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What they are saying about Blair facing Chilcot
Eloquent and professional? Or slippery and sweaty? Opinion is divided...
Tony Blair will dodge the demonstrators - including family members of British soldiers who died in Iraq - to appear before the Chilcot Inquiry today. He will have six hours, starting at 9.30 am, to defend his decision to take Britain to war in Iraq alongside the United States.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said yesterday: "Tony Blair is able to set out the case, to show the decisions he made, and to do so in the most professional and eloquent way, and I believe that he will be able to answer all the questions that the inquiry puts to him."
Professional and eloquent? Or slippery and sweaty? Not everyone is as confident as Blair's successor. This is what media commentators have been saying in the run-up to his long-awaited appearance...
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:Phillip Stevens in the Financial Times: "There will be plenty for the inquiry to seize upon if it wants to criticise the way Mr Blair took Britain to war. But these are issues of judgment, competence and process rather than mendacity. That will not satisfy the Blair-is-a-war-criminal brigade. But then the quest for a smoking gun has always seemed likely to prove as futile as was Mr Blix's search for WMD."
Matthew Norman in the Independent: "For Mr Blair, the journey will not end on Friday, or when the inquiry publishes its findings. However damning these appear, however transparent the intent to cast him as a deceitful warmonger, they will be written in the language of euphemism, thus allowing each side to claim a victory of sorts. For Mr Blair, in fact, the trek can never end.
Even if he is as canny in his choice of foreign destinations as he is with his answers on Friday, and avoids any Pinochet-type indignity, much less a war crimes trial, he is must trudge through his remaining days as a pariah."
Matthew Carr for The First Post: "At times the polite discussions of 'mistakes' and 'inadequate planning' have resembled a post-mortem into an unsuccessful England cricket tour rather than the greatest moral and political disaster in British history. There is nothing surprising about this. The government did not set up the Chilcot Inquiry in order to indict itself."
Rachel Sylvester in the /Times/: "For weeks Mr Blair has been studying papers, talking to friends writing longhand notes, as he prepares for Friday. He will, says a friend, be 'candid and direct', admitting some mistakes ‹ although he will not concede that it was wrong to go to war. It will, no doubt, be a polished performance. For his critics, though, it will never be enough because their angst is not just about the war in Iraq."
Matthew D'Ancona quoted in the Daily Telegraph: "Blair is many things, but a stumbling, easily foxed witness is not one of them. There is not a single question the committee can throw at him that he has not answered in his head a thousand times."
The Mole for The First Post: "This is not the Nuremberg trial, neither is it an impeachment hearing. This is a panel of four men and one woman, three of whom... are on first-name terms with Tony Blair. While many members of the British public might wish this was Judgment Day for Tony Blair, it is very unlikely to be so."
Andrew Gilligan in the Daily Telegraph: "For all the testimony to Chilcot, the most damaging evidence of all against Blair has come from his own lips. In an interview with the BBC's Fern Britton, he said that he would 'still have thought it right to remove' Saddam Hussein even if he had known at the time that there were no weapons of mass destruction. 'I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments,' he added." ·
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That's a ridiculous comment. It wasn't just 'Bush and Blair', but Hans Blix and the rest of the United Nations who thought that Saddam Hussein had WMD. Over the years, first UNSCOM and then UNMOVIC had found many weapons and programs that the regime had tried to conceal. Saddam Hussein had publicly boasted about the weapons he had, had used WMD before, Tariq Aziz said they had biological weapons to 'deal with the Persians and the Jews'. Iraq never did account for the missing 26,000 litres of anthrax and 1.5 tons of VX gas. If you actually did follow the 'words and actions' of the UN inspectors you would surely know Blix's great frustration at 'disturbing incidents' and 'harrassment' even while searching under 1441, Iraq's refusal to allow U2 planes, the programs they found to build long-range missiles. They found 11 undeclared empty chemical warheads and thousands of pages of hidden nuclear documentation.
And remember that the burden of proof was on the Iraqi regime itself, not on the UN team. They were only 270 inspectors in a country the size of France, without Iraq's full co-operation their job was impossible. I think it was more than reasonable to infer that what had been found was the tip of the iceberg, and that was even after Resolution 1441. Given this history of obstruction and non-co-operation with UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, I don't know what the point of longer inspection time would have been. But whatever you may think were the rights and wrongs of the timing of the war, to say 'anyone with a brain' knew there were no WMD is a frankly laughable statement.
As Jeremy Clarkson said it in his column in The Sunday Times after Blair was initially elected as PM: "If people insist on electing a man who looks like the village idiot, they deserve everything they get"
And do you know what? He DOES look like the village idiot!
He is always slippery and sweaty, an inveterate liar, I knew he was lying way back then, and anyone claiming to have been misled is merely trying to avoid their own culpability. They all went along with him despite it being obvious he was lying. He knew there were no WMD, as did anyone with a brain who had followed the UN inspectors actions and words. Bush and Blair were gagging for a war, they got it, and so far it's lasted longer than WW2.