In foreign policy Blair was an impenitent interventionist. Mr Gladstone’s agony on behalf of the Bulgarian hillsmen would–had Blair reached that far in mentor Woy’s book on the Victorian statesman which was cobbled together from the work of Gladstone scholar Colin Mathew–have found an echo in the young Prime Minister’s bosom. Almost as soon as he took office in 1997, Blair was given intelligence by the British Foreign Office which gave him grave cause for concern about the continuing menace of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Right-wing Republicans such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were urging a complete change of direction in foreign policy, what they called a Project for the New American Century. They argued that America would have the power to change the world for the better only if it were to take a much bolder leadership role in the years to come. It should dare to be interventionist. These neo-conservatives urged a regime change in Iraq, with the Shia exile Ahmed Chalabi, from a wealthy banking family, as the likely American puppet-president of a new democratic Iraq. Clinton resisted this suggestion, but as Saddam Hussein consistently refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into his country, and as US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on 7 August, suffered major terrorist attacks (224 killed), pressure was building on President Clinton to take a more aggressive attitude towards Iraq. After the embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton authorised the punishment-bombing of a supposed terrorist base in Afghanistan and what was claimed to be a chemical weapons-related facility in Sudan. They in fact hit a veterinary pharmaceuticals factory. ‘Everyone knew that what Clinton was doing was wrong, bombing that plant,’ said one member of Blair’s inner circle. ‘But we also knew that supporting him was right.’ While President Chirac of France and Kofi Annan of the United Nations made it clear that any further air strikes or military action by the USA were to be deplored, Britain alone remained supportive. Later that year, on 15 November, Clinton and Blair decided to use Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraq. When asked by his secretary if he should cancel a game of tennis because of the impending air strikes, Blair replied, ‘Can’t let that squirt Saddam get in the way.’1 By the end of Ramadan 650 sorties had been made by Allied bombers. Two hundred and fifty targets had been selected. No weapons of mass destruction seemed to have been found by these bombing raids, but Blair was pleased at having played a part on the world stage while the other European leaders held back. On 9 January he flew to Kuwait to thank the RAF pilots who had carried out the bombings, and proudly had himself photographed in the cockpit of a Tornado jet.2
In the next two wars which Blair conducted it seemed as if the case for interventionism was strong, if not overwhelming. President Clinton managed to broker a peace agreement in the Balkans on 21 November, 1995, after three and a half years of war and the deaths of 200,000. The British, guided by Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary, had been anti-interventionist, or ‘hyper-realist’ as the Americans called it. Bosnia had been left to suffer. Blair, once he came into office, was determined that the same should not happen in Kosovo. He dispatched his carrot-bearded Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to Belgrade to confront Slobodan Miloevic and demand Kosovan autonomy. Threats of ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces, as had happened in Bosnia, were once again uttered. By August, 200,000 Kosovan ethnic Albanians had been driven from their homes. When a policy of intervention had eventually been decided, it was once again Britain and America who undertook the bombing–this time of Belgrade. There were some drastic mistakes, but Blair said, ‘To those who say the aim of military strikes is not clear, I say it is crystal clear. It is to curb Slobodan Miloevic’s ability to wage war on an innocent civilian population.’3 At first it seemed as if the American bombing of Serbia was rallying the people behind Miloevic, but Blair, Robin Cook and Clare Short, the International Development Secretary in her ‘lovely Brummie accent’–as Alan Clark called it–defended the bombings as an act of liberation–albeit a clumsy one. By the end of the war, there were 850,000 refugees, caused directly by the bombing, and most of the military targets had been missed. But when Blair visited Pritina on 31 July, he was greeted by the liberated Kosovans as a saviour. As they chanted ‘Tony, Tony’, he could call out, ‘We fought in this conflict for a cause and that cause was justice.’
Blair’s third war was in Sierre Leone in which, with remarkably little loss of life, seven hundred entered Freetown, initially to evacuate foreign nationals after a coup d’état against the moderate Muslim government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. When eleven men of the Royal Irish Regiment, along with their local military liaison, were taken hostage, the SAS went in with Chinook helicopters. One British soldier was killed and twenty-five of the rebels. The rest of the hostages were rescued, and the Kabbah government restored. ‘We welcome your excellency the peacemaker, we love you and respect you, trust and support you’ read a sign hanging from a ramshackle school near Freetown airport when Blair revisited the country three years after its liberation.
