Tony Blair protest
© EPA
Question: When does a congenital liar stop lying? Answer: Never. Even if he ever seems to be recanting his lies he isn't. All that he may be doing is hoodwink the world and make people believe that he's contrite, which he isn't.

Those doubting the above need only look at the former British PM Tony Blair's half-hearted attempt to be seen by the world as repenting his crime of having brazenly abetted his old 'buddy' George W. Bush's unprovoked aggression against Iraq in 2003.

At the peak of that popular cry of protest in Britain against Tony Blair's blatant involvement in Bush's war against Iraq—deemed, rightly, as a crime against humanity—the protestors regularly carried placards that dubbed Blair as B-Liar. The epithet was so appropriate and popular that it almost replaced Blair's real name and people only referred to him as B-Liar.

Blair served a fresh reminder of his unlimited perspicacity for lying in a recent interview on American television with Fareed Zakaria, a journalist with a reputation of treating his neo conservative guests with kid gloves. Talking of his role in the sordid episode of the alibi concocted, by Bush and his neo con warmongers, of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), Blair feigned as if he was, after all, contrite and repentant. He apologised that because of it, Iraq was invaded and lives were lost without justification.

A sympathetic western media that had never really seriously probed Bush's underlying motive in the invasion of Iraq—a country without any involvement in 9/11, the template and alibi for the Bush aggression—quickly summed up that Blair was feeling sorry for his role and was contrite.

That, at best, is so much of trash. Blair only regretted that he was fed false intelligence and because of it readily became part of the Bush juggernaut to lay waste Iraq.

So, all that B-Liar was contrite about was the faulty intelligence that became the template of that wantonly illegitimate Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Blair never said a word of repentance about the whole idea of the old and new imperialists pouncing upon a country that neither had a role in the crime perpetrated on 9/11, nor posed a threat to the security of either of their countries or, for that matter, any other country listed on the imperialists' roster of 'friends and allies.'

The unvarnished truth is that Blair, viscerally, was part of the neo con agenda of war against Iraq and was fully complicit in the alibi brazenly crafted by the warmongers to justify their invasion of Iraq.
Bush Cheney Rumsfeld Blair
© n/aWill the real War Criminals ever be tried?
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair
Iraq had been in the cross-hairs of the neo con warmongers from the day the idea of an American Century sprouted in their fertile imagination. For nearly a decade preceding the actual invasion of Iraq in 2003, the neo cons had been laying their groundwork for it. Open letters to the then President Bill Clinton were inserted by inveterate dreamers of an American Empire—notorious men like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Chenney and their gang of warmongers—in the New York Times and Washington Post pleading with the president to follow their lead.

Planning for regime change in Iraq had begun soon after the end of the First Gulf War, in 1991, as Kuwait was 'liberated' from Iraqi occupation and Saddam Hussein's forces were pushed back into Iraq.

The neo cons were furious that Bush Sr., then president, hadn't chased Saddam up to Baghdad and expelled him from power. To them it was a golden opportunity missed by George H W Bush to acquire a foot-hold in the old Mesopotamia—a geo-strategically important land essential to their dream of imposing American tutelage over the Gulf region and exploit its vast oil and gas resources for America's outreach to the areas beyond.

Iraq was key to the neo con dream of dominating the region, totally, in more senses than one. The plan was two-pronged: degrade any potential in the area to pose any threat to Israel—the darling of the neo cons and central to their ploy of making the whole region around Israel subservient to US and Israeli interests.

Iraq, with its vast resources of oil, gas and water from two big rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, had the potential to pose a credible threat to Israel. Saddam may have been used by the Americans to nip the 'evil' of the Islamic Revolution in next door Iran in its infancy by triggering the 8 year-long war with Iran, in 1980. But that bloody conflict couldn't finish off the Iranian revolution and ended up making it stronger and more resilient.

By his inability to cripple Iran, Saddam Hussein had outlived his utility and had to go. A change of regime in Iraq was deemed an absolute essential if the dream of the American Century was ever to be realised. Saddam's fate had been sealed, as far as the neo cons' strategy was concerned.

As these lines were being written, news has just come in from Baghdad of the demise of Ahmed Chalabi, the principal US puppet in the then Iraqi diaspora, who had offered his services to CIA for millions of dollars in American tax payers' money.

Chalabi, from a prominent Shiite family loyal to the Iraqi royalty, until its overthrow in a bloody coup d'etat in 1958, was CIA's ace Iraqi asset who became an invaluable tool to the neo con planning of subversion and subterfuge in Iraq against the Saddam regime.

It was Chalabi who was believed to have confirmed to CIA and Pentagon that Saddam possessed not only lethal weapons of mass destruction but also the rockets to target these WMDs at targets in the west.

Chalabi fed whatever info he deemed necessary to his American mentors who, in turn, lapped up every word from his mouth and elevated it to the status of gospel truth. Chalabi kept feeding CIA and the Pentagon concocted evidence of Saddam's WMDs and his gullible hosts took it for real. Or was it that it suited their aggressive intent against Saddam to lend credence to whatever Chalabi was feeding them for self-preservation as CIA's principal asset among the Iraqi leaders in exile?

It's not hard to conclude, with the benefit of hind-sight, that both Chalabi and CIA were using each other for the extension of their respective agendas; Chalabi dreamed of riding into Baghdad—from which he'd been in exile since 1958—on US tanks as Iraq's new leader; the Americans were led to believe by Chalabi, and others of his ilk, that the Iraqi people were so absolutely fed up with Saddam and his tactics that they would welcome the American invaders of their land as their 'liberators' and emancipators' and shower rose petals on them. The real 'reception' turned out to be radically different.

