Columns

On Tuesday, two days from now, Britain will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks on London’s transport services that left 52 persons dead and several hundred maimed, wounded or psychologically torn apart. This was Britain’s 9/11 on a much smaller scale. There were no hijacked aircraft in the skies heading for New York’s twin towers or Washington’s Pentagon that symbolized America’s military might and aggressor mentality.

Here in London the tragic drama was confined to Central London’s underground commuter network or the capital’s distinctive red-coloured buses. But it left the British people equally shaken. If those who caused death and devastation in the US were foreigners, the perpetrators of the London bombings were home-grown. It was the result of a conspiracy hatched in the towns and cities of Britian by those born or based in this country.

The fact that Britain was producing its own brand of suicide bombers made the circumstances chillingly dangerous.What had turned these four men-one just 18 years old- into co-conspirators in a plot to blow up innocent persons on their way to work and had done them no wrong?

The answer was not hard to find except by those who were purblind or had from the onset misled the British people to support a war of aggression. One of the video messages left by a perpetrator of the 7/7 atrocities blamed Britain for its military adventures against Afghanistan and Iraq in which tens of thousands of Muslim civilians had been killed and were still dying.

Perhaps the most direct and personal accusation was a graffiti written on the steel memorial to those killed in the attacks which had been erected at Hyde Park. Discovered before last year’s commemoration and erased, that particular graffiti read “Blair lied thousands died.”

That, in essence, pinned the blame precisely where it rightly should be. For it was Tony Blair, then British prime minister who took the country into a war of aggression in violation of the UN Charter, without a UN mandate and on a false prospectus that misled parliament.

In Feburary 2003, a month or so before Blair joined hands with the war-mongering President George Bush (jr) and his neoconservative and belligerent cohorts to invade Iraq, over one million people marched in London to oppose the Anglo-American plans for war.

Blair’s reaction to this unprecedented opposition to war was to argue that the essence of democratic governance was the willingness of political leaders to defy popular will. The price for Blair’s arrogant stupidity was not paid by him but people in Britain who were killed and their families. A demand for a public inquiry into the bombings and the causes that led to it were summarily dismissed by Blair who declared that such an inquiry would divert resources from the daily destruction going on in Iraq in the name of a war against terror.

That, of course, was not the real reason why the demand for an inquiry was shunned. An official inquiry would raise very awkward political questions regarding the role that the illegal invasion of Iraq and the consequences of the occupation played in creating the conditions for the 7/7 bombings.

This might not have happened if Blair had not defied public opinion here and internationally and paid heed to the warnings of his own intelligence services that predicted what could happen if Blair went to war. In February 2003, shortly before British troops went to Iraq, Blair was told by British intelligence that the invasion of Iraq would “heighten” the risk of terrorism in Britain.

Did he listen to the British people or his intelligence services? No. Even after the bombings, the Blair government desperately tried a deceitful cover up and denied the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with 7/7. But opinion polls showed that the overwhelming majority of the British public were convinced of a causal connection between the war and 7/7 two years later. In fact the majority of the British polled pointed at Blair for the tragic political blunder of invading Iraq without any legal basis and the consequences of which are still being felt not only in Iraq but also very much in today’s Britain.

In early 2004 before the London bombers struck, an official report drawn up by the Home Office and the Foreign Office identified ‘foreign policy’ — and the Iraq war in particular — as the major cause of alienation of young British Muslims. Author Milan Rai, an anti-war activist, using secret documents declassified since the London bombings and leaks from British intelligence, completely demolishes the illusion that Blair and his closest officials tried to create that 7/7 had nothing to do with the aggression against Iraq.

If Blair has earned the sobriquet of America’s “poodle” it is not without point. The messianic zeal with which he followed Bush junior’s false sense of morality born out of a new evangelism that led to the Middle East imbroglio undermining the entire international legal system, is a sorry political chapter in British colonialism that never ended.

It is now known that Blair discussed with Bush about launching a war against Iraq many months before Anglo-American forces invaded Iraq. It is also now history that Blair misled the British parliament into believing that Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction and there was an imminent threat to Britain and its interests in the region.

The Iraq war is surely the most flagrant act of aggression by a British Government in modern times. It was launched without the merest provocation to UK or US by the Iraqis, in breach of the UN Charter and a host of international laws and against the opposition of the majority of members of the Security Council.

Who in Britain should be held accountable for this undermining of international order and peace? Who else but Tony Blair, who is at last being eased out of his position as Special Envoy for the Middle East of the Quartet with little achieved during the last eight years or so except to placate Israel?

One reason why the John Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s invasion of Iraq has been held up is the long time tussle between Washington and London on the release of the communications-written and verbal- Bush and Blair had when a plan to attack Iraq was being hatched and Blair’s support for the invasion was solicited.

Nearly five years after the Chilcot inquiry ended the report is still not out. Chilcot was reporting only on war. His tome has taken more time to complete than Tolstoy took to write on both War and Peace.

Media reports on the long delayed Chilcot inquiry, however, indicate that Blair is in for a roasting as the British leader who took the country to war violating numerous international and international humanitarian laws as Sri Lanka’s widely-respected Justice Christie Weeramantry wrote in his book “Armageddon or Brave New World”, recording his thoughts on the hostilities in Iraq.

The US and Britain are demanding accountability for alleged war crimes committed by Sri Lanka. Why are they not turning their moral searchlight inward towards their own leaders guilty of aggression against another sovereign country? Morality, like charity, should begin at home.

For Blair the day of reckoning will surely come.