ON HIS SECOND APPEARENCE at the Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq War last Friday, Tony Blair once more spent five hours being questioned by some of the best minds available over his management over what many believe to have been an illegal war. There were some sitting and listening to his evidence who had lost loved ones during the Iraq War. They hoped that Mr Blair would publicly apologise to them, and others like them in their position for ever taking us to war in the first place. This our former prime minister failed to do and was briefly heckled by one despairing wife or mother.
What he did do was express his regret for the lives lost during that brief war, and for giving the impression at his last appearance that he deliberately ignored their suffering.
Tony Blair, like Margaret Thatcher, is loved more abroad than at home. But the Iron Lady was never accused of being a war criminal, and never had a sizable portion of her people demanding that she stood trial in the Hague as a war criminal.
Tony Blair has not been so lucky, for there are many from all points of the political compass who do wish such a fate upon him. Among them are not only the ragbag loony Leftists to whom such a demand is just part of their portfolio of rhetoric which they use without caution or thought: there is also those on the Right who think an appearance before Mr Milosevic’s accusers in the Hague would suit their opinion of Blair admirably.
It is understandable, emotionally at least, that the loved ones of those killed should adopt a position that seeks Mr Blair’s imprisonment as a war criminal. It is a position one can understand emotionally if not intellectually, and they have a greater legitimacy for such demand than does Mr Blair’s political enemies, who, whether from the Right or the Left, have different agendas to the families of those killed in the war.
IS THIS NOT THE fourth or fifth enquiry into the Iraq War? It seems that every time one enquiry leaves Blair free to roam our streets, there are demands for another. Thus was born Chilcot’s enquiry which one hopes will be the definitive one; but one must wait and see whether Chilcot’s verdict is a decisive valedictory to such enquiries or enough doubt will be presented as to allow further inquisitions until Blair’s enemies are satisfied, if not by a war crimes trial, then at least by Mr Blair’s unequivocal political guilt.
I belong to a generation that was born in the shadow of Nuremburg, and I soon understood what being a war criminal meant. The criteria then was provided by the Nazis. They consciously, for ideological reasons, deliberately set about the elimination of a whole race of people. It was the ambition of Nazism to do so. The Jews were not, in that awful phrase ‘collateral damage’; they were seen as just as inferior by the Germans as the black peoples had been seen by the slave traders and owners a hundred years earlier.
As we know the Jews were joined by the gypsies as the enemies of racial purity. Thus those who concocted the final solution, as well as those who implemented it were treated as war criminals when Germany was defeated.
But let us remember this. By the modern definition of being a war criminal, Churchill and ‘Bomber’ Harris would join Tony Blair in the Hague. Was it not those two who oversaw the carpet bombing of German cities? Did hundreds of thousands of civilians not die indiscriminately in the bombing of those cities?
Carpet bombing was a formula whereby thousands of tons of munitions were dropped on German cities by us, causing indiscriminate carnage to the citizens of Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig. Surely, according to modern logic, this also represented a war crime?
No doubt those on the Left would agree that such a military enterprise did represent a war crime. But those who sit on the Right and would like to see Mr Blair sitting in the Hague would no doubt baulk at such a comparison. To those people I would suggest they forget their political animosity toward Blair and consider whether his behaviour bares comparison to the Nuremburg defendants, and whether Churchill’s behaviour also bares the same comparison .
After all, did Tony Blair not use his gifts of persuasion to encourage Bill Clinton to help the people of Kosovo against the Serbs? Was he not successful in that endeavour?
When the Muslims of Kosovo were liberated and the Serbs brought to heal, it was discovered once again what war crimes meant in their original sense. Srebrenica was a war crime for which no UN official was ever sent to the Hague, despite the fact that their peacekeepers bore the responsibility for the deaths of Muslim civilians. They bore the responsibility because they gave them no protection against the Serbs. It was a disgraceful inaction that the Dutch who were given their role, failed to fulfil its remit.
Tony Blair saved the UN from their failings in the Balkans by his determination to form a coalition of the Western powers to bring Serbia to heal. His success in that venture it seems, has counted little.
In Sera Leon Blair saved this small African nation from the barbarism of anarchy by ridding the country of philistines who distributed debauchery and torture in equal measure throughout the country. Today in Sera Leon Tony Blair is seen as a ‘god’ or ‘king’ among the people.
Tony Blair believes in something called ‘liberal intervention’. It is a concept I do not believe in because it entails, (if necessary) nation building. Nation building is best left to the people after the tyrant has been removed from power and the people allowed to continue with their lives. To try, as we have done in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to reconstruct or rebuild both countries (in Iraq merely as an afterthought following the invasion) we in the West leave ourselves open to decades of political, military and financial involvement. Something the people living in the West do not support – especially at the cost of more deaths among our young soldiers.
So I too am a Blair critic; but if his detractors had their way and he was harangued before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague, no democratic leader would take the necessary action in the future to stop a tyrant for fear of sharing Mr Blair’s fate.
In his contribution to the Chilcot inquiry, the former prime minister referred to the next threat on the horizon for the West.
Iran is fast becoming the fulcrum for the future of the whole Middle East. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reach extends throughout the region orchestrating conflict and turmoil from Afghanistan to Lebanon, Egypt and Gaza. Tehran’s power has grown as a result of the West’s weakness in preventing it.
After Iraq, no Western leader is prepared to challenge Tehran, except by meaningless threats via the United Nations. Ahmadinejad is on the brink; and if he so wishes could tip the whole of the Middle East into conflict.
As Blair said at the end of his contribution to Chilcot: “I am out in that region the whole time. I see the impact and influence of Iran everywhere. It is negative,
destabilising. It is supportive of terrorist groups. It is doing everything it can to impede progress in the Middle East peace process and to facilitate a situation in which that region cannot embark on the process of modernisation it urgently needs.
“This is not because we have done something. You know, at some point -- and I say this to you with all the passion I possibly can -- the West has to get out of this what I think is a wretched policy or posture of apology for believing that we are causing what the
Iranians are doing or what these extremists are doing. We are not. The fact is they are doing it because they disagree fundamentally with our way of life and they will carry on doing it unless they are met with the requisite determination and if necessary force.”
Whatever you may think of Blair and his dealings on the international stage, the above warning should be heeded, and support be given to any Western leader prepared to act with force. Our weakness has been Tehran’s strength, and if we continue to shy away Iran will smell our fear.
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