Over there, over there....

Take a moment to pity poor, poor Tony Blair. Here he went and tried so hard to be the strongest, surest, most faithful lapdog in the Coalition of the Killing, and look at the thanks he gets. His own citizens, his own people! badgering him over trivialities like did he lie through his flaming teeth about the Iraq War. The ingrates!

One of the issues has been the advice given him by Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, about the war's legality. Blair insisted that Goldsmith had confirmed that the attack on Iraq was legal but rumors and stories persisted that he had actually expressed doubts. What to do with such doubters, especially in an election campaign? Aha! Confound them, that's the ticket! Or at least that's what we can conclude from what The Independent (UK) reported on the 29th:

An attempt by Tony Blair to defuse Iraq as a general election issue by disclosing the Attorney General's private doubts about the legality of war has left a series of questions unanswered.

In a spectacular U-turn, Downing Street published a 13-page memo from Lord Goldsmith on 7 March 2003, including crucial caveats about military action omitted from his final legal advice backing the war 10 days later. ...

Last night, there was little sign Mr Blair's attempt to "clear the decks" had calmed the storm. Anti-war MPs claimed that the Commons, and even the Cabinet, might not have backed the conflict if they had been told of Lord Goldsmith's doubts.

Those doubts included warnings that going to war without an additional UN Security Council resolution specifically authorizing it, British soldiers and ministers could face prosecution in international courts, a declaration that Blair's campaign to accuse France of an "unreasonable" veto in the Security Council had "no basis in law," and shot down the claim justifying Saddam Hussein's removal on "humanitarian" grounds: "Regime change cannot be the objective of military action."

Two key questions still hanging in the air are what caused Lord Goldsmith to so dramatically change his position in the period between March 7 and March 17, by which time his advice was stripped of all caveats, and what transpired during the Cabinet meeting that latter day. Two current members of Blair's government, while defending him, admitted they never saw the March 7 version of the advice and former Secretary for International Development Clare Short has insisted for some time that neither questions nor discussion were allowed when the Goldsmith report was presented.

One senior Labour figure said: "If a lie is an intent to deceive, there is no doubt there was an intent to fool and mislead people and deceive them into thinking the Attorney General had given his unequivocal legal authority. All caveats were kept from ministers and they were given a dubious account of the facts."

And if that wasn't enough to give Tony the blues, on Sunday The Times (UK) dropped what should be a bombshell.

A secret document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification. ...

[The meeting] was chaired by the prime minister and attended by his inner circle. The document reveals Blair backed "regime change" by force from the outset, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, that such action could be illegal.

The meeting took place on July 19, 2002, The Guardian (UK) reports, at a time when Blair (and Bush) were publicly insisting that "no decision" had been made about Iraq. Despite that, at this meeting Blair told his military and intelligence chiefs that in April he had told Shrub that "the UK would support US military action to bring about regime change" in Iraq - something he had not even told his own MPs. As The Times makes clear, all the later talk about WMDs and "humanitarianism" were just the excuses to justify the pre-determined end.

"If the political context were right, people would support regime change," said Blair. He added that the key issues were "whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan space to work".

The political strategy proved to be arguing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed such a threat that military action had to be taken. However, at the July meeting Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said the case for war was "thin" as "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran".

Straw suggested they should "work up" an ultimatum about weapons inspectors that would "help with the legal justification'. Blair is recorded as saying that "it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors".

A separate secret briefing for the meeting said Britain and America had to "create" conditions to justify a war. ...

Downing Street claimed the document contained "nothing new".

Well, yeah, that's true, Tony. We've known for a long time. After all, as The Guardian notes, it was learned last year that Sir David Manning, your foreign policy adviser, had written to you about a March 14, 2002, meeting he'd had with with Condoleezza Rice: "I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion."

Another document leaked last year records Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the US at the time, as telling Sir David on March 18 2003, the eve of the invasion, about a meeting with the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. He said: "I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option."

So we've known for some time that it was all lies, that it was all bull, that it had nothing to do with WMDs or "defense" or "threat" or "humanitarianism." We've known for a long time that you sacrificed truth, honor, decency, humanity, and tens of thousands of lives (so far) to your twisted schemes for dominance, your toadying servitude to dreams of power. You were going to prove yourself the faithful minion of the sleazy plotters in the White House and so to share in the supremacy. And you didn't care what it cost so long as it was someone else footing the bill of blood.

You're right, Tony. Nothing new here. But y'know, it's always nice to have it in black and white.
PBU18