Such messages were not hung out for Blair to read when he visited the Labour Party Conference or spoke to the trades unions. The office of Prime Minister is a lonely one, and, as successive occupants of the job had discovered, merely to lead a political party was to make most of your closest colleagues hate you. The more Thatcher had been loathed at home by her Cabinet, the more she saw herself as a liberator of eastern communist bloc countries, and a woman with a mission to the world. Blair had tasted early the heady excitements of being a world leader who could make a difference, in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone.
By the close of the second millennium, the Cold War had been won by the West. China had adopted capitalism and was well on the way to its phenomenal economic growth, making it a far greater world power than it had ever been in the days of its unbudgeable Marxism. The Soviet Union had broken up, and the subsequent wars in the Balkans had been brought to an end, very largely thanks to the interventionism of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton in Kosovo. The new President of the United States, George W. Bush, had only been elected by a whisker, and there were those who questioned the very legality of his election. But elected he had been, and Blair was determined to follow Bill Clinton’s advice to work alongside the Americans as he had done so successfully before.
The communist threat to American power had been overcome. Nothing else in the world, surely, could pose a comparable threat. One American historian believed that the world had seen the end of history. Hereafter, all that remained was for the rest of the world to adopt Western capitalism. The world had become, in effect, American.
Anyone contemplating what George Bush Senior had called ‘the new world order’ would see that there were flaws in the argument.
History does not end. No one predicted the speed with which the Soviet bloc would unravel. It was equally possible that the US economy could, as it had done in 1929, implode. Those Europeans who watched with dismay as McDonald’s and Starbucks replaced their local cafés and restaurants would not necessarily have wept if, as could quite possibly happen, the United States themselves dissolved, as the nation states of the Soviet Union had dissolved.
If in Europe there were those who entertained feelings of generalised resentment against the spread of American food chains, American films, American music, American clothing, in the Middle East, and further east, there were more specific grievances felt against the United States and its influence. Many Muslims, in particular, saw in the United States nothing less than the Great Satan, a society which, for all its expressed belief in the teachings of Jesus, was grossly materialistic, and lost in a welter of pornography and sexual licence. Moreover, it was American money which armed, and maintained the existence of, Israel as an independent state. And the existence of Israel, especially in its post-1967 borders, was a cause of resentment far beyond the borders of that country itself–whatever those borders happened to be.
The growth of Islamism was something which the Western world noted with a mixture of indifference and incredulity. Had not the Islamic world always thrown up, from time to time, figures such as the Mad Mahdi whose followers murdered General Gordon of Khartoum? And then the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Mahdi, or whatever name it happened to possess in any one generation, faded away and the Muslim world resumed its peaceful, sleepy existence. That was the romantic idea, though ever since the West linked itself to dependence upon oil, and ever since large numbers of poor Muslims from the former Pakistan and elsewhere had migrated through the Western world, it was not a very realistic picture.
One fine day in the United States, 11 September 2001, four aeroplanes were hijacked by Islamist suicide-murderers. American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was diverted and flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8.46 a.m., killing all on board and, within the building, an untold number. United Airlines Flight 175 Boston to Los Angeles was diverted and flew into the South Tower of the World Trade Center fifteen minutes later. The Twin Towers collapsed and the total casualties were almost 3,000 people. Meanwhile, American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington’s Dulles airport to LA, also taken over by maniacs, was diverted, and, having flown in the direction of the White House, switched course and flew at the Pentagon at full speed, killing all 64 people on board and 125 Defense Department personnel. Donald Rumsfeld was in his office, but was uninjured, though he felt the impact of the crash on the building. A fourth flight, United Airways 93, left Newark, New Jersey, at 8.42 bound for San Francisco. Because the plane had taken off late, the flight controller was able to warn it, when in midair, of the danger of attack. It crash-landed in a field in Pennsylvania killing everyone on board.
