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It is a little sickening when you remember that the real emotive force behind Tony Blair’s argument that we should go to war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who caused his own people to suffer. And that was central to his success in winning the parliamentary vote. It certainly swung Boris Johnson.
I went to see Boris Johnson speak a couple of years ago, back before he had actual executive power, when he was just a daft toff who presented Have I Got News For You. He was asked about his vote on the Iraq war and he said it came down to thinking it noble to end a tyrant’s abuse of his people. That’s why he voted in favour of it and it pisses me off to this day, because that’s not what the vote was about. It was about evidence that Iraq was a threat to the region and to us. That’s why WMD were fabricated, why the fantastical 45 minute claim was made, and why the Iraq dossier had to be largely plagiarised, copied and pasted from a post-graduate term paper.
Many MPs who voted in favour of invading Iraq did so not because of any hard facts. Neglecting to scrutinise the shabby evidence, they voted with their hearts, believing that stopping Saddam Hussein’s tyranny was a compelling enough reason to invade. Tony Blair plucked their heart strings with great skill, always concluding his argument with that point, with the suffering of the Iraqi people.
And it stinks. It’s a crock of shit. People all over the world are suffering under tyranny, many at the hands of governments we enable with armaments, trade, financial backing and good old indifference. So instead of action being taken where it’s desperately needed, we bring a country to its knees and turn it into a breeding ground for terror. It’s bullshit, and all those politicians who overlooked the absurdity of the evidence and thought it ‘noble’ to bombard a country, dismantle its infrastructure, and turn it into a bloodbath now have all that blood on their hands. Conversely, all those politicians currently content to leave the suffering of African peoples to the Africans to deal with are topping up the rising death-toll with their indifference. It’s the bloodiest of hypocrisies.
No oil? Well you must be a goat then, because you can go to hell…
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