1 February 2014 - Tony Blair will not go away. Last week in a fashionable London restaurant a young barman who regards him as a war criminal tried to place the former UK prime minister under citizen’s arrest. Days later, with customary unabashed self-importance, Blair was proclaiming that religious extremism, not political ideology, lies at the root of 21st century global conflict. He was also trumpeting the establishment of a Blair Foundation website at Harvard University designed to expose perversions of faith and promote tolerance.
Blair behaves like a prophet the world ignores at its peril. Not that he bears much resemblance to traditional conceptions of prophets, feverishly pursuing as he does a gaudy celebrity lifestyle and missing no opportunity to enlarge his wealth. Yet what most compromises Blair’s crusade against extremism is the perception that he himself has done more than a little to foment it through his unconditional support of the calamitous US invasion of Iraq in 2003. His critics are hoping that the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war will lay bare that Blair knowingly misled the UK Parliament, encouraging the belief that Iraq posed a nuclear threat to the UK after agreeing with US President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in order to effect regime change. But what has become of the inquiry that was launched five years ago under the auspices of the former top civil servant Sir. John Chilcot? read more>>>
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