Sunday 15 June 2014

Blair: It's Not My Fault".

Yesterday's  Guardian  a paper which in its failure to actively scrutunise  the Blair Government's military adventurism tells us

In a passionate essay published on his Faith Foundation website, the former prime minister said it was a "bizarre" reading of the situation to argue that the US-British invasion of Iraq had allowed the growth of Sunni jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), whose fighters have swept through towns and cities north and west of Baghdad over the past week.
"We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not: and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.
"We have to put aside the differences of the past and act now to save the future," says Blair, adding that force may be necessary. "Where the extremists are fighting, they have to be countered hard, with force."
  In a defence of his actions in Iraq, Blair attacked as "extraordinary" any notion the country would be stable if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power.

"The civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect. Iraq is now in mortal danger. The whole of the Middle East is under threat."
He said it was inevitable that events across Iraq had raised the arguments over the 2003 war. While admitting that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, he said: "What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the west, was manufacturing chemical weapons. We only discovered this when he used them. We also know, from the final weapons inspectors' reports, that though it is true that Saddam got rid of the physical weapons, he retained the expertise and capability to manufacture them.
"Is it likely, knowing what we now know about Assad, that Saddam, who had used chemical weapons both against the Iranians in the 1980s war – that resulted in over a million casualties – and against his own people, would have refrained from returning to his old ways? Surely it is at least as likely that he would have gone back to them
?
 And yet he can't see that his disabling of the  Arab World has any responsibility for the likely Civil war in Iraq , The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism in that region and the misery of the ordinary civilians .

And Blair maybe should as where Isis who seemed to have spiled over from Syria got its weapons


... the Syrian rebels themselves say they are already armed and trained by US in the use of sophisticated weapons and fighting techniques, including, one rebel said, "how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush." The interviews are the latest evidence that after more than three years of warfare, the United States has stepped up the provision of lethal aid to the rebels, as PBS notes "it appears the Obama administration is allowing select groups of rebels to receive US-made anti-tank missiles."

The commander of the unit also told Ali that their American contacts had asked him to bring 80 to 90 members of his unit to Ankara for training.
One of the fighters said they received three weeks of training in how to conduct ambushes, conduct raids and use their weapons. They also said they received new uniforms and boots.
“They trained us to ambush regime or enemy vehicles and cut off the road,” said the fighter, who is identified only as “Hussein.” “They also trained us on how to attack a vehicle, raid it, retrieve information or weapons and munitions, and how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush.”
 More Here

Iraq faces Civil War and falling into fundamentalist control
Afghanistan will erupt in to war between various fractions and be very lunch in the same position as when the Russians left
The Arab Spring as turned to Winter and in Egypt the experiment with democracy saw the wrong people (as far as the West was concerned) so with barley a whimper from Western leader the Military are now back in charge.
Libya  is decided into fractions who are hostile to each other and is likely to fall to fundamentalist controlI always thought the problem with Blair (as with Thatcher) was not that they lie but their almostMessianic belief that despite the evidence they are right.

Blair  was always determined to see his place in History and more importantly wright it himself

But I very much doubt History wil absolve him or for that matter the Guardian the supposed Left- Liberla paper which in itself must examine why they couldn't se this coming.





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