Quote:
Originally Posted by chezlaw
Only a few are of that ilk. There's always some but that's nothing like the norm.
I'm pretty extreme. I've use my 'one-time' on TB ending up in court for war crimes and I hate what he did to the Labour party. In my view he did as much harm as Thatcher, not least because he was leader of the wrong party - at least thatch was a Tory!. Still, I wouldn't wear one of those shirts.
If you make common cause with those who do, you're one of them. And you've bought into a rather silly counter-factual, ahistorical groupthink, if you don't mind my saying so (or even if you do).
Tony Blair's time in office was nothing like as depressing and strife-torn as Margaret Thatcher's. Tony Blair brought in the Human Rights Act, the minimum wage and the Freedom of Information Act (all of which would have been anathema to Thatcher). He doubled real-terms spending on the NHS, against his grudgy Chancellor's wishes. He brought the Good Friday Agreement to a successful conclusion. John Major's earlier involvement is a little under-recognised, but actually getting the deal done was the tricky bit.
Gordon's private-finance initiative in public services was in my view inadvisable (in terms of both value for money and public-service culture). And it was just as well that the ID card didn't happen.
But there are no war crimes for which Tony Blair could be tried, which is why the ICC, the only competent body, is not making any such case. it is not for fascist, populist idiots on the internet or in the legal profession or academia to make up their own definitions of war crimes and then insist that their ideological bugbears should be tried. They are merely members of the 'Saddam Hussein Is The Father Of Righteousness, Blair Rates An Immediate Nuking' Society. (Hello acronym fans everywhere.)
In any case, Tony Blair's decision on Iraq made no difference. It would have happened anyway. The Americans would simply have put in another division of their own in place of British 1st Armoured. We know this because the US president phoned No.10 and made that exact offer, to save Tony Blair the political embarrassment. (Tony Blair was more popular than the president in the US and actually scored higher name-recognition in US polls, which is fairly extraordinary, so it did the president no good to be seen to make trouble for him.)
And, as Peter Mandelson has explained, after the US invasion Britain would in any case have faced a second request for troops, to help with the stabilisation phase, which was fully UN-authorised, and it would have politically near impossible to refuse this request. And it was during the stabilisation phase that almost all the trouble happened. So staying out of the initial invasion would have made next to no difference at all in reality -- it would only have made a difference in terms of UK-centric 'optics'.
And you don't want to take too much notice of Chilcot, because the actual findings in Chilcot's report did not warrant his shouty headline-grabbing conclusions. For instance, Chilcot's inquiry found that MI6 lied to the prime minister, but Chilcot smothered that in his media presentations. And the report itself was defective, claiming there was no obvious reason for the prime minister's letter to the attorney general which said Iraq was in material breach of UNSCR 1441. There was an extremely obvious reason, which was UN chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix's statement to the Security Council that Iraqi co-operation with inspectors 'could in no sense be called immediate', as required by 1441, and that Iraqi delaying tactics 'could be construed as a material breach of Resolution 1441 by those urging military action.' (The text of UNSCR 1441 enforces 'serious consequences', universally understood to mean military action, in the event of any 'material breach'.)