Tony Blair's walk of shame

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 10 May 2007

The ongoing illegal carnage in Iraq has just claimed yet another high-profile career – that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has announced that he will step down from his position on 27 June this year following perennial pressure from his Labour Party comrades.

Blair started ruining his career by joining forces with United States President Gorge W. Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard in the invasion of Iraq, ostensibly searching for some “weapons of mass destruction”.

Announcing his decision to support the US’s “coalition of the willing”, as Bush tried to romanticise it, Blair told British MPs that the “new world faces a new threat: of disorder and chaos born either of brutal states like Iraq, armed with weapons of mass destruction; or of extreme terrorist groups. Both hate our way of life, our freedom, our democracy”.

Blair further told the baffled MPs: “My judgment, as Prime Minister, is that this [terrorist] threat is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before”.

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, it has come clear that both the “weapons of mass destruction” and the “threat” Blair referred to were fictional. And, for this deadly invention, Blair’s career, like that of his accomplices in the US (Collin Powell, John Bolton) had to end in shame, justifiably so.

Perhaps the greatest demagogue to have presided as British Prime Minister, Blair should be remembered for his hypocrisy, for he:

(a) preached clean governance in poor countries and then stopped the investigation into allegations of corruption in the British-Saudi Arabia arms deal;
(b) spoke eloquently about peace in Africa, particularly Sudan, and then went on to invade Iraq without the backing of the United Nations.

Reporting on Blair’s departure, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) quoted Blair's election agent and close friend John Burton as having said that he expected the outgoing Prime Minister to continue as an MP until the next general election, “unless he was offered a major international job”.

Based on Blair’s terrible record, made worse by the war-mongering that characterised his leadership, Blair cannot be trusted to hold any other “major international job” and speak on behalf of the people of the world.

If he does not qualify to finish his term as British Prime Minister, he should therefore not qualify for any other “major international job”.