I’m glad to see others are making this point, having banged on (see ‘Third,…’) about it myself the last few days. Roger Simon writes:
[Tony Blair] went on for the umpty-umpth time to reiterate the motivations for the war:
[Quoting from the New York Times:] Blair, who last visited Basra in May, said Saddam Hussein’s regime “had a proven record of use of weapons of mass destruction” and that “literally hundreds of thousands of its citizens died in prison camps.”
Critics of the war always ignore the latter part as if no one ever mentioned it before the conflagration started. I take that as a personal insult because that was always by far the most important reason to me. Maybe I’m exceptional, but I find mass murderers horrifying.
Of course, I’m not unique in this and, of course, anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention before the war saw it mentioned by virtually everybody in favor of regime change from Bush on down. That many still choose to ignore this… I can only regard as deliberate obfuscation for political purposes. They fool no one but themselves.
After posting this yesterday (see point one) about Andrew Marr’s comment on the BBC news the night before, I was directed to an item by Marr now on the BBC site. It confirms my initial impression.
But the message [of Blair in Basra] was very much the humanitarian one that, certainly here in the south of Iraq where there are some 10,000 British servicemen and women deployed, things are beginning to return to something a little bit more like normality as many countries would understand normality.
There is traffic in the streets, the economy is starting to revive a little bit, a certain amount of security returning, far fewer shootings, the odd bombing – but better.
The message was that the British involvement had helped to bring hope to a part of the world where people had been living for decades under dictatorship, police state and in great poverty.
Tony Blair cannot divert attention from why we went to war, because this is the month when Lord Hutton reports and when there is going to be inevitably a great upsurge of debate about that again.
What this shows is he accepts that he cannot hide away from that.
He has to take it full-on, and he has to try and make some of those humanitarian cases for the conflict that he did not make before the war started. (Emphasis added.)
I don’t know that this is, word for word, what I heard Marr saying on the news. But it’s along the same lines. And the final statement is false. (Hat tip: Chris Smith.)