Oh the things you find

While I was looking for the link to a June 20, 2003 article in the Daily Mirror (UK) as an update to this post, I found the following, by columnist Tony Parsons in the May 10 issue of the paper. I've included it here in full, as I thought it was worth your while.

Stop me if I am missing something here, but if former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic can end up on trial for war crimes committed under his leadership, then why can't Tony Blair?

Former Yugoslav President Milosevic didn't personally murder anyone. He didn't actually rape anyone. And he didn't soil his suit by torturing anyone in a stinking prison cell.

And yet Milosevic stands accused of crimes against humanity. He faces life imprisonment for unspeakable atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo that happened when he was many miles away.

But Milosevic was dragged to The Hague because he was the man at the top, and the indisputable architect of a mountain of misery.

"He (Milosevic) controlled events," the judges at The Hague were told when his trial began, "because he controlled the people who constituted the bodies that did evil."

Which is a perfect definition of Tony Blair's moral responsibility for everything that has been done in this country's name in Iraq.

Just as Milosevic bears ultimate responsibility for the slaughter and torture in the Balkans, so Blair must shoulder ultimate responsibility for the carnage and - even worse - the enduring hatreds that have been stirred up in Iraq.

Britain's involvement could not have happened without Tony Blair. First, it was because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to rain down on Croydon.

When that turned out to be tosh, the justification for war was the moral imperative - we were bringing freedom, democracy and enlightenment to a wretched and oppressed people.

And I am sure the Iraqis would thank us, if only someone would remove the dog collar, the boot and the rifle butt from their throats.

Blair is guilty as sin. He will not stand trial, of course. There will be no ritual humiliation and bringing to book for the Butcher of Baghdad, the way there was for the Butcher of Belgrade.

Blair will not stand trial for the 16,180 Iraqis who have been slaughtered on his watch, or the 1,195 Allied soldiers who have wasted their lives.

The Prime Minister will eventually go, but he will spend the next two decades or so swanning around the lucrative lecture circuit of the United States, smiling his pious, why-hast-thou-chosen-me-oh-Lord? grin, until he slides into the dribbling senility currently being enjoyed by his hero, Lady Thatcher. Unlike Milosevic - who was undoubtedly convinced of the rightness and goodness of his cause - Blair will get off without charge, and without any blood or brain sticking to his halo.

But that doesn't stop him being guilty as sin.

And there are plenty of others who are guilty too - especially those of us who supported the war in Iraq.

It is time to come clean - before they release the pictures of Iraqi women being abused in those rancid cells, before the pictures of children being tortured come out, before a bomb goes off on the London Underground. Time to say all of us who supported this war were wrong.

Hideously, horribly wrong. About as wrong as we could possibly be.

We should have been marching with the peaceniks, no matter how much we secretly despise them, and all their pacifist tendencies - and until the day I die I will believe that many in the peace camp would have rolled over in 1939.

But it doesn't matter why we supported the war - because we truly believed the lies our Prime Minister told us about weapons of mass destruction, because we thought that Saddam deserved to be buried by history, or because we have a sentimental attachment to the armed forces of this country and could not contemplate criticising our soldiers when they were fighting and dying - we were wrong.

Whatever the reason, we were dead wrong.

The pictures of American and British troops in all their sadistic glory will keep on coming now, and they will store up loathing that will last a lifetime.

And one day, possibly one day soon, there will be a bomb in a major British city, and innocent men, women and children will be maimed and killed, and then we will have injustices of our own to nurse, and then we will have our own burning hatreds to cultivate, and our own vengeance to claim.

So it goes - the never-ending enmity of the Middle East taken up residence in this rainy little island.

Most of us are sick of the sight of Tony Blair now, but he is ultimately irrelevant - just another lying, self-serving politician, just one more thing we were wrong about all along.

What matters are the unimaginable forces that Blair has unleashed, and the hatred that will last for a thousand years.

Another week, another cell, another image to haunt our dreams.

Are we really torturing the children now? Are we raping their women, and taking a few happy snaps to gloat about with the boys back home?

Are these really the mad acts of a few rotten eggs?

To this former supporter of the war in Iraq, it looks like the whole damn farm is rotten to the core.

Would that such a level of intellectual courage was more common among the punditry on this side of the big pond.