and UK policies aided by his ignorant determination and “ridiculous documents.”

Philippe Sands QC, Professor of international law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, has said (7) ‘he believes, unequivocally, that the 2003 invasion was illegal under international law. “In the UK, beyond those associated with the government’s effort, I cannot think of a single international lawyer who thinks the war was lawful. Not a single name comes to mind. That’s got to be telling.” ‘

It can only be hoped the Chilcot Inquiry’s findings deliver Charles Anthony Lynton Blair and his cohorts in a tragedy which will be his and George W. Bush’s place in history. A sharp and chilly return to reality.