A screen grab of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair from USTREAM Live as seen on www.guardian.co.uk
I have been watching former British Prime Minister Tony Blair testify this morning before an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. The inquiry is also known as the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry because the panel before which Blair is testifying is headed by Sir John Chilcot.
In so much as one can reach a broad conclusion about an event as complex and as historic and as full of backroom machinations as the invasion of Iraq, I think the way Blair is projecting it is that he was caught between an emphatic President George W. Bush and a skeptical President Jacques Chirac. Blair has been handling himself with consummate ease while insisting that the invasion came only after steadfastly exhausting all other peaceful options. He even said that had the invasion not taken place Iraq’s President Saddam Hussain "may have been" now competing with Iran to develop weapons of mass destruction.
I am not plugged into Britain’s politics and how personal equations play out there but purely going by what I have seen in the live streaming of the inquiry, it seems that Lord Lawrence Freedman, a war historian and member of the panel, and Blair are not very comfortable with each other. In simplistic terms Freedman is not buying what Blair is selling, namely that the UN weapons inspection process under Hans Blix would not have compelled Hussain to “cooperate” without the threat of military force. Freedman seemed to suggest that the UN process was “abruptly” stopped to make way for the military action.
Among the more interesting expressions that I heard from Blair was that the countries that supported UN security council resolution 1441 but not the United States felt “buyer’s remorse” eventually. His point being that they felt they should have supported America in general and President Bush in particular as he prepared to invade Iraq. It was in this context that he said that without that Hussain would have today been in competition with Iran.
One significant point that Blair made was that there were indeed doubts whether the war would be legal in the absence of a second resolution by the security council. However, considerations to avoid a “political catastrophe” over the subject won the day for Blair in favor of the invasion.
I know all this is too much to digest but whoever said the life of an unpaid blogger, underpaid journalist and rarely paid writer is an easy one?