"I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought,"Tony Blair said in an interview on CNN.
This blog is unimpressed with Blair’s apology, stressing
that it as a typical defense tactic which has been carefully designed to divert
the public opinion and avoid culpability.
“He’s doing what he is master at which is spin control,”
said Ian Williams, the senior analyst of Foreign Policy in Focus. “He’s trying
to shape the discussions and the agenda. So what he did is going to be transformed
from a crime to a mistake.”
By saying that what he did was based on mistaken
intelligence, what he is doing is diverting the fact that he deliberately
distorted the intelligence reports to make it mistaken. He lied and used
so-called intelligence that was known to be false. The whole thing is about him
avoiding culpability for his part in what even he now has to admit was an
unmitigated disaster. He’s simply trying to preempt the criticism and
condemnation that is going to come his way at the conclusion of the Chilcot inquiry
on the Iraq War. His lawyers have had access to the Chilcot enquiry report and he knows what the report now contains. This apology
is a reflection of what the report will say.
We also have the information from a memo, which showed that
Tony Blair committed Britain to support the Iraq war back in about 2002. And
despite what had been said in public, that Saddam Hussein could have avoided
war by renouncing his weapons of mass destruction, we knew that Blair had
already committed Britain to that war. So, he has been caught lying
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