It was after these events that the world became conscious of the words Al Qa’eda, a fanatical terrorist Islamist organisation, and of its evil genius, Osama bin Laden (born 1957), the seventeenth child of a Saudi construction engineer who had a total of fifty-seven children. Bin Laden money was ‘new’. Osama’s grandfather had been a penniless immigrant to Saudi from South Yemen, but the new money had bought for the bin Ladens the attributes and manner of life of European ladies and gentlemen. There were many bin Ladens in London. One of Osama’s brothers had a nice house in Kensington Square. Osama, having led the life of a rich playboy, had recast himself in the model of a prophet. His long face, Jesus painted by El Greco, was soon to become one of the most famous of the age.
The morning after the 9/11 attacks, the band had assembled outside Buckingham Palace as it does every morning at the Changing of the Guard, and, when the music began, it struck up ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. It was a spontaneous response to the tragedy, and representative of majority British opinion. Most people in Britain must have shared the feeling, of which the band music was a symbol, that the two great English-speaking peoples of the Western world, the United States and Britain, have a deep bond of friendship. The fact that many Britons perished on 11 September in New York was not the primary reason for the sense of shock and shared outrage in Britain. The British felt that the attack on America was an attack on their closest ally and strongest friend.
Such feelings in Britain are shot through with ambiguities and ironies, and in the weeks which followed the attack some of these ambiguities turned to expressions of outright anti-Americanism. There was even a perception, especially on the left, that ‘the Americans’ had in some sense ‘had it coming to them’ that they ‘deserved’ or had been ‘asking for’ some such retributive act of violence against its innocent civilian population. Ever since the end of the Second World War, certainly since Suez, there has been a strong vein of anti-Americanism in the British psyche–‘over-sexed, over-paid, and over here’. But it would be easy to misread this. Many who would complain about the ‘bloody Yanks’ would also feel a natural kinship with them. Although the unfolding Iraqi crisis, the war and its aftermath, would allow anti-American feeling to be voiced by all the usual suspects, and it certainly increased anti-American feelings throughout the world, there was no notable increase in anti-Americanism in Britain, despite the best endeavours of the BBC, and some sections of the press, to whip such feelings into flame. Indeed, as the extent of the Islamist terror threat became clear, with explosions in the London transport system (see Chapter 27), there were increased feelings of solidarity with the Americans in their desire to go after the perpetrators of 9/11 and get’em.
But how could such an elusive individual as bin Laden be found? And how would it be possible to distinguish between the need to get back at the mass murderers, and the need to construct a plausible Middle Eastern policy which would contain the rogue states?
The Americans had continued to receive intelligence about the dangers posed to world peace by Saddam Hussein, and a key source was the cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi whose codename was Curveball. In the evidence gathered by the Presidential Commission on the reasons for pre-war misinformation guiding the Oval Office, it was stated that ‘of all the disproven pre-war weapons claims from aluminium centrifuge tubes to yellowcake uranium from Niger, none points to greater levels of incompetence than those found within the misadventures of Curveball’.4
Curveball had originally surfaced in Germany, where he had persuaded his minders that he had worked as an Iraqi chemical engineer and supervised one of Saddam’s mobile biological weapons labs. Curveball’s real name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan. A 601-page report released in March 2005 by the US government conceded that Curveball and the CIA had been ‘dead wrong’ in all their pre-war assessments of the Iraqi situation.5
US relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had, broadly speaking, known three phases. There had been the phase, from September 1980, when this exceptionally brutal dictator had authorised the invasion of neighbouring Iran. For the next six years, America supported the Iraqis in their war against the Iranians. The war ended in a stalemate, and amazingly, Saddam survived it, in spite of uprisings by Kurds and Shias, which he suppressed with merciless severity. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Americans changed their view of him. He became a villain who was trying to steal oil. Following his humiliating defeat in the Desert Storm war it was a prodigious achievement on his part to survive. But he did so. The Israelis and their allies were never to forget that he launched scud missiles which landed in Tel Aviv. Economic sanctions over the next years brought Iraq to a state of near collapse. In 1998, a nationwide health survey of Iraqi children showed that 9.1 percent were actively undernourished, 26.7 percent undernourished and 22.8 percent underweight. The health service was at the point of collapse. Iraqis were leaving their country in droves. In New Zealand alone, there were 30,000 Iraqi refugees, most of them highly skilled or professional.
