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The Unraveling Of Tony Blair
By John Pilger
06/03/03: (Znet)
In his latest article for the Daily Mirror, John Pilger argues that the
"high crime" of the invasion of Iraq that "will not melt
away" and says the catalogue of Tony Blair's deceptions are now
being revealed by the day, unravelling what was left of his credibility.
Such a high crime does not, and will not, melt away; the facts cannot be
changed. Tony Blair took Britain to war against Iraq illegally. He
mounted an unprovoked attack on a country that offered no threat, and he
helped cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The judges at
the Nuremberg Tribunal following world war two, who inspired much of
international law, called this "the gravest of all war
crimes".
Blair had not the shred of a mandate from the British people to do what
he did. On the contrary, on the eve of the attack, the majority of
Britons clearly demanded he stop. His response was contemptuous of such
an epic show of true democracy. He chose to listen only to the unelected
leader of a foreign power, and to his court and his obsession.
With his courtiers in and out of the media telling him he was
"courageous" and even "moral" when he scored his
"historic victory" over a defenceless, stricken and
traumatised nation, almost half of them children, his propaganda
managers staged a series of unctuous public relations stunts.
The first stunt sought to elicit public sympathy with a story about him
telling his children that he had "almost lost his job". The
second stunt, which had the same objective, was a story about how his
privileged childhood had really been "difficult" and
"painful". The third and most outrageous stunt saw him in
Basra, in southern Iraq last week, lifting an Iraqi child in his arms,
in a school that had been renovated for his visit, in a city where
education, like water and other basic services, are still a shambles
following the British invasion and occupation.
When I saw this image of Blair holding a child in Basra, I happened to
be in a hotel in Kabul in Afghanistan, the scene of an earlier
"historic victory" of Bush and Blair in another stricken land.
I found myself saying out loud the words, "ultimate
obscenity". It was in Basra that I filmed hundreds of children ill
and dying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and
drugs under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair.
It was the one story Blair's court would almost never tell, because it
was true and damning.
Up to July last year, $5.4 billion in vital and mostly humanitarian
supplies for the ordinary people of Iraq were being obstructed by the
United States, backed by Britain. Professor Karol Sikora, head of the
World Health Organisation's cancer treatment programme, who had been to
the same hospitals in Basra that I saw, told me: "The excuse that
certain drugs can be converted into weapons of mass destruction is
ludicrous. I saw wards where dying people were even denied
pain-killers."
That was more than three years ago. Now come forward to a hot May day in
2003, and here is Blair - shirt open, a man of the troops, if not of the
people - lifting a child into his arms, for the cameras, and just a few
miles from where I watched toddler after toddler suffer for want of
treatment that is standard in Britain and which was denied as part of a
medieval siege approved by Blair. Remember, the main reason that these
life-saving drugs and equipment were blocked, the reason Professor
Sikora and countless other experts ridiculed, was that essential drugs
and even children's vaccines could be converted to weapons of mass
destruction.
Weapons of Mass Destruction, or WMD, has become part of the jargon of
our time. When he finally goes, Blair ought have WMD chiselled on his
political headstone. He has now been caught; for it must be clear to the
most devoted courtier that he has lied about the primary reason he gave,
repeatedly, for attacking Iraq.
THERE is a series of such lies; I have counted at least a dozen
significant ones. They range from Blair's "solid evidence"
linking Iraq with Al-Qaeda and September 11 (refuted by British
intelligence) to claims of Iraq's "growing" nuclear weapons
programme (refuted by the International Atomic Energy Agency when
documents quoted by Blair were found to be forgeries), to perhaps his
most audacious tale - that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
"could be activated within 45 minutes".
It is now Day 83 in the post-war magical mystery hunt for Iraq's
"secret" arsenal. One group of experts, sent by George Bush,
have already gone home.
This week, British intelligence sources exposed Blair's "45
minutes" claim as the fiction of one defector with scant
credibility. A United Nations inspector has ridiculed Blair's latest
claim that two canvas-covered lorries represent "proof" of
mobile chemical weapons. Incredible, yesterday he promised "a new
dossier".
It is ironic that the unravelling of Blair has come from the source of
almost all his lies, the United States, where senior intelligence
officers are now publicly complaining about their "abuse as
political propagandists".
They point to the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul
Wolfowitz who, said one of them, fed "the most alarming tidbits to
the president ... so instead of giving the president the most
considered, carefully examined information available, basically you give
him the garbage. And then in a few days when it's clear that maybe it
wasn't right, well then, you feed him some hot garbage."
That Blair's tale about Saddam Hussein being ready to attack "in 45
minutes" is part of the "hot garbage" is not surprising.
What is surprising, or unbelievable, is that Blair did not know it was
"hot", just as he must have known that Jack Straw and Colin
Powell met in February to express serious doubts about the whole issue
of weapons of mass destruction.
It was all a charade. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has
spoken this truth: the invasion of Iraq was planned long ago, he said,
and that the issue of weapons rested largely on "fabricated
evidence". Blair has made fools not so much of the British people,
most of whom were and are on to him, but of respectable journalists and
broadcasters who channelled and amplified his black propaganda as
headlines and lead items on BBC news bulletins. They cried wolf for him.
They gave him every benefit of the doubt, and so minimised his
culpability and allowed him to set much of the news agenda.
For months, the charade of weapons of mass destruction overshadowed real
issues we had a right to know about and debate - that the United States
intended to take control of the Middle East by turning an entire
country, Iraq, into its oil-rich base. History is our evidence. Since
the 19th century, British governments have done the same, and the Blair
government is no different.
What is different now is that the truth is winning through. This week,
publication of an extraordinary map left little doubt that the British
military had plastered much of Iraq with cluster bombs, many of which
almost certainly have failed to detonate on impact. They usually wait
for children to pick them up, then they explode, as in Kosovo and
Afghanistan.
They are cowardly weapons; but of course this was one of the most craven
of all wars, "fought" against a country with no navy, no air
force and rag-tag army. Last month, HMS Turbulent, a nuclear-power
submarine, slipped back to Plymouth, flying the Jolly Roger, the
pirates' emblem. How appropriate.
This British warship fired 30 American Tomahawk missiles at Iraq. Each
missile cost 700,000 pounds, a total of 21 million pounds in taxpayers'
money. That alone would have provided the basic services that the
British government has yet to restore to Basra, as it is obliged to do
under international law.
What did HMS Turbulent's 30 missiles hit? How many people did they kill
and maim? And why have we heard nothing about this? Perhaps the missiles
had sensory devices that could distinguish Bush's "evil-doers"
and Blair's "wicked men" from toddlers? What is certain is
they were not aimed at the Ministry of Oil.
This cynical and shaming chapter in Britain's modern story was written
in our name, your name. Blair and his collaborators ought not to be
allowed to get away with it.
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