Blair's evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry - if indeed responding to questions by a group of what George Galloway called "Establishment stooges" on the BBC's Question Time last Thursday, a gaggle of the great and good who had already had their collective hamstrings cut by the restrictive terms of the Enquiry can be called giving evidence - took place in a fog of moral righteousness by the media, who focused on whether or not he would apologise for the Iraq folly and his pivotal role in it, and the question of his belated admissions that, far from 'not doing God', he believed he had a hot line to the Almighty throughout.
This, of course, played into Blair's hands, and allowed him to slide away from any difficulties over facts by expertly playing what he sees as his aces - personal sincerity, total moral conviction, and the belated, but carefully judged regrets over the death and suffering his vaulting ambition and cynical real-politicking have visited on an entire nation, Iraq, and the brave members of the British Armed forces and other war coalition countries' military personnel who lost their lives or were maimed, physically and psychologically, by loyally doing their duty as defined by a misguided Parliament and nation.
Aided by the inabilty of the Enquiry to take evidence under oath, the denial to Chilcot by the Cabinet Secretary of the right to use and quote from the key correspondence and transcriptions of the Bush/Blair dialogues, the absence of any legally qualified person to conduct the kind of forensic cross-examination necessary to extract the truth from a man whose entire political legacy, not to mention his current international - and obscenely lucrative - business interests are threatened by the truth, he was able to duck and weave behind his various baffle walls from the feeble blasts of the Enquiry team.
So what he knew, and when he knew it, the critical commitments made by him to his US master, and the real nature of the behind-the-scenes dialogue with the Attorney General remain as cloudy as before.
What we are left with is the messianic Blair, a Christian fundamentalist believer, who, like his superior, George W. Bush, was certain that he had God's hand on his shoulder, possessed by a burning belief in his own righteousness, who did the right thing as he saw it at the time - even though his omniscient God seemed to have missed the inconvenient absence of WMDs - and had no regrets about removing the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, at whatever cost to Britain and Iraq, a calculated decision that immediately catapulted him into international superstardom and richness.
He will never appear before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague, and his position as icon to the American Right and the military/industrial complex is not only secure, but enhanced. Anthony Lynton Blair, peace envoy, is now a greater danger to world peace than he was before the Chilcot Enquiry started.
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