There was every reason to hope that Saddam Hussein would be toppled by Iraqis, and that, when this happened, the West could repair the cruel damage inflicted upon Iraq by oil sanctions.
Then came Curveball’s intelligence reports that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Six months after he became Prime Minister, Tony Blair had remarked to the Liberal Party leader Paddy Ashdown, ‘I have now seen some of the stuff on this. It really is pretty scary. He is close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction…We cannot let him get away with it.’6
When Iraq had been invaded, and no WMD were found, it was easy to take the view that the fears had been foolish, or even that those intent upon a war with Saddam had simply invented, or at the very least exaggerated, the extent of the danger. It is only fair to stress that very many well-informed diplomats, politicians and observers of the Middle East, in the period from September 2002 to March 2003, believed in the existence of these weapons, and in the imminent danger of Saddam using them. Of course, the memory of those scuds in Tel Aviv, fired off towards the close of the First Gulf War, concentrated the minds of the pessimists. When a fifty-page document, ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction–the Assessment of the British Government’ was published on 24 September 2002, there was mixed reaction. ‘Chilling reading’ for the Jerusalem Post. The Financial Times, however, found in the document ‘no compelling evidence that immediate military action is needed’.7
Again and again, Blair told the House of Commons that there were two reasons why war was necessary in Iraq: that Saddam would not comply with UN Resolution 1441, and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction which could destroy the enemy within forty-five minutes. Both these claims were questionable. The Iraqis did respond to Resolution 1441 with a 12,000-page dossier which was never made public. We do not know what it contained. Nor had Tony Blair or George W. Bush ever demonstrated in what ways the government of Saddam Hussein was in breach of UN Resolution 1441. Unlike some Middle Eastern states–Israel, for example, which is also in breach of several UN resolutions–Iraq did at least permit weapons inspectors into their country, and none of the WMD were ever found. That said, the UN weapons inspectors who had visited Iraq on 25 November 2002 were unable to account for six thousand chemical aircraft bombs, seven Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles and two Russian scuds which were known to be in Saddam’s arsenal, together with biological material capable of producing 26,000 litres of anthrax and 1.5 tons of VX gas. To exemplify the scale of the possible threat, the weapons inspectors noted that a mere 140 litres of VX could kill a million people.8 In spite of this lingering threat, Kofi Annan stated that the war against Iraq was illegal.
The war against Iraq was the one event for which Tony Blair will undoubtedly be remembered by history. It was a war which turned into a catastrophe, plunging the peoples of Iraq into a civil conflict which would last for a generation, a conflict which killed well over half a million people.
Britain had never fought a war in the past which was based upon intelligence alone. As it became clear what George W. Bush intended, millions of people all over the world took to the streets to implore the governments of Britain and the United States to think again. The overwhelming argument against the war was not pacifist or anti-Zionist or anti-American, though people of these persuasions joined the millions who marched. Most British people believed, correctly as it turned out, that an aggressive war fought by Britain and America would make a bad situation in Iraq much worse: it would destabilise an already wretchedly volatile region; it would increase the likelihood of tension between Israel and her Arab neighbours, between pro- and anti-Western Arab states; it would strengthen the hands of the Islamist extremists throughout the world; and it would, indeed, seem to be a justification of the worst paranoid fantasies of Osama bin Laden. For, if the USA and Britain, in defiance of the United Nations and against the advice of France, Russia, China and most other people in the world, led an invasion force against the Iraqis, how else could poor Muslims respond, other than by acts of terrorism?
Why did Tony do it? He denied that in 2002, when staying with George W. Bush on his ranch at Crawford, Texas, he had prayed for guidance, even though Christian author Stephen Mansfield, claiming he owed his story to White House officials, says that both men did pray together; and this story is backed up by a writer on Time magazine, David Aikman. In March 2006, Blair told a British television audience, when asked why he had gone to war on Iraq, ‘If you have faith about these things, then you realize that judgement is made by other people. If you believe in God, it’s made by God as well.’9 President Bush made no bones about having been guided by God to attack Iraq.
