COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
No, he did not.
This is a flimsy defense being "put out there."
I lived through that time and followed events closely.
There was absolutely no question that there were no weapons
of mass destruction.
We had the expert testimony of weapons inspectors, ones
working in Iraq at the time and ones who worked there earlier.
After Bush pere's Gulf War (1990-91), the entire
infrastructure for Saddam's serious weapons was destroyed, every bit of it.
Saddam had built, running up to 1990, some serious
facilities for producing fissile material. The existence of these facilities
was the real reason for Bush pere's Gulf War.
These facilities and documents were entirely destroyed.
Later imposed weapons' inspectors working in Iraq worked
diligently, following up every lead, and never found a scrap of anything that
mattered.
Their findings were later confirmed by American military and
intelligence services working there following the unjustified and illegal
(under international laws and treaties) invasion of Iraq.
We also had before the invasion several Iraqi scientists who
told us nothing was being done along these lines.
We also had the intelligence services of several significant
states confirming that nothing was going on.
We also had leaders in neighboring states making such
statements.
Now, if I and others understood this much, how much better
were Blair's sources?
There was no possible basis for this claim that he
"really believed," else why did he force manipulative activities like
creating the dodgy dossier?
The whole thing was a feeble excuse to destabilize and
effectively Balkanize the most advanced Arabic country in the region, leaving
millions with no employment, no electricity, and no clean water for years.
And that's over and above the million or so who perished,
the several million driven out as refugees.
By the way, Assad's Syria took something like 2 million
refugees from the war. He really is a terrible man, isn't he?
The US, of course, as so often took none.
Now America and its allies, after repeating the dirty
business in Libya, are doing the same thing to Syria, only cowardly using
proxies, lunatics hired and trained from all over.
The real strategic purpose in all this murder and
destruction is to secure Israel's hegemony in the region and eliminate all
independent-minded leaders and movements.
