WMD - Again

Well, that's kind of interesting, former Prime Minister Tony Blair's defensive position on his historical decision to march alongside the United States into Iraq to liberate that country from its decided dictator. Yes, he was a brute, no doubt about it, and persisted as a menace to his neighbours and to the world at large. Well, perhaps not so much the world at large, unless we're talking petroleum and foreign investments, but certainly a menace within the Middle East.

Suspected of having stockpiled weapons of mass destruction; chemical, biological, nuclear, he was a fairly easy target for a president amazingly fixated on invading that country. Surely there was something Shakespearean about the interaction between an earlier invasion led by President Bush Sr., and a sense of unfinished business his son was determined to finish. To demonstrate to his father how an American president takes his responsibilities seriously?

There must have been some kind of magnetic brotherhood-spark set off between George W. Bush and Tony Blair, two powerful world figures very much alike in very many ways; a robust friendship resulting in an international conspiracy. To persuade the rest of the world and specifically the United Nations general body that there was glorious merit in embarking on the conquest of Iraq.

Which was speedily accomplished and poorly realized. Unleashing deadly antipathy between religious factions which the brutal Saddam Hussein had kept in check. Within the country he ruled, that is, with the minority Sunni subjugating the majority Shia, even while he fought a war of attrition with Iran, truly a Shi'ite country.

He was, in that sense, aside from his dreadful predations on the Kurdish people and the Marsh Arabs, responsible for the deaths of millions, having initiated that 7-year Iraq-Iran conflict where Iran was quite content to send masses of children into the battlefield to be extinguished for the greater glory of fundamentalist Islam.

Despite what is known today, despite the seemingly ineradicable suicide missions still erupting within Iraq and the potential for a complete melt-down of the current Shia-led government, former PM Blair insisted he would do nothing differently were he to re-visit the issue. "What we now know is that he [Saddam] retained the intent and the intellectual know-how to restart a nuclear and a chemical weapons program when the inspectors were out and the sanctions changed, which they were going to do ...

"Today we would be facing a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran, competing both on nuclear weapons capability and competing more importantly perhaps than anything else ... in respect of support of terrorist groups ... If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are."

Perfectly self-serving. Is the country really better off than it was before the invasion? Perhaps time will give that response. Is world security improved with his removal? Not that we could notice. All the indices that were present that made it seem logical and needful to mount an invasion of Iraq are present now - far more clearly present and acknowledged - in Iran, a country clearly in possession of intent and nuclear achievement.

The same country that invaded Iraq could not be persuaded to play the heavy with Iran. Iran, in fact, presents as far more dangerous to the world community than Iraq ever did. In Iraq it was the boastful conceit of a tyrant anxious to impress the world with his puissance that had to be countenanced by warnings, sanctions, then invasion. A nuclear-lunatic Iranian administration? not so much.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is as rhetorically defiant and even more spitefully agnostic to international overtures and pleas for civility than Iraq was. A God-driven antagonism to anything remotely resembling surrender to a worldly power representing the assembled nations of the globe has taught another lesson. That delusional powerful men drunk on their vision of divine intervention cannot be reasoned with.

That direct danger to world stability and more directly to the existential future of its neighbours is most certainly dire. The response from the world body to that threat has been pitifully inadequate. The challenge to the sovereign-decision making of Iran's Supreme Ayatollah and his governing Islamic Council has fallen on deliberately deaf ears. The Iranian opposition, beset by the malign intentions of a thoroughly intransigent tyranny fends for itself.

What now? Useful suggestions, anyone? Will Mr. Blair please stand and speak a little louder?