The slaughter that shames Blair: As ISIS militants commit new atrocities in bloodsoaked Iraq, he is branded a ‘warmonger’ and ‘crusader’ for wanting more Western military action in Middle East!
Militants in Iraqi have published fresh pictures which they say are of soldiers who deserted the army being executed. The pictures show groups of men being rounded up, beaten and transported to the desert where they are shot in a ditch. They emerged shortly after Tony Blair was branded a medieval ‘crusader’ by his former deputy for calling for a new military campaign in the Middle East. Mr Blair – now a Middle East peace envoy – called for the West to intervene in both Iraq and Syria to ensure that Islamist fanatics are ‘countered hard, with force’. Blair’s comments prompted an avalanche of criticism from both Left and Right, with even allies suggesting he should ‘stay quiet during moments like this’.
The slaughter that shames Tony Blair: Outcry from all sides over former prime minister’s ‘Crusader’ call for a new blitz on Iraq as the country descends into a bloodbath.
- Tony Blair said current chaos in Iraq could have been avoided
- The former PM suggested the West should have bombed Syria
- Blair said it was ‘bizarre’ that Iraq War was blamed for violence
- Also suggested inaction could lead to a terror attack in the UK
- But his comments prompt avalanche of criticism from Left and Right
- Former minister Clare Short said he was ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’
- Pictures have emerged showing the mass execution of government soldiers
Iraq descended to new depths of savagery yesterday – as Tony Blair washed his hands of all blame for the bloodshed. With Islamist jihadists now in control of large areas of the country, appalling pictures emerged showing the mass execution of government soldiers by masked fanatics. Dozens of terrified men in civilian clothes lie in a shallow ditch before being executed in cold blood by Islamist extremists. The Iraqi Army deserters, some wearing football shirts, were taken to scrubland where they faced a firing squad of Al Qaeda-inspired insurgents. But, to derision from Left and Right, Mr Blair insisted that the sectarian violence tearing the country apart had nothing to do with his own actions in supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Tony Blair suggested the chaos in Iraq could have been avoided if the West had bombed Syria!!
Murdered: Cold-blooded extremists gun down the group, some of whom are still sitting up in their shallow ditch
Merciless: Clouds of dust appear to rise around the bound bodies of Iraqi prisoners as a militant walks down a line holding a rifle. This image, which could not be verified, was uploaded to an extremist website
Brutal: Another masked gunman stands over a row of bodies, with the black flag of ISIS visible in the top-left of the shot, The image is thought to originate in the Salahadden governrate, north of Baghdad
Captive: Footage appears to show militants from the Islamic State of Iraq leading away captured Iraqi soldiers
Captive: Footage appears to show militants from the Islamic State of Iraq leading away captured Iraqi soldiers
Instead, he blamed the West’s failure to bomb Syria last year – and called for fresh Western military action against both nations. ‘We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that “we” have caused this,’ the former Prime Minister wrote in an extraordinary essay. ‘We haven’t.’
Militants from the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) with captured Iraqi soldiers wearing plain clothes after taking over a base in Tikrit, Iraq
Sectarian violence is tearing Iraq apart and Mr Blair says the West should intervene to ensure that Islamist fanatics are ‘countered hard, with force’
Call to arms: Volunteers, who have joined the Iraqi Army to fight against predominantly Sunni militants, carry weapons during a parade in the streets in Al-Fdhiliya district, eastern Baghdad
‘Your great danger, when you want to go and do these regime changes, you’re back to what Bush called a crusade… put on a white sheet and a red cross, and we’re back to the Crusades.’ Tory MP Charlotte Leslie described Mr Blair’s views as ‘dangerous’. ‘Believing Blair on the Middle East feels about as safe and wise as referring patients to Harold Shipman,’ she said. And Ukip leader Nigel Farage said the former Labour leader has become ‘an embarrassment’ and suggested his friends should urge him to take ‘an extended period of silence’. He added: ‘The lesson is not that the West should intervene in Syria – the lesson is the West should declare an end to the era of military intervention abroad.’ Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003, said the second Gulf War was ‘perhaps the most significant reason’ for the current sectarian violence’.
Clare Short, who served in Mr Blair’s Cabinet during the war, branded him a ‘complete American neocon’
‘We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule,’ he wrote in the Mail on Sunday. Former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell added: ‘I think Mr Blair actually admitted today that the purpose was regime change. Well that’s not what he was telling us back in 2003.’ Downing Street declined to comment on Mr Blair’s intervention. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid said the situation in Iraq was a ‘huge worry’ but warned there were no plans for military intervention.
U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair shake hands in 2003, after discussing the war with Iraq
Labour also distanced itself from its former leader’s comments. Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander said the Iraqis themselves ‘hold the key to resolving this crisis’. Former Labour Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown said Mr Blair was right to say that Iraq ‘would have been a problem’ even without the 2003 war, but added: ‘One wishes someone would tell him to just stay quiet during moments like this, because it does drive a great surge of people in the other direction.’ Mr Blair, who wrote that he was speaking ‘with humility’ in his essay, acknowledged for the first time that ‘regime change’ had been a key factor in the 2003 war.Yesterday, he said: ‘It is a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today to claim that, but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis.’ He added: ‘There is no sensible policy for the West based on indifference. This is, in part, our struggle, whether we like it or not. ‘But every time we put off action, the action we will be forced to take will ultimately be greater.’ Warning of the risk to UK security, he said: ‘If we don’t deal with the Syria issue then the problems are not just going to be for Syria and for the region. The problems … are going to hit us very directly even in our own country.’ The West was also ‘naïve’ about the 2011 Arab Spring and may have to act again in Libya because of the rise of Islamist militants, he added. The massacre of hundreds of unarmed young men by radicals fighting for the Islamist State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), took place near Tikrit – birthplace of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It was filmed and later posted online. Jihadist leaders said the killings were to avenge the death of an ISIS commander shortly before the splinter group’s lightning advance towards Baghdad – in which they captured a string of key towns and cities including the second city of Mosul. The offensive has plunged Iraq into its bloodiest crisis since the withdrawal of US troops in 2011. ISIS rebels, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, are said to have murdered 1,700 soldiers last week. Yesterday fierce fighting broke out near Mosul, where officials fear another mass killing of civilians. However, Iraqi military chiefs, backed by Shia and Kurdish militias, said they had ‘regained the initiative’ and killed 279 militants to prevent the capture of Baghdad. The SAS are now heading to Iraq to assist the U.S. in pinpointing targets for air strikes, which may start within 24 hours. Meanwhile, up to 2,000 Iranian troops, including members of the elite Revolutionary Guard, are reported to have been sent across the border into Iraq to provide training and advice. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll yesterday said 15 per cent of voters would still have Mr Blair as Labour leader – rather than 7 per cent for Ed Miliband.
