Tuesday 5 July 2016

Chilcot, Blair and the ICC

With the publication of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war tomorrow, the International Criminal Court has shrugged it's shoulders and announced that while it will would comb through the report for evidence of war crimes committed by British troops, Blair's decision to go to war was outside of it's remit so therefore will not be able to prosecute Tony Blair for any war crimes.
Already the family of dead soldiers and those who opposed the war have spoken out to condemn the ICC decision, stating that Blair will once again escape retribution for his decisions but as shameful as that is, i don't expect to hear much from Chilcot that we don't already know.
I am sure that we will hear about 'lessons being learned' and 'mistakes being made' but it is hard to believe that we have learnt anything as since Iraq we have gone blundering into Libya and to a lesser extent Syria.
We know all that already, we put the blame firmly on George W Bush and Tony Blair for what happened, and what is continuing to happen in Iraq and Syria, the massive car bomb in Baghdad at the weekend that killed 150 is a direct result of the decisions they made back in 2003.  
The political impact of the Iraq war in Britain was serious, it not only cost Tony Blair his Prime Minister position but blasted his once promising reputation and cost Labour tens of thousands of supporters who could not bring themselves to vote for a party that would act so heinously, myself included.
So if those of us baying for Blair's blood won't get our way, and all we will hear is confirmation of common knowledge that that Blair misused and span the available intelligence, what can we take from Chilcots words? 
I will be listening with interest to hear not how we ended up in a war whose repercussions are still echoing today but why the British and American governments in their desperation to attack Saddam, went to such lengths to deceive, cheat and lie to the public to take us into the war as that question has never been fully answered.

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