Not Blair's Fault

Not his fault

If newspaper comments sections are any guide, the great British public are unanimous in one thing if nothing else: Tony Blair and George W Bush are to blame for the sadistic savagery now being visited on Northern Iraq. If only we hadn’t invaded in 2003 they would be living in peace picking buttercups and daisies under the benevolent gaze of uncle Saddam is the constant refrain from every keyboard.

This is a ridiculous fantasy on a par with regarding Dances With Wolves as an accurate portrayal of the Old West.

Iraq was a nasty barbarous place long before we showed up in 2003 and will be a nasty barbarous place as long as they remain drunk on a nasty barbarous religion.

Let’s go back twenty years or so before we disturbed Eden.

November 1978: The US ambassador to Iran warns for the first time that America’s closest Muslim ally in the region, the Shah, is distinctly shaky.

January 1979: The Shah of Iran falls in Islamist revolution and the revolutionaries celebrate with a bloodbath of their enemies.

June 1979: The Iranians begin publically to urge their Shiite brethren in Iraq to rise up and overthrow the secular Ba’th regime.

July 1979: Saddam Hussein formerly takes power in Iraq and murders dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of his opponents.

April 1980: The Iranians escalate to direct action against Iraq. April 1980 alone sees an attempt on the life of the deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, and on the information minister two weeks later. And In just this one month 20 Iraqi officials are murdered in bombs attacks orchestrated by Iran.

September 1980: These Iranian attacks and Saddam’s quest for glory lead him to launch an invasion of Iran. Hoping to take advantage of the revolutionary turmoil Saddam instead unites Iran behind its revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini is so fond of its consolidating effect that he subsequently ignores all Saddam’s overtures of peace for 8 long years.

March 1988: The Kurdish town of Halabja is gassed leaving 5,000 civilians dead. One gas attack out of many, but the pictures of dead children touch a nerve.

August 1988: The futile Iran/Iraq  war ends. Up to a million have died. Iran’s revolutionary fervour has cooled following hecatombs of corpses and Iraq is ruined and bankrupt.

August 1990: Saddam invades Kuwait to solve his financial problems. The usual orgy of murder, looting, and rape ensues.

January 1991: Operation Desert Storm led by US and British forces removes the threat to our vital oil interests and liberates Kuwait in 100 hours. Tens of thousands have died in Saddam’s latest adventure.

Saddam becomes a hero to Muslims everywhere for winning “The Mother Of All Battles”. The Iraqi dictator revels in the role and over the next decade or so is a constant irritant with his support for terrorism and for taking pot shots at British and American aircraft imposing the “No Fly Zones”. He also manages to persuade everybody with the possible exception of himself that he possesses weapons of mass destruction.  

March 2003: In the wake of 9/11 the murdering hero’s number is up. The US and Britain invade and topple the blood-soaked tyrant.

Suddenly the entire western media so blasé about the preceding decades of torture, atrocity and slaughter realises that people are dying in Iraq. And best of all, it’s all our fault.

The only way you could pin the blame for the current situation on Tony Blair is through utter ignorance of Iraq, its religion, and its history. The sadistic slaughter was going on long before the British PM’s brave decision to face down bien pensant opinion and do the right thing, for once.

Perhaps that was a mistake, but the 2003 invasion was not the starting pistol for murderous psychos in Iraq.