Will the statements open up what others will say or bring forward as they might try and distance themselves from him?
"Iraq War was right even if there were no WMDs"
Tony Blair would have invaded Iraq even if he had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country, he has admitted.
Mr Blair replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."
He added: "I can't really think we'd be better off with him and his two sons still in charge but it's incredibly difficult... and that's why I sympathise with the people who were against it for perfectly good reasons and are against it now but, for me, in the end I had to take the decision."
Snip
At a memorial service in St Paul's Cathedral in October to honour British military and civilian personnel who served in Iraq, Mr Blair offered his hand to Peter Brierley, whose son, Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, was killed in 2003. Mr Brierley told him: "I'm not shaking your hand, you've got blood on it."..>>>>>
Now what with him coming out and over explaining to spin his side of the story it makes one wonder, what with came out already, will others start speaking their minds as to what really went down as the heat starts boiling under the Blair.
Blair Iraq war admission sparks fresh outrage
Tony Blair's admission that Britain would have backed the Iraq war even if he knew it did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) sparked outrage Sunday and calls for his prosecution for war crimes.
The former prime minister, who backed the US-led invasion in 2003, told the BBC it would "still have been right to remove" Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein because of the threat he posed to the region.
Lawyers representing the deposed Iraqi leadership said they would seek to prosecute Blair following his remarks, while one newspaper commentator said it was a "game-changing admission" for the ongoing official inquiry into the war...>>>>>
Not yet scathing enough for you, stay tuned.
'Sycophant' Tony Blair used deceit to justify Iraq war, says former DPP
Tony Blair used "deceit" to persuade parliament and the British people to support war in Iraq, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said today.
In an article in the Times, Macdonald attacked Blair for engaging in "alarming subterfuge", for displaying "sycophancy" towards George Bush and for refusing to accept that his decisions were wrong.
Macdonald's comments about Blair's decision to go to war are more critical than anything that has been said so far by any of the senior civil servants who worked in Whitehall when Blair was prime minister.
Macdonald was DPP from 2003 until 2008 and he now practises law from Matrix Chambers, where Blair's barrister wife, Cherie, is also based.
Snip
Macdonald wrote: "The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions, and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage.
"It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner, George Bush, and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn't want, and on a basis that it's increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible."
Macdonald said that Blair's fundamental flaw was his "sycophancy towards power" and that he could not resist the "glamour" he attracted in Washington...>>>>>
See I told ya, oh he says much more, it was getting hotter under the blair and this is just the beginning, We Hope!
Who will turn the heat on Tony Blair over Iraq?
If it has achieved nothing else, Sir John Chilcot's inquiry into the Iraq war has at least brought Tony Blair out of the woodwork.
Only two weeks ago, Mr Blair was saying to CNN: "I think the best thing with this inquiry is actually to let us all give our evidence to the inquiry… I think the appropriate place to [go through the issues] is at the inquiry."
Snip
Blair's remarkable pre-emptive strike comfortably overshadows anything so far said to Sir John Chilcot. It goes to the very nub of the issue Sir John is considering: was the war necessary, and was the prime minister's official justification, weapons of mass destruction, merely a pretext for something decided long before?
Mr Blair's statement that he wanted rid of Saddam all along, and would simply have "deploy[ed] different arguments" to do so in the absence of WMD, is his clearest admission to date that the famous weapons were indeed a pretext. His belief that a war on Iraq would have been necessary even without WMD is both significant – and highly questionable.
Snip
The task for Chilcot and his panel is now rather different than it was last week. Mr Blair's game-changing admission gives them a licence to be tougher and more prosecutorial. The question for Sir John and his panel is whether they can match the interrogative skills of Fern Britton; whether they can extract such important confessions of their own from their guests on the Iraq Inquiry sofa...>>>>>
Blair sold Iraq on WMD, but only regime change adds up - Hans Blix
The PM seems to have deployed arguments as they suited him. Our weapons inspections were telling another story
Before the Iraq war was launched in March 2003 the world was given the impression by the US and Britain that the goal was to eradicate weapons of mass destruction. Recent comments by Tony Blair suggest, however, that regime change was the essential aim. He would have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein even if he had known that there were no WMD, he said, but he would obviously have had to "deploy" different arguments. Must we not conclude that the WMD arguments were "deployed" mainly as the best way of selling the war? Blair's comments do not exclude a strong – but mistaken – belief in the existence of WMD even when the invasion was launched. However, given that hundreds of inspections had found no WMD and important evidence had fallen apart, such a belief would have been based on a lack of critical thinking.
