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Mon 17 May, 2004 09:48 am
From today's English Daily Mirror Newspaper:
TONY PARSONS: WE WERE HOAXED...BY BLAIR May 17 2004
SOMETIMES you have to hold up your hands, admit you got it wrong and say: "Sorry, folks, I was hoaxed."
Tony Blair fooled me. He told us we were fighting for freedom, democracy and national security in Iraq.
I see now that it was all a pack of lies.
While this newspaper took an anti-war stance on Iraq, this column - to my eternal shame - acted as a craven cheerleader to Tony Blair and his grotesque, misbegotten military adventure.
And now 16,270 Iraqis are dead. There are 1,203 British and American servicemen who have given their lives for a cause that was not worth dying for.
There is an ever-growing mountain of misery - little Ali Abbas with his arms blown off in a US air strike and the thousands of unknown maimed children like him - and a loathing for this country in the Arab world that will last for a thousand years.
Blair has blood all over his prayer book. And I have to admit that I was one of the idiots who believed his lies about Iraqi bombs falling on Slough.
I was one of the gullible fools who believed the crap about bringing light and goodness to a blighted land.
Light and goodness? Let's see where light and goodness reside if they release the videos and photographs currently under lock and key in Washington, the war porn that had the American Congressmen that saw them on the verge of vomiting.
The pictures of sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib. Forced sexual acts between prisoners. Corpses being defiled. The rumoured tape of an alleged rape of an Iraqi woman - an image that may prove an atrocity too far for the squeaky-clean, God-fearing patriots in the Mid-West.
And then there's my favourite - the prisoner who was forced to abuse himself with a banana. It may not have softened up the prisoner. But, by God, I bet it softened up the banana.
Here is our war on terror.
Here is Tony Blair and George Bush in all their glory. Getting some poor Iraqi bastard to stick a banana up his rectum.
And if that doesn't wipe al-Qaeda off the face of the earth, then I don't know what will.
Lest we forget, it's not just the Americans who are in the dock of world opinion. It's not just the trailer-trash Nazis, those pig-faced women and fat-bellied men who seem to enjoy the whole "softening up" business a little too much.
Blair has shackled our country to the sick dreams of George Bush and we must share the disgrace.
I can understand that a stressed-out British squaddie might give someone who could be his sworn enemy a good hiding.
What beggars belief is the petty sadism, the institutionalised cruelty, and the murderous brutality apparently being committed in the name of this country.
Four British troops have been arrested after Baha Baoudsalim Mousa, 28, was beaten to death after being taken into custody by soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment.
Was Mousa's broken body a mirage? Have we imagined it all? Unfortunately not. No British Prime Minister has ever dragged the name of this country lower than Tony Blair.
He has shackled this country to a rabble of sadists, butchers and fools. He has put the security of this nation in extreme peril. Blair has hauled this country into the sewer occupied by Bush, Rumsfeld and little Lynndie England, the trailer trash who would not have been out of place as a guard in Belsen.
But it would not have been possible without the support of New Labour, certain national newspapers and columnists such as myself.
We allowed Tony Blair to get away with mass murder.
Blair has shamed this nation. By unleashing this tragically wrong-headed war, he is responsible for the slaughter of children, the torture of civilians and a bottomless well of hatred that will explode in our faces before too long.
Jacques Verges, a senior French lawyer, has written a 17-page letter to the new International Criminal Court to see if Blair can be prosecuted for war crimes in Iraq. Monsieur Verges, who campaigned against torture by the French army in Algeria, says: "If a construction company builds a bridge which collapses and the managers say they did not oversee the project, they are criminally negligent. Who else is responsible for the occupation of Iraq than the man at the top?"
The savage irony - and you would need a heart of stone not to laugh - is that George Bush refused to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. But Tony Blair signed up for the ICC, and can therefore be held responsible for war crimes committed in his name.
But punishing Blair - drumming him out of No 10, dragging him before the International Criminal Court - is hardly the issue.
It will not make Ali Abbas's shattered arms grow again if Tony Blair gives way to Gordon Brown. It will not bring back from the dead the thousands of Iraqis and British soldiers who lost their lives for Blair's preening egomania.
And it will not stop millions of Muslims hating us.
The damage is done. Tony Blair did it, but people like me allowed him to. The real tragedy is that he could have been stopped.
He hoaxed his own party by telling them that weapons of mass destruction were about to rain down on Littlehampton.
He hoaxed suckers like me, who believed there was no actual link between Osama bin Laden and Iraq (ah, there is now!) by telling us that we were bringing decency and humanity to an oppressed land.
Yeah, right.
This is the question that Tony Blair, supreme con merchant, has to answer: Would you like that banana up your bottom now or later?
At least one columnist who has recognised his past errors of judgement amongst so many who have yet to.
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