Peter McKay
The Daily Mail
The British government inquiry into the launching of the Iraq war “threatens the gilded new life of multimillionaire Tony Blair,” said Peter McKay. Since he left office in 2007, the former prime minister has spent his time on a “bank-advising, speechmaking, money-grubbing” whirl. Having been “Bush’s keenest ally” in the run-up to the war, he is now employed by U.S. banks and is active on the “American speech circuit.” But all that could change.
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A memo by his foreign policy advisor, leaked to the press last week, reveals that Blair and Bush discussed how to provoke Iraq into war even if U.N. inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction. Bush proposed flying U.N.-flagged planes, flanked with fighter jets, over Iraq, hoping to attract anti-aircraft fire. Blair supported the idea, the memo says, and was fully onboard with the war the Bush administration was determined to wage, regardless of what Saddam Hussein did. Yet at the same time, Blair was assuring Parliament that he sought a peaceful solution and only wanted to rid Iraq of WMD.
If the inquiry shows that that was a lie, Blair won’t have a prayer of becoming president of the European Union, his most cherished ambition. Instead, other European countries might even try to prosecute him as a war criminal. Blair could spend the rest of his days “closeted with lawyers trying to protect him from extradition warrants.”
