STRAIGHT TALKING Cam hasn’t learnt from Blair’s folly

FROM UKIP’S DEPUTY LEADER

TONY Blair went on U.S. television last week to give what some have suggested was a cynical apology for the Iraq war.

Many claim he knows that the never-ending Chilcot Report – first commissioned in 2009 – is finally coming to a conclusion and he wants to get his side of the story in first.

Blair apologised for the misreading of the intelligence which suggested the enemy had weapons of mass destruction, and also admitted he had not sufficiently planned for a postSaddam Hussein Iraq.

But he refused to apologise for the removal of Saddam. And on the face of it that sounds plausible as Hussein was an evil and cruel dictator.

Yet if we used the fact he was a nasty man as a reason to invade Iraq, why did we do nothing about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe who was also treating his own people in an appalling fashion?

I was opposed to the war in Iraq at the time. Not because people were saying it was an illegal war or because I’m a pacifist – I was opposed because it didn’t make any sense.

The only person Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda hated more than George W. Bush was Saddam Hussein. That was because he dealt with al-Qaeda ruthlessly and kept a lid on the extremists.

So I thought, why remove a secular dictator when it was clear that once he was removed al-Qaeda would move in?

And as we now know, that’s precisely what happened.

I argued then and I still argue now that Islamic extremism was and is a greater threat to us and the rest of the globe than dictators like Saddam. I think I have been proven right, but amazingly our politicians don’t seem to have learnt the lessons of history.

Fast forward to 2011 and David Cameron repeats Blair’s folly by helping to remove Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

Guess what? The same thing happened again. The dictator was removed and the extremists moved in. And as a result of our collective madness in Libya, we encouraged an uprising in Syria.

Not content to admit we had got things wrong twice before, we tried the same thing again when Cameron attempted to get permission to bomb Syria to remove Bashar Al Assad.

It’s like we’re banging our heads against a brick wall.

The Arab Spring was a con job and Cameron and President Obama fell for it hook, line and sinker. And amazingly, they’re still falling for it now.

I said it on national television in 2012 that we didn’t know who the so-called rebels actually were in places like Libya and Syria.

And judging by the fact that Tripoli is now overrun with Islamists, and half of Syria is controlled by Islamic State, then I was right to air my concerns.

So it’s time for some grown up politics. This isn’t the college debating society – this is real geo-politics. There’s no black and white or good and evil, just grey areas and lesser evils.

And as far as I can see, in comparison to Islamic State, the strongmen were and are the lesser of those two evils.