Joe Wilson is pontificating again, this time explaining away Tony Blair's role in ousting Saddam.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was "double crossed" by aides to US President George W. Bush who pushed for war in Iraq, the former US diplomat in the eye of the CIA-leak storm said in a radio interview.
"I watched the way that the British built their case, and it was a disarmament case as best I could see it," said Joe Wilson, whose wife Valerie Plame saw her role as a CIA agent leaked to the media.
Wilson is making the strange case the Blair government was so ignorant they allowed themselves to become useful idiots for the Bush neocons in the quest to topple Saddam. The trap was apparently set at the infamous Bush-Blair meeting in Crawford in 2002, mentioned often by the left as part of the Downing Street Memo discussions. His argument is rather strange and absurd.
The well-rehearsed script so far has been that Blair was just as guilty as Bush...that they both knew there were probably no WMDs, so decided to "sex-up" the known intelligence and use it as causus belli, presumably because they knew all other ways were illegal. Why, though? In Bush's case conventional liberal wisdom says to enrich Halliburton, but few have explained just how this helped a British Liberal Party PM. Wilson is the first neo-lefty to offer some support for Tony, which is strange since Wilson was around in 1998 when Blair bombed Iraq during Desert Fox. If Blair bombed because he believed there were weapons then, will Wilson soon be rebuking Clinton for hoodwink?
His semi-defense of Blair could be partisan, or it could be an effort to steer the Iraq argument towards an Israeli construct -- that Sharon was actually the man behind the curtain all along. There's been talk around the blogospere (at least part I visit) about an anti-semite angle, making a case that Scooter Libby, himself Jewish, was singularly obsessed with Wilson after he began dropping Sharon stink bombs during TV interviews in early 2003. Tom McGuire's blog has all the in-depth.
Don't know about anti-semite, but I'm ready to believe that Israel was more involved than we've been told, yet not ready to believe there's anything wrong with it, especially in a post 9/11 world. An ally is an ally. Who doesn't recall the Iraqi Scud missiles falling on helpless Tel Aviv neighborhoods in 1991? The war never ended for Saddam. To say he posed no threat to Israel or the region would be naive.
Even if Bush hoodwinked Blair into working for Sharon, let's review the events to date..an unstable pan-Arabic dictator who openly encouraged Palestinians to murder Jews now sits in jail. The Syrian Army was kicked out of Lebanon, and Libya was disarmed. A.Q. Khan's network was exposed, and the concept of democracy gained steam on the Arab street, due in part to the purple fingers in Iraq. The Israelis gave back some conquered territory but themselves remain on dry land, as opposed to being "pushed out to sea". Hard to argue those accomplishments only benefitted Israel. To say that Blair would not have been thrilled with this outcome back in 2002 would be itself rather strange and absurd.
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