01 July, 2014

Tony Blair is mad to deny Iraq was a tragic error

Tony Blair is mad to deny Iraq was a tragic error: Advertisement

The reality is that before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was no al-Qaeda presence in that country, none at all. Saddam was a ruthless Ba’athist tyrant who treated his population with appalling brutality. But he did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, and he did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

The truth is that we destroyed the institutions of authority in Iraq without having the foggiest idea what would come next. As one senior British general has put it to me, ‘‘we snipped the spinal cord’’ without any plan to replace it. There are more than 100,000 dead Iraqis who would be alive today if we had not gone in and created the conditions for such a conflict, to say nothing of the troops from America, Britain and other countries who have lost their lives in the shambles.