The Americans took responsibility for entering the northern parts of Iraq, and securing the northern city of Mosul, and Baghdad itself. The British troops, with immense skill and comparatively little loss of life, occupied Basra. The total Allied casualties for the war itself were 122 American and 33 British.10
Only a few pessimists had ever doubted whether the Americans and their allies would win the war itself. What was in doubt was what would constitute a victory. On 1 May 2003, George W. Bush announced that the war was over. But after that date, 20,000 American troops would be killed by the Iraqi resistance, and the country which they had come to liberate was in chaos. In Berlin at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Army sent a senior Russian general to make sure that essential services would be restored for the civilian population once the war was over.11 In Basra, the British Army did manage to restore the power stations, but in American-administered Baghdad there were long periods without water, gas or electricity. The police forces were in disarray. For years–not for weeks or months, but for years–it was unsafe to walk the streets. ‘Paradoxically’, wrote the journalist Patrick Cockburn,12 who knew Iraq better than most over a period of over thirty years, ‘Iraq became so dangerous that journalists, however courageous, could not rebut claims that most of Iraq was safe without being kidnapped or killed themselves.’ Quite apart from the damage done to the stability of the Middle East as a whole, it had made America hated throughout the world. General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, the largest US intelligence agency, called it ‘the greatest strategic disaster in American history’.13
The war and its aftermath showed New Labour in an ugly light. There was the affair of Dr David Kelly. He was a scientific civil servant who had met with a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, to discuss the dossier asessing the threat posed by Saddam’s WMD. There were no witnesses to the discussion between these two men and the only evidence for what was said were some hastily composed notes by the journalist. Kelly was among those who believed that Saddam had WMD and that they represented a threat. He knew Iraq and he knew about chemical weapons. Much of the pre-war excitement, as we have seen, had been caused by Tony Blair claiming in the Commons that Saddam could make use of WMD within forty-five minutes. It was assumed that this meant he could reach the nearest British troops or bases, that is to say Cyprus, within this time-span. In the course of talking to Gilligan, Dr Kelly appears to have conceded that it might have been possible that the ‘forty-five minute claim’ had been added to the dossier ‘for impact’.
At 6.07 a.m. on the radio news programme Today, on 29 May 2003, Gilligan claimed that a British official who had helped to prepare the dossier now believed that it had been ‘transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier’. This was not what Kelly had ever claimed. In all the subsequent inquiry and the report written by Lord Hutton in January 2004, the BBC’s editorial control was found to be ‘defective’ and Gilligan was censured for failing to be accurate. The chairman of the Governors of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, and Greg Dyke, the Director General, both resigned.
David Kelly, universally regarded as a man of intellectual seriousness and moral integrity, was given no support when the trouble broke. Quite the reverse. As soon as Gilligan made his unfounded, or at best highly exaggerated, claim on the Today programme, New Labour behaved with all the gentleness of Mafia thugs. Kelly’s cover was blown and he was obliged to appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons where he was given a mauling by a backbench bruiser (Labour) named Andrew Mackinlay, who mocked Kelly as a government ‘fall guy’. Kelly went into hiding for a while to hide from the press, and when he returned home to Oxfordshire, his wife found him in a state of deep dejection. On 17 July 2003 he went for a walk, and next morning his dead body was found in some remote woodland. A coroner’s verdict decided that he had committed suicide by cutting his wrist and taking an overdose of painkillers. Subsequently, this verdict was questioned, and it was suggested that Kelly had been murdered either by Iraqis or by the British security services. Whether or not the conspiracy theory is believed, New Labour had been shown in its nasty colours. The war was regarded by the huge majority of the electorate as a disaster, and the instinct of Blair’s henchmen was to conduct a propaganda war with the press and the BBC and to find some scapegoats. Dr Kelly was indeed a ‘fall guy’. His death was said to have been shattering to Blair, who considered resigning. ‘Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign?’ Blair was asked this by a Mail on Sunday reporter when his plane touched down in Tokyo. Most unusually, Blair was silenced, lost for words–ashen, exhausted, beaten.14
Had the Iraq war been, as Bush appeared to claim, part of the War on Terror? It was hard to see this as especially logical, since to quote the ‘Iraq Options’ papers produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office of 8 March 2002, ‘In the judgement of the JIC there is no evidence of Iraq[i] complicity with international terrorism. There is therefore no justification for action against Iraq based on self-defence to combat imminent threats of terrorism as in Afghanistan.’15
Saddam was a horrible dictator, but it was against international law to invade countries to depose their leaders merely because they were nasty to their own people. Many of the world leaders, certainly Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, could be seen as more worthy of such immediate attention.
