Thursday, July 07, 2016

If it was just, can there be any justice?

The Chilcot report on Britain's involvement in the Iraq war has been published having taken 7 years and cost 10 million pounds. Superficially, it seems to be a damning indictment of the then Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair. The report says that there was no proof that Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence was faulty and Blair chose what bits of intelligence to present. There was no legal justification for war and Blair ignored warnings of unleashing terrorism in Iraq if Saddam was removed. British and American eagerness to go to war is probably based on the hypothesis of a 'Just War'. However, it is difficult to understand how killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a country far away can be morally justified as self defence. It is more probable that victory in the 2 world wars and the enormous superiority in firepower, especially from the air, give the US and the UK a gung-ho attitude to war. Even now Tony Blair is being blamed for the death of just 179 British army personnel killed in the war and not the 150,000 Iraqi civilians slaughtered unnecessarily. At 6,275 pages and 2.6 million words is the Chilcot report an attempt at covering up Blair's crimes in a flood of verbosity? The report does not mention the UN Arms Inspector, Hans Blix who repeatedly warned that Saddam did not have any WMD, and now says that Blair considered himself a "global sheriff", whose mission was to rid the world of evil dictators, so he resorted to "spinning", which means lying, Britain into war. However, Hans Blix is mentioned by Tony Blair in letters to Bush, where he says that they would have to "trick" people into supporting the war. What was this absolute intelligence that justified killing 150,000 people? A chemical engineer from Iraq, code name 'Curveball', convinced the CIA with drawings of fictitious WMDs, while British intelligence was convinced by stories of glass balls from the Hollywood movie, The Rock. It gets better. Two psychologists were paid $81 million to torture prisoners with beatings, sleep deprivation and water boarding, to extract confessions. Even now Blair shows no remorse, insisting that he did the right thing by removing an evil dictator and he would do it again. It has not occurred to him that he maybe a bigger evil than Saddam, as innocent people continue to die in Iraq. Why are the British and Americans allowed to write there own version of history? Because we in Asia are divided. Those who come to power through the deaths of their fellow citizens remain silent, which allows the aggressors to write history as they choose. Thus silence of Indian politicians has allowed the British to portray Churchill as a hero when he was responsible for the deaths of 3 million Indians. Of half a million children killed in Iraq, Madeleine Albright said," I think this is a hard choice but the price, we think is worth it." Her ancestors were Jews. 

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