Snip
Many are convinced that the American and UK military plans moved on autopilot, and the inspections were a charade. I am sure that many in the Bush team felt that way. It seems likely that British and American leaders expected that UN inspections would again be obstructed or that Iraqi violation of the draconian new resolution 1441 would persuade the security council to authorise military action to remove the regime. For my part, I tended to think of the war preparations rather as a train moving slowly to the front and helping to make Iraq co-operative. If something removed or reduced the weapons issue, the train, I thought, might stop.
Snip
Unlike the US, the UK and perhaps other members of the alliance were not ready to claim a right to preventive war against Iraq regardless of security council authorisation. In these circumstances they developed and advanced the argument that the war was authorised by the council under a series of earlier resolutions. As Condoleezza Rice put it, the alliance action "upheld the authority of the council". It was irrelevant to this argument that China, France, Germany and Russia explicitly opposed the action and that a majority on the council declined to give the requested green light for the armed action. If hypocrisy is the compliment that virtue pays to vice then strained legal arguments are the compliments that violators of UN rules pay to the UN charter....>>>>>
Iraq - Phase Four!!
Blair’s critics are asking the wrong questions
All the talk is of WMD, lies and the decision to go to war. But the Chilcot inquiry is uncovering a much bigger scandal
Snip
One is a recollection from my own private meeting with Sir John Chilcot, some weeks ago, as part of his meticulous trawl through the people he thought might have something to add or suggest. He told me then, as he reminds each witness now, that the inquiry team has already received and sifted through thousands of documents, many of them with the top level of classification. This means that some of the questioning is much less innocent than it sounds.
One should recall here that the removal of the sovereign government of Iraq left the invaders with the full moral responsibility for the country in the immediate postwar period, a responsibility given legal force by UN Resolution 1438. What was to happen after the war was no detail to be tacked on after a military campaign, but a major strategic question that would affect that country and the future of the whole region. It was reasonable to expect that massive effort would go into planning that future.
Listening to the questioners at the inquiry, and particularly Sir Roderic Lyne, it seems to me they are asking some uncomfortable questions about the resources and co-ordination that were put into Phase Four...>>>>>
And right the writer is except I wouldn't place it as bigger but very equal to everything connected with this Historic Debacle of Death and Destruction that will affect the coming decades!!
What the British do with what has been coming out of the Chilcot Inquiry, as to their Countries reputation and accountability for those involved are theirs to make. My interest, across the pond here, are the tidbits coming out about what was going on here in the States as to their American Counterparts in our Government and what they were and were not doing in leading to their wanted invasion and occupation of Iraq and regime change of the once good friend of many involved, like these:
Drip, drip, drip, ""He recalled noting that: "the dog didn't bark - it grizzled." Don't forget - this 'grizzling' for regime change was 6 months BEFORE 9/11."". drip, drip, drip, ""But there was a 'sea change' in attitude after the atrocities, with former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice targeting Iraq on the very day of the outrage."", drip, drip, drip, ""George Bush tried to make a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida in a conversation with Tony Blair three days after the 9/11 attacks, according to Blair's foreign policy adviser of the time."", drip, drip, drip, ""There was "a touching belief [in Washington] that we shouldn't worry so much about the aftermath because it was all going to be sweetness and light"."", drip, drip, drip, ""Boyce mentions the "dysfunctionalism" of Washington. He says that he would find himself briefing his American counterparts on what was happening in different parts of the US administration. Rumsfeld was not sharing information"", drip, drip, drip...........!
And the Blair statements, along with the earlier ones about what was known, add to the above as it opens the window a crack to what he was being told to do by his counterpart president bush, or is that cheney!!
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