For No Positive End: By Their Own Words

by

Abby Zimet, staff writer

Seven years and 2.6 million words later, the release of the blistering Chilcot Report in the U.K. lays the blame for the bloody debacle of the Iraq War - its trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of soldiers killed and maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed along with millions displaced, and murderous legacy of turmoil and terror - where it belongs: On the duplicitous, cynical, arrogant, morally bankrupt heads of Messrs. Blair and Bush. In the report and subsequent statements, Sir John Chilcot mercilessly portrays Blair as what theNew York Times dubs “Washington’s poodle,” who "chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted." As to the glaring failures of judgment that accompanied that decision, he adds, "We do not agree that hindsight is required." Blair in his turn called going to war the “most agonizing decision” of his life, followed by his "sorrow, regret and apology" it turned into such a shitshow - or, assummarized on Twitter, "Sorry not sorry." 

 

Despite the widespread belief that Blair, along with Bush and Cheney and much of their administration, should be charged with war crimes, the report fails to address legal culpability for the catastrophes they all engendered. And of course the U.S. has failed to produce a comparable documenting of the Bush/Cheney crimes, or even any occasion that might require them to proffer a pathetic "Sorry not sorry" for the fact they're still free and above ground. Still, their obscene shadows hover menacingly in the current revisiting of the war's history. In order to remember their own, as yet unnamed culpability, a look back at the multitude of lies they told - "Let the warmongers be damned" - at the time, and a listento the grieving, furious U.K. families who suffered and continue to suffer because of them, and who still feel they should pay for their crimes, from the sister of a dead soldier who declares Tony Blair "the world's worst terrorist" to the father of a dead soldier who soberly, mournfully concludes, "My son died in vain." Meanwhile, in Iraq, the news today was not of Chilcot but of the ongoing chaos and terror and latest bombings that killed hundreds - in Iraq, a day like any other. From one former soldier: "We did that."

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2016/07/06/no-positive-end-their-own-words