Which war lies will you remember him for?
For 10 years Tony Blair has faithfully backed the United States in its military adventures abroad, using lies and spin to whip up public feeling in favour of war, and ignoring public opinion when this failed.
What are the war lies that you will remember Blair for? Here are a few of them:
Please add you own by posting a comment below
1. 1998: US bombs Sudan
On Aug 20, 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa chemicals plant in Sudan, claiming it was a “terrorist base”. The plant turned out to provide 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines; its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria.
Tony Blair and the then defence minister, George Robertson, rallied to the cause, claiming that America was justified and defending the apparently unassailable evidence. They were, however, alone in supporting the action and rejecting accusations that Clinton had ordered the attacks as a distraction from the unfolding Monica Lewinsky saga.
Noam Chomsky was one of many who pointed out: “One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims.”
2. 1998: US/UK bomb Iraq
In December 1998 the US and Britain bombed Iraq for four days as part of a new strategy of “regime change”. The attacks took place during Clinton’s impeachment hearings. Britain was the only ally to join the US, setting it at odds with almost all its European partners – even Kuwait refused to support the attacks.
Blair said war was necessary because Hussein never intended to abide by his pledge to give unconditional access to UN inspectors trying to determine if Iraq had dismantled its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
But UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said the inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that “had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing.” They were then withdrawn on instructions from Washington.
3. 1999: NATO bombs Serbia
NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This indeed occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked.
With bombing under way, NATO military figures publicly refuted political leaders’ whole justification for the war by saying that the military strategy could not prevent the humanitarian disaster.
Human Rights Watch said: “We are concerned that NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not because it was making a significant contribution to the Yugoslav military effort but because its destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Serbia”
The war was undertaken without UN authorisation and complete with the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of cluster bombs. “We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured”, Tony Blair said two weeks into the bombing in April 1999, revealing the brutal reality of NATO’s supposedly “humanitarian war” over Kosovo.
4. 2001: US/UK invade Afghanistan
Tony Blair, Oct 2, 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has so many times before.”
Cherie Blair, Nov 19 2001: “The women in Afghanistan are as entitled as the women in any country are to have the same hopes and aspirations for ourselves and for our daughters. … We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.”
The reality today: “Without a huge injection of foreign aid – and there is no evidence that anyone wants to provide it – it may not be long before British commanders start saying: ‘Let’s get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.’” Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian, June 21 2007
The reality today: “In a filthy corner of a clinic in Lashkar Gah, a heavily pregnant 12-year-old lies wailing at a curt, dismissive doctor. Down the road some of the thousands of widows in the area beg in the mud. In the local hospital, women lie recovering from the horrific burns of failed suicide attempts. The brave new world promised by Tony Blair, President George Bush and Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, appears not to have reached the women of Helmand.
“When asked whether life was better now than under the Taliban, Fowzea Olomi, 40, the director of the women’s centre [in Helmand], laughs: ‘The Taliban have gone?’ Life now, she says, is worse.” Terri Judd in the Independent, June 13 2007
5. 2003: US/UK invade Iraq
Over to you…
