The Tony Blair Trial

The British people are going into frenzy over the Chilcot Inquiry Blair saga. Everyone in the UK is almost shocked Blair did not offer an apology or show remorse. Everyone in Iraq I spoke to said ‘huh?’ or ‘what?’ and have never even heard of the inquiry which seeks to establish why their country was invaded in the first place.

The whole thing is very quintessentially ‘British’. Who said what and why and how that changed who’s view on what which led to the invasion. They are very precise and technical and demand to know every single little detail. Iraqis on the other hand are asking their politicians very different questions. Namely how soon they can live in peace with no bombs going off and less money being stolen.

Tony Blair says he has no regrets for getting rid of Saddam, and that feeling is shared by tens of millions of Iraqis who are not asking Blair to apologise for toppling the brutal dictator.

The British people demand to know why Blair used the WMD line to con them into going to war. The Iraqi people on the other hand know what a WMD looks like, smells like, and feels like. The British people demand to know how UNSCR 1441 made it ‘legal’ for Blair to send in Armed Forces into a sovereign state and occupy it. The Iraqi people are grateful that Saddam’s Fedayeen can longer roam the streets cutting tongues off in public squares and hacking their victims’ heads off with machetes. 7 years on British mothers are asking why their sons have been sent to war on a lie. 7 years on Iraqi mothers can still remember having to pay for the bullets ‘wasted’ on their sons’ executions.

Say what you will of the chaos and destruction that followed the March 2003 invasion of my country. It was, and still is, nothing compared to the three decades of oppression and tyranny the Iraqi people had to put up with during Ba’ath rule.

If your family is being executed one by one by some psychopathic murderers, the last thing you want an armed police officer to think about is the ‘legality’ of his reaction.

The British people are of course not just obsessed with the legality of the war; they discuss its ‘morality’. We have heard the argument time and time again. It was the Western powers who supported him against the war with Iran. It was the Western powers who armed Saddam and gave him so many of his weapons. They seem to be confusing only themselves. Bush was not the President of the US when that was happening and Blair could not even get a seat at the Hackney Borough Council when the Iraq-Iran war started. To say they cannot correct the mistakes of previous governments because it would make them hypocrites is an argument that is fundamentally flawed.

A constant question they ask is 'was it moral to get rid of Saddam?'

The simple answer is that it would have been immoral not to.