Word: blaire
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...evidence. It has been a very British affair. Chaired by a former public servant, Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry has been marked by polite probing rather than electrifying cut and thrust. Yet for all the lack of drama to date, seats for the appearance of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, expected to take place Jan. 29, are in such demand that a ballot for them has had to be organized...
...reason is not - or not just - that Blair still retains an element of star quality, although he clearly does. There is also a sense that part of his personal Iraq story remains untold. That, despite his evidence to previous inquiries and the hundreds of interviews he has given, he has not yet explained when he decided war was both inevitable and right, nor how far he was willing to go to convince others. (See pictures of Tony Blair's decade in power...
...well be that Blair's most telling disclosure has already been made. Before Christmas, he told the BBC that he would have gone to war even if he had known that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, conceding that "you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat." Perhaps he will go further when he appears before the inquiry, but I wouldn...
...course, a monster is pretty much how protesters at the daylong hearing saw Blair himself. Besuited and wearing Blair masks smeared with stage blood, a trio of demonstrators held aloft a casket emblazoned with the motto "The Blood Price." Relatives of military casualties who had failed to secure seats in the hearing kept a vigil outside its doors, alongside an array of protesters who still feel the need to publicly express their anger over Blair's Iraq role. "I'm hoping he's going to live in the U.S.A. after this. Him and Bush are ... cronies, aren't they?" asked...
...object of all this emotion isn't unmoved by it. But out of office, as in power, he is irrepressible. "In the end, [the war] was divisive, and I'm sorry about that," said Blair, in his single use of the S word during his testimony. But, he continued, "if I'm asked if we're safer and more secure [another question he put to himself], I believe indeed that...