DID the country wake up yesterday to hear that Tony Blair had apologised for the Iraq war? Well, yes, and no.
The old spinmeister general was up to his old smoke-and-mirrors tricks again as he appeared on television to present his assessment of his actions regarding the 2003 invasion.
He may have uttered the words “I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong”; he may have conceded shortcomings in the (lack of) planning for the invasion’s aftermath, but this was no heartfelt, genuine apology.
No, Blair’s comments on CNN were all about saving his own skin, getting the ball rolling on his damage-limitation exercise before the publication of the long-awaited Chilcot Report, which is bound to highlight his failures over the war.
Twelve years ago many of us had not quite mastered the art of understanding Blair’s doublespeak, but the tragedy of the Iraq fiasco made us wise to his communication style.
By the time it was clear Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and we had witnessed the hellish consequences of the war – including the rise of the repugnant Daesh and the devastating Middle East refugee crisis – we had become experts in seeing through the former prime minister’s dissembling ways.
Blair has been asked repeatedly by the families of soldiers who lost their lives in the war to apologise to them, but he has consistently refused.
His “apology” yesterday adds insult to injury to both them and the millions of Iraqis who lost loved ones or who suffered terribly because of the invasion.
As the Greens’ co-convener Maggie Chapman says in The National today, Blair’s comments on CNN are simply not good enough. If he was truly sorry and not cynically trying to minimise the harm to his own legacy, he would surrender himself for trial as a war criminal at The Hague. The fact that he doesn’t speaks volumes.
Blair’s Iraq war TV apology rejected as spin before Chilcot
Carolyn Leckie: Don’t be fooled: Blair has still not said sorry
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