Blair’s bizarre claims – and the reality: One of Britain’s most distinguished generals says former PM is in ‘complete denial’
Blair accepts not a shred of responsibility and still refuses to apologise for taking us to war. So let us examine what he says point by point – and show his false logic for what it is.
CHEMICAL WEAPONS
CLAIM: One of the most extraordinary arguments by Tony Blair in his essay is that, because Syria’s President Assad has used chemical weapons, this retrospectively justifies invading Iraq, where no such weapons were found. ‘Is it likely that, knowing what we now know about Assad, Saddam, who had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and his own people, would have refrained from returning to his old ways?’ he asks.
TRUTH: Leave aside, as too preposterous to merit a response, the argument that because one dictator in one country has used chemical weapons, it follows that another in a completely different country would have done so too. It was already quite clear by 2003 that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was no threat to anyone. For, following the Iraq/Iran war and Saddam’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq was being adequately contained militarily by the West. It was not only subject to punitive economic sanctions and UN arms inspections, but was being bombed almost daily by the US Air Force in Operation Desert Fox. Although Saddam Hussein may have retained a latent ambition to obtain weapons of mass destruction, neither the UN inspectors before the war or the Iraq Survey Group afterwards have ever found any trace of such weapons.
WE’D BEATEN AL QAEDA
CLAIM: Blair says the West had overcome the terrorist threat in Iraq before withdrawing. ‘Three or four years ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was a beaten force,’ he writes.
TRUTH: To say al Qaeda was ever ‘defeated’ in Iraq is nonsense. True, significant damage was done to its infrastructure while US and British troops were still in the country, but it was never defeated.
Like all insurgents, the terrorist group merely laid low until the enemy became weak or distracted. But the key point is that neither al Qaeda nor any other extreme jihadist group had any presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Saddam Hussein was far too brutal to allow that.
After the invasion, insurgents piled into the country. They were encouraged by disenchanted loyalists from Saddam’s Ba’athist party – all Sunni Muslims – who were furious at the toppling of their leader and the rise to power of rival Shia Muslims under Western auspices. The Sunnis had, after all, ruled in Iraq since 1638, when the Sunni Turkish Ottomans took over Baghdad from the Persians.
THE ARAB SPRING
CLAIM: If Iraq hadn’t been invaded in 2003, says Blair, Saddam Hussein’s regime would not have survived anyway – ‘it would have been engulfed by the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that swept Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.
TRUTH: The invasion of Iraq and its terrible aftermath was the cause of the Arab Spring. This is because the young people involved in the uprisings throughout the Middle East felt empowered by the removal of Saddam, who had ruled with an iron fist for 24 years. Many were appalled by what they regarded in Iraq as Western interference in Arab affairs, which encouraged them to overthrow their pro-Western dictators. It was no surprise subsequently that what started out as a series of anti-West pro-democracy revolutions would soon be hijacked by Islamic extremists.
BLAME IRAQ’S PM
CLAIM: Rather than accept responsibility himself, Blair says the current Iraqi regime is to blame for the chaos: ‘The sectarianism of the Maliki government snuffed out what was a genuine opportunity to build a cohesive Iraq’.
TRUTH: To blame Prime Minister Maliki takes some beating for sheer gall. Maliki may be corrupt, partisan, authoritarian and a puppet of Iran’s Shia Muslim regime. But Blair brazenly seems to dismiss the fact that he would never have been in power had the 2003 invasion not taken place. General Colin Powell, US Secretary of State for Defence at the time of the invasion, famously remarked: ‘You break it, you own it’. Blair broke Iraq but simply won’t accept any responsibility for doing so.
IT’S OBAMA’S FAULT TOO
CLAIM: Blair suggests that President Barack Obama should have kept his soldiers in Iraq: ‘There will be a debate about whether the withdrawal of US troops happened too soon’.
TRUTH: US troops had been in Iraq for nearly nine years – from March 2003 to December 2011 – numbering 170,000 in 500 bases at their peak. The war had by then cost the US government some $800billion and 4,500 Americans had been killed.
Does Blair think America should have kept up this loss of blood and treasure indefinitely? In addition, the US had spent a staggering $30billion on training and equipping the Iraq army. What they could never do, however long they stayed, was to give them the will to fight.
MILITARY STRIKES
CLAIM: We need a decisive military response, says Blair, ‘including military strikes against extremists in Iraq and Syria’.
TRUTH: As we have seen, military intervention invariably makes things worse. So far, our adventures in the Middle East have served only to increase hatred of the West and recruit still more insurgents to fight alongside our enemy. But Blair, all too clearly, cannot face this brutal truth. He once said that war is an imperfect instrument for righting human distress. He should pay more heed to his own words.
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