‘War criminal’ Tony Blair knighted

Saeed Pourreza
Press TV, London

Reading out the names of fallen British soldiers in Iraq while the man responsible for their deaths and millions more is honored.

Only meters away, a protest organized by Stop the War Coalition, calling for former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s knighthood ceremony to stop.

The biggest of those lies in the so-called Iraq war dossier- a claim that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed mass-murder weapons.

Well we knew in September 2002 that the dossier amounted to nothing. We were told there were weapons of mass destruction. Everybody seriously looked at that said it didn’t. Blair was determined to go to war regardless. He was determined to go to war whatever the evidence. So eventually they cooked up the evidence.

In 2016 all the lies were exposed by the so-called Chilcot report that concluded Iraq “posed no imminent threat” at the time of the 2003 invasion.

For Tony Blair, who defended his decision to go to war, that has not meant a war crimes tribunal, but the UK’s most prestigious knighthood. To anti-war activists, that’s a dangerous precedent.

But forgive and forget they have not. Tony Blair continues to be one of the most detested politicians at home and abroad.

Nearly two decades since the Iraq war Tony Blair is still remembered as a war criminal despite efforts to reinvent him as a visionary leader, which is why the protesters here say the court Tony Blair should be attending today is not a royal one.

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