Earth To Tony

Somebody really needs to put a pie in Tony Blair's face. Hard on the heels of the Carnegie Report's finding that Bush "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs," and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's charging the Administration (with the documents to prove it) with planning to invade Iraq from its very first NSC meetings -- months before September 11; Tony Blair insists that "it would have been 'irresponsible not to have acted upon' pre-war intelligence that Saddam's regime had weapons of mass destruction."

Even though it was known, long before the war that that intelligence had been "stovepiped", cherry-picked, and coerced from the intelligence agencies, by Dick Cheney et al., to fit the pre-determined conclusion. Even though it was known that key elements of that intelligence were based on forgeries. Even though the UNMOVIC inspectors strongly claimed to need a few more months to definitively determine the status of Iraq's WMD programmes, and harshly denounced the "coalition"'s having cut short their work. Even though former inspectors and high-level defectors emphatically stated that Iraq had been "qualitatively disarmed" by 1995.

In other words, the "intelligence" was bogus, and Blair knew it. In other words, Blair is lying. No surprise there. But let's dig a little deeper.

Blair further ponders that, "You can only imagine what would have happened if I'd ignored the intelligence and then something terrible had happened."

Guess what, Tony? Something terrible did happen: you murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis. You irradiated the country with your "depleted" uranium weapons. You destroyed, for the second time in a decade, the country's infrastructure. You allowed thousands of years of history to be ripped to shreds in a matter of days. You sold off the country's resources to Dick Cheney's former employer (from whom he still draws compensation) and other close friends of the Bush Administration. You undertook a military occupation explicitly modeled on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. If that's not "terrible", then what the fuck would have been?

Oh, yeah. Saddam was going to sell or give his weapons -- that you knew he didn't have -- to Uncle Osama -- with whom you knew he had zero affiliation -- who was then going to light up New York City with a "dirty bomb" -- though you surely know that Osama already has his own weapons (or so it's been reported), and is trying to figure out a way to deliver them.

But, yeah, let's assume that Saddam had the weapons, that he was in cahoots with bin Laden, and that the "civilised" world was in imminent danger of being "mushroom cloud"-ed therefrom -- all within, as you've claimed, 45 minutes' time. Using your own logic, then (sorry for that), it would have been "irresponsible" in the extreme not to have invaded Iraq much earlier that you actually did. Why the fuck did you wait for months on end when Saddam/Osama were poised to strike? As this blog has pointed up before now, the "coalition" should have launched its attack no later than September 24, 2002 -- the date on which the Blair Administration released its infamous dossier "proving" that Saddam's

chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programme is not an historic leftover from 1998. The inspectors aren't needed to clean up the old remains. His WMD programme is active, detailed, and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The WMD programme is not shut down. It is up and running.

And

that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes...

Why did you irresponsibly wait six more months before "disarming" Saddam, Tony, knowing all the while that you were 45 short minutes away from immolation? After all, you can only imagine what would have happened if something terrible had happened.

Tony's next trick was to try to revive the "double-deception" line of argument, previously ridiculed once or twice in this space: "There is something bizarre about the idea that Saddam had these weapons, got rid of them and then never disclosed the fact that he got rid of them."

"Never disclosed"? What the fuck was the 12,000 page accounting turned over by Iraq in December of 2002 -- chopped ham? Why the fuck did he allow weapons inspectors back in? What the fuck was Saddam supposed to have meant when he said that, "This is an opportunity to reach the British people and the forces of peace in the world. There is only one truth and therefore I tell you Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever"? (Sure, he could, theoretically, have been lying. But that's an entirely different animal from never having "disclosed" that he'd gotten rid of the weapons.)

There's something "bizarre", all right. It's that Tony Blair hasn't been mercilessly spanked upside his bare ass with a deftly wielded hairbrush.

Posted by Eddie Tews at January 12, 2004 02:31 PM