There was at best a confusion, at worst a subterfuge, going on. The American neo-cons wanted to control Iraq and its oilfields. They also wished to teach rogue Arab states a lesson. It was certainly true psychologically that they would probably not have tried to sell such an idea to the American public had it not been for the assault on the World Trade Center and the massacre of over three thousand people in New York. But why this should have involved Britain, and why Blair should have been so anxious to go to war so quickly, remained a mystery. Was it a simple blunder, or had he in some mysterious way become an American neo-con? Certainly his contempt for British public opinion, and indeed for world opinion, became increasingly marked, as his hair became grey. His face was now so much televised that he regularly had lipstick and slap applied to his wrinkled skin. The eyes looked shifty and mad.
Tony and George Dubya’s war had led to much agitation in the Middle East. There was still no suggested solution to the plight of Palestine. The Israelis felt threatened and embattled, especially by the rocket and mortar attacks from Lebanon into northern Galilee, and in the summer of 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon. The attacks on Lebanese civilians shocked the world, however much the world sympathised with the plight of Israelis frightened by Hamas. But what scandalised world opinion much more than an understandable Israeli aggression was the silence of Bush and Blair until 750 Lebanese civilians had been killed and many homes flattened. Under the jaunty headline LET’S HOPE SCOTLAND HASN’T ABOLISHED CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, Neil Mackay in the Scottish Sunday Herald on 6 August reported:
The Lebanese government is working behind the scenes to bring Tony Blair before the Scottish courts, charged with war crimes for aiding and abetting the Israeli onslaught against Lebanon.
Ali Berro, the Lebanese government’s special adviser on legal affairs, is assisting Lebanese nationals living in Scotland, and their legal team, in their attempt to take the Scottish Executive and the UK government to court for allowing US aircraft to fly ‘bunker-buster bombs’ from America to Israel via Scottish airports.
Berro is providing the legal team, led by the Glasgow-based human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, with detailed information about alleged Israel war crimes, and also forwarding information on the casualty rates of Lebanese civilians and the type of weapons being deployed by the Israeli army. In total, some 30 lawyers, including QCs, in Scotland and England are helping prepare the case against the government…
The team is accusing Blair of assisting Israel in carrying out war crimes against civilians, citing various pieces of international legislation, including the Geneva Conventions, which say that it is a war crime to aid and abet a nation carrying out attacks targeted against civilians.
Some 750 Lebanese civilians have died in the attacks–many women and children. Berro said: ‘Human shreds are scattered amid the destruction.’ He also outlined Israeli attacks on petrol stations, warehouses, electricity companies, places of worship, bridges, hospitals and ambulances.
Berro said the Israelis were using phosphorous bombs, and ‘sending ultimatums to the inhabitants of villages, waiting for them to get out and then hunting them on their way to safety’.
International legislation, which Berro said was breached by Israel, included The Hague Convention, The 1948 Convention Against Mass Killings and The Geneva Conventions.
Azam Mohamad, one of the Scottish-based Lebanese nationals taking the case against the Scottish Executive and the UK government, said: ‘We took this action as US aircraft are going through Prestwick Airport with bombs bound for Israel that will be used to shell our families. We want to stop those bombs.’
Mohamad, the director of Glasgow’s Middle East Society, added: ‘We are shocked that Tony Blair has allowed aircraft carrying bombs bound for Israel to come through this country. These weapons are illegal as they are used to kill civilians. I cannot find words to explain my unhappiness at Blair’s decision. If we get a chance to take Tony Blair to court, we will do so.
‘Blair is helping terrorism because what Israel is doing to Lebanon is terrorism–they are attacking and killing civilians. He is utterly in the wrong.’
It was presumably with a view to righting the effects of his Middle Eastern activities while Prime Minister that there emerged in his post-ministerial role Tony Blair, the peace-broker between Israel and Palestine. In this task, in so far as his other tasks as memoirist, banker, lecturer and expert on climate change permitted, he had an uphill struggle.