LIAR, BLIAR, PANTS ON FIRE!

I’ve always been more than a little dubious at Blair’s insistence that toppling Saddam Hussein made Britain, or London, a safer place.

I can only imagine that the illegal (in that it didn’t have the backing of the UN) invasion of a sovereign state; the killing of tens of thousands of its totally innocent citizens, including children, in night after night of utter terror in the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign conducted jointly by the US and its poodle, would have made the likelihood of a revenge attack on these countries more likely...

Especially as the reason given for this horrific invasion was to rid the country of WMDs, which were there for absolute certain, but in fact haven’t been found in the 7 years since.

The fact that the invading powers were pathetic enough to go in without the semblance of a plan for what would happen after Saddam was toppled, and that the resultant mess makes people’s lives intolerable even now, may have an added effect of disgruntlement in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

But hey, what do I know?

Well, nothing of course. For me it was a simple application of common sense. Bush and Blair together with two other nut job right wingers in the form of Silvio Berlusconi and José María Aznar López acting, as Lord Bingham described it, like ‘world vigilantes’, seemed to me to be an open invitation for revenge. As indeed it has been.

However, I feel somewhat vindicated because yesterday came (for Blair) the damning evidence of Eliza Manningham-Buller at the Chilcot Inquiry. She told the inquiry that, contrary to what Blair had said, the surge of warnings about home-grown terrorist threats after the Iraq invasion led to a 100% in MI5's budget. A fact presumably hidden from FoI requests on the grounds of national security.

Mrs Manningham-Buller said that the UK’s involvement in Iraq had radicalized a whole generation of young people who saw it, and our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam. She added that arguably it had given Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.

I wonder why Mr Blair neglected to mention this information when he was giving his evidence to Chilcot. Did he not know, was he not briefed, did he just forget with all his money making activities to worry about....or did he just plain, old fashioned lie?

To be honest there is little satisfaction in the knowledge that I was right all the time. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, millions more rendered homeless or injured, some horribly and irrevocably. Freedoms, including women’s rights which were widespread and liberal in Saddam’s Iraq have been rolled back and there is still no effective government.

Unlikeable though he was, Saddam was the kind of man who could keep this concoction of a country together and the blockheads got rid of him.

When will the “stupid white men” learn to keep their stupid ignorant paws off other people’s countries? Eliza Manningham-Buller for Defence Secretary!!