Context: 9/11 changed everything, says Tony Blair to Iraq war inquiry

As pointed out in comments on LP by Katz

In other words, the WMD scare was simply a pretext for a premeditated plan to remove Saddam. Blair knew that his real motives would not have received public support so he made some motives up.

And on the subject of WMD capabilities, Blair set the bar so low that perhaps even the existence of biochemical or nuclear physics courses at Baghdad University might have triggered an impermissible capability on the part of the nation of Iraq.

Blair’s mendacity is grotesque.

and Paul Burns.

Especially when the lawyers from the British foreign Office testified that they had advised the war was illegal. Well, this makes it a war-crime, doesn’t it? So why aren’t Howard, Blair and Bush on trial in the Hague? Any other world leaders who have done the same thing have had had Western politicians baying for his blood, eg Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Or is it one rule for them, and another for us?

Sadly, I think Paul Burns’ last sentence has it in a nutshell. After all, “the United States government has consistently opposed an international court that could hold US military and political leaders to a uniform global standard of justice”, and if undermining the ICC is good enough for them, going along with it must be good enough for us seems to be the political reasoning in Australia and the UK.

Yet another example of the USA sabotaging uniform international standards set by the UN so that they can then complain that the UN is ineffective and can thus be ignored AKA it’s wrong for anybody else to act unilaterally, but there’s no way a bunch of furriners is going to tell the USA what it can and cannot do.

Categories: ethics & philosophy, Politics, social justice