Bill Clinton was still in office when US Congress passed the Iraq Act, in 1998, calling, openly, for regime change in Iraq. It was an unprecedented act of imperialist hubris for the American lawmakers to place themselves in place of God and decide who should be ruling over a sovereign state, Iraq, which was a founding member of UN. It also amounted to thumbing their noses at the UN by the American lawmakers. The world body—the message between the lines of Iraq Act said—was impotent to act US wanted it to and, therefore, Washington would take the law into its own hands to dictate Iraq's fate.

Blair signed on the nefarious agenda merrily and willingly because it was a reflection of his own imperialist impulse. British cooperation in the planned aggression against Iraq, on the fabricated alibi of it being in possession of WMDs was deemed essential because of the old imperialist's colonial expertise and experience. Blair was cut from the same cloth as the neo cons and didn't flinch for a moment from hitching his wagon with Bush's treacherous invasion plan.

Nowhere in his interview with Zakaria did Blair offer anything remotely attributable to feeling sorry that Iraq was laid waste, brutally vulgarised and its people treated as animals by the arrogant American occupiers of their land. He abides by his convoluted sense that the people of Iraq were actually done a favour by the western invaders because they toppled Saddam and saved them from his clutches.

Likewise, the incorrigible liar only dissembles that the invasion of Iraq, in his words, was a contributory factor in the rise of ISIL and all the attendant terror and destruction this band of predators has unleashed in its wake.

Blair should know that the end-game for his fellow neo cons in Iraq was its truncation. To achieve this end-result, the first Bush 'viceroy' of Iraq, Paul Bremer—a Zionist to boot—disbanded the well-trained and well-armed army of Saddam Hussein on the first day of assuming control of a vanquished Iraq. Degrading Iraq was a principal component of the scheme to make the country vulnerable to centrifugal forces. A weak and vulnerable Iraq couldn't pose any threat to Israel—the fortress of American power in the region and the sword intended to be kept hanging over the heads of all the neighbours of Israel.

The disbanding of Saddam's army was done with so much haste and poor planning that the soldiers and officers were allowed to carry all their weapons with them; the arsenals were emptied by disbanded soldiers. They became the harbingers of an ISIL with no shortage of weapons.

On top of it all, brazen humiliation was heaped on the occupied Iraqis by their power-drunk American masters. Abu Ghuraib was just one instance of inhuman and barbaric torture inflicted on the Iraqis made prisoners there. It became famous because of those pervert and sexually-deviant American 'guards', both men and women, who treated their Iraqi quarries as toys to satisfy their pervert urges. But Abu Ghuraib was not a solitary example; there were dozens of other places where Iraqis were humiliated and tortured, day-and-night.

The toll exacted, with diabolical intent, from the Iraqis was as much a catalyst of revolt against a pernicious American occupation as attempts to divide Iraq along ethnic and sectarian divides. ISIL, Blair should know, didn't come up as a spur-of-the-moment reaction by the Iraqis—and subsequently the Syrians. It flared and took hold of the people because of their sense of privation, humiliation and suffering under an insensitive and uncaring occupying power and its allies bent upon truncating Iraq in more senses than one. That was the principal catalyst for the rise of radicalism in Iraq and neighbouring Syria which, in turn, spawned the terrorist outfit, ISIL.

The neo con agenda for Iraq and its surrounding areas was predominantly impacted by Henry Kissinger's policy of divide-weaken-and rule. That Kissinger Doctrine was devised in the wake of the first oil embargo of 1973 and has since been adopted by the warmongers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as their bible.

To put teeth to the divisive Kissinger Doctrine, the oil rich Gulf potentates were encouraged to invest in forces arrayed against the Baathist regime of Syria. They opened their coffers for those ready to overthrow the Assad regime because that would not only have removed Assad but also weakened Iran—a principal reason for the Saudis and Qataris to bankroll the terrorists who became the progenitors of ISIL.

The Arab Spring, of 2011, came as a huge shock to the neo cons, just as the 1979 Islamic Revolution had taken the imperialists by complete surprise. The warmongers failed in their tactics to roll back the Iranian revolution but they did—with a lot of help from reactionary and anti-democratic status-quo holders among the Arabs—succeeded in snuffing out the short-lived Arab Spring.

In the process, Libya has been rendered worse than Iraq and the promising democratisation of Egypt subverted by imperialist agents in the Egyptian military high command. As these lines are being written, General Abdel Fattah Sisi, the butcher of Egypt, is being received with full honours by David Cameron of Britain—the mother of democracy in our 'civilised' world.

But Britain alone hasn't rolled out the red carpet for the blood-thirsty Egyptian dictator who has the blood of thousands of Egyptians—predominantly the youth—on his hands. Earlier, Sisi was received with similar fanfare in Germany and France.

Blair, surely, can't be ignorant of it that the overly-trumpeted and touted western values of democracy and human rights come with a proviso: they aren't meant for the Arabs or Muslims whose misfortune it is to be ruled and persecuted, ruthlessly, by western surrogates and minions. Cameron and his ilk couldn't care less how the human rights of the Egyptian people are mauled by a blood-thirsty cabal under Sisi. Their sole concern is that an Israel-friendly Egyptian autocrat should cause no problem to Israel running roughshod over its Palestinian quarries and making their lives a living hell for them.

The International Criminal Court is most eager and overly anxious to try the Sudanese President, Bashir, for alleged war crimes. One wonders, when, if ever, it will have the moral fibre to try well-known war criminals like Bush, Blair, Cheney and Rumsfeld whose crimes are amply documented and known to all?

Karamatullah K Ghori is a former ambassador of Pakistan, now lives in Canada. His book Bar-e-Shanasaee: Kuch log, kuch yaaden, kuch tazkeray — un shakhsiyaat kay jinhon nay Pakistan kee taarikh banaee aur bigaadee was published from India by Pharos Media, New Delhi.