Self-serving....\\\"Phoney Tony Bliar\\\"......Bush\\\'s Poodle.

      "A Journey", Tony Blair"s, auto-biography, sounds like "the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon" according to the Economist. Blair's "tortured argments" eg."they had to invade Iraq becauseSaddam could hypothetically hook up with Al-Qaida, but they didn't properly prepare for the insurgency because they knew Saddam had no link with Al-Qaida"......he fantasized that Saddam might someday give WMDs to terrorists, even though Saddam did not like terrorists because they were impossible to control and even though, Blair admits that the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist Osama were opposites and also that when Saudi Arabia felt threatened by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Osama offered to fight the Iraqi dictator.
     Blair supported Bush's invasion because of "symbols"i.e. "sending a message of total clarity to the world" after 9/11 that defying the international community would no longer be tolerated. He supported Cheney's grandiose plan to remake the world and his no patience with "namby pamby peacenikery"...."he (Cheney) would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran ,Hezbollah and Hamas....he was for hard, hard power. No ifs. no buts, no maybes. We are coming after you, so change or be changed".
     Blair tells the story of an Iraqi woman who sent him  a letter, which he keeps in his desk, and told him how her family had suffered torture and death, because her family had fallen foul of Saddam's son and begged him to act ......she returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam and was killed by sectarians a few months later..."What would she say to me now?
"Guilty consvience?
     This war was waged by lies...lies about WMDs....lies about al-Qaida, osama and Saddam's being connected...lies about Saddam acquiring uranium from Africa (Wilson was sent to Africa and found that not to be so and when he wrote an op-ed about it, kis wife was outed as a CIA operative.....also Saddam's nuclear weapons programme was blown to smithereens in the first war. While it was true that Saddam had gassed the Kurds, what was covered up was America's involvement ....the visit of Reagan's emissary, Don Rumsveld, to Saddam in 1982 and the wide array of weapons,( including the helicopters that was used in the spraying
) that was supplied to Saddam to fight the common enemy, Iran.
      Tony Blair, by his "poodling" support for Bush's disastrous war, has helped to create a weaker Iraq, that is no longer a counterweight to Iran. He has contributed to the tens of thousands that have been killed and the hundreds of thpusands wounded and the millions displaced and living in squalor, misery, insecurity and instability. He is a deeply religious Catholic and perhaps he has his demons to live with but this "airy-fairy" rambling has fully justify the Brits view of him as "Bliar", "Phony Tony".