Five words that damn Blair... and Chilcot

BLAIR will be with us. These five words, written in a memo from then US Secretary of State Colin Powell to George W. Bush in March 2002, confirm what the Mail has long suspected: Tony Blair struck a secret deal with the US President to go to war in Iraq – then embarked on a disgraceful year-long campaign of spin and lies to win Parliamentary approval for the invasion.

Indeed, the memo describes Mr Blair’s readiness to produce ‘public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause’.

Six months later, in September 2002, this propaganda blitz would result in the infamous – and entirely false – claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy biological weapons ‘within 45 minutes’.

Truly, it is one of the great scandals that Mr Blair has yet to be held to account for the illegal Iraq war, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, including 179 British servicemen.

(Compare this with the eight-year jail term given to Sgt Alexander Blackman, who killed a wounded Taliban under extreme duress fighting another of the ex-Prime Minister’s ill-judged conflicts, in Afghanistan).

Indeed, Sir John Chilcot should be ashamed that the details of Blair’s 2002 ‘deal in blood’ with President Bush should have emerged not in his own long-delayed report, but via the public release of internal Government memos in the United States.

Blair is utterly damned by their content. And Chilcot is damned by his continuing failure – six years after his inquiry began – to produce his own verdict on this most shameful episode in modern British foreign policy.