Word: blaire
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...anticipation about Blair's evidence is stoked by Westminster-based journalists and commentators, many of whom have either conveniently forgotten their own support for the war or hope to expunge their complicity with proof that Blair hoodwinked us all. At worst, he is portrayed as a man who cared nothing for questions of morality or legality, so determined was he to fall in behind the U.S. But that is merely to replace one fiction - that Saddam was armed to the teeth with WMD - with another. (See pictures of Saddam Hussein...
...worked in Downing Street for Blair from 1998 to 2001, and although I had left his staff before the buildup to war, the Tony Blair I knew had a clear sense of right and wrong based on profound moral convictions. If anything, he saw things as either black or white too often: there were few gray areas for Blair. That contributed to an impatience with those who did not agree with him and a steadfast determination to achieve what he believed to be right by whatever means necessary...
...9/11, but his words just three weeks after the 2001 attacks are worth recalling. "The kaleidoscope has been shaken," he said. "The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us." Clearly, regime change was not a concept that Blair woke up to only in 2003. By the time President George W. Bush's determination to remove Saddam by force was fixed, I suspect Blair saw another stark choice. Either Bush succeeded or the Iraqi leader humiliated the United States by mobilizing world opinion against the President, and forced...
...Blair knew he could not persuade British public opinion to support military action solely on the basis that Sad-dam should go and that Bush had made up his mind. He had to use, in his own phrase, "different arguments." The arguments he chose were based on Saddam's "active, detailed and growing" WMD program and his nuclear ambitions. In doing so, Blair stretched the truth about WMD to breaking point. (Read a TIME cover story on Saddam Hussein being captured...
...right, Blair thought then - and believes just as strongly now - that his position on the war was morally sound and that the arguments he used to defend it were morally justifiable. It might be better if he were able to say that to the Iraq inquiry next week, but he's extremely unlikely to do so. It would be interpreted, with some justification, as evidence from his own mouth that he lied. Winston Churchill famously declared that in wartime "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." But that argument would not excuse...