He's never going to get it

I'd describe Tony Blair's testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday as disgraceful but predictable. Lord Goldsmith admits that he agonised over the legal case for war, Jack Straw says supporting the decision to go to war was the hardest thing he's ever done....and Blair? He'd do it again, and what's more (a new twist, this) he thinks that the current situation regarding terrorism in general and Iran in particular shows how right he was.

The amazing thing is that there is now much more than circumstantial evidence that he is lying about all this now, just as he was in the run-up to war. Yesterday he tried to suggest that the 9/11 attacks changed his whole approach to Iraq, by bringing the risks posed by "terrorists with WMDs" into clearer focus. Yet a newly-released memo shows that he signed the UK up to join the US in pushing for regime change in Iraq in March 2001, a full six months before the atrocities in New York and DC. Even at that stage the UK and US had cooked up a strategy to force the issue by making a series of demands of the Saddam Hussein regime in the near certain knowledge that he would be unwilling to accede to them, thus providing a casus belli.

In his Times column today, Matthew Parris says that he finally realises that Blair sees the world in Manichaean terms: a stark division between good and evil. This would certainly explain why Blair was so willing to go along with US attempts to conflate Saddam's regime with al-Qaeda, and why he feels comfortable lumping them together in his testimony as "these people". (How long, I wonder, before that dismissive phrase is translated on Islamist websites as "Moslems"?)

Perhaps most disgracefully of all, Blair took it upon himself to call for a similar course of action to be taken against Iran. That country, he suggested, poses a bigger threat to the UK now than Iraq did in 2003. As we've all -- all except for Tony Blair that is -- long ago realised that Iraq posed effectively no threat to the UK back in 2003, it's to be hoped that Gordon Brown or whoever is in charge in a few months time sets a rather higher hurdle if and when decision time on Iran rolls around.