To the Hague

By Dave Anderson:

That is where Tony Blair should be going anyways for a trial on the crime of waging aggressive war.  He indicts himself this morning as the LA Times reports:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction.

"I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat," Blair told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast this morning.

There is a thin but straight faced argument for the WMD threat that I don't accept as valid, but I can see where there is a reasonable defense that in the light of 9-11 previously acceptable risks and uncertainty were no longer acceptable.  And from that premise, coercive diplomacy to get inspectors back in to reduce the uncertainty or to confirm the risk made sense.  This argument falls apart by mid-January 2003 when the inspectors were coming back to the UN with bupkis behind minor bureaucratic screw-ups and marginal violations at most.  Anyone with a serious attempt to make this argument should have flipped their opinion from supporting the war or at least the threat of war to opposing the invasion of Iraq; it was not a threat to the United States or the United Kingdom or any other nation. 

The policy was fixed for whatever motives (Blair seems to be going towards a combination of Friedmanesque "suck on this" and neo-conservatism's attempt to democratize at the point of a tank barrel justifications") and the policy was aggressive war against a nation that posed no justifiable threat. 

To the Hague he should go in a just world.  Instead, he is still a shell of a Very Serious Person who may ocassionally have to be careful in his travel itinerary