Blair and the other sucker

I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong,” Tony Blair told Fareed Zakaria during a CNN interview. The TV interview came ahead of the much delayed British Chilcot – expected now by next summer – report investigating Iraq war. 

He also apologised “for some of the mistakes in planning” the war. It didn’t however come clear from the interview what were “some of” the correct decisions made in planning for the war. The war was neither a mistake, nor “wrong” intelligence. It was well thought of by those who cooked the intelligence book and sold it to two suckers named George W Bush and Tony Blair. The plan intended to break up Iraq, destroy the know-how by assassinating Iraqi scientists and to dismantle the Iraqi army. Not because Iraq was a threat to America, but it was an Israeli agenda. 

On February 21, 2003, Jeffrey Steinberg wrote in the Executive Intelligence Review that Blair’s infamous dossier on Iraq’s WMD included 11 pages copied “verbatim, from an Israeli journal Middle East Review of International Affairs.”  According to Steinberg, the Blair dossier was “cooked-in-Israel propaganda” to drive the US to invade Iraq.

Complementing Blair’s hoax, US Zioncons waged a misleading campaign to influence American public opinion and to deceive officials on the cost of war and its aftermath. 

On July 11, 2002, Richard Perle a Pentagon official, who was on Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s payroll in mid-90s, professed the war will end “after the first whiff of gunpowder.”

His ex-boss, Netanyahu, gave a Congressional testimony two months later where he promised America, “If you take out Saddam regime, I guarantee it will have enormous positive reverberation on the region.” 

About a month before the war, Israeli firster and American official Kenneth Adelman published an Op-ed in the Washington Post, positing that the war “would be a cakewalk.” 

In briefing the Armed Services Committee on February 25, 2003, General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the US Army, warned that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to secure postwar Iraq. Days later, civilian Zioncon Paul Wolfowitz countered: “The notion that it will take several hundred thousand troops are wildly off the mark.”

In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward wrote that Secretary of State Colin Powell used to refer to the Office of Special Plans – war bureau – as “a separate government.” The Office was led by Zioncos: Lewis Libby, Wolfowitz and according to Powell, it was run from Douglas Feith’s “Gestapo” office. Soon following the invasion, Wolfowitz assured the House Appropriations Committee and American taxpayers that the war cost and rebuilding “doesn’t have to be US taxpayer’s money.” We have “a country that can really finance its own reconstruction.” 

Wolfowitz’s statement cost the taxpayers between two to six trillion dollars.

After the Zioncons WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) was exposed, Wolfowitz offered a new fallacious assessment. He claimed that removing Saddam would help in the peace between Israel and the Palestinians.  

The Zioncons’ undue influence came under FBI. There were public reports in July 2004 of a probe by the FBI into potential Israeli spies in the Pentagon who might have influenced US decision on the war. The FBI suspected the Israeli mole was a senior analyst closely associated with two senior officials: Zioncons Wolfowitz and Feith. It believed that “highly sensitive information” was passed to Israel via “the pro-Israel lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee.”

The FBI inquiry was quashed and Americans never discovered the Israeli spies who blundered America and Britain’s human and financial resources on a “made for Israel war”. 

Hence, Chilcot has an opportunity now to bisect the Israeli “sacred cow” and identify the source of the “wrong” intelligence. It should start by deciphering the palpable link between US Zioncons’ ideologue and Israel.   

Undeniably, Saddam was a brutal dictator. But the war, the preceding economic blockade and Netanyahu’s promised “enormous  reverberation on the region” are causing more human deaths than Saddam ever did. 

The world might be better with one less Arab dictator, though it would have been a much better place without Bush and his British toady.

* Mr Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) writes regualr newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab world issues. He is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America. A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper.