The battle for new leadership of the Labor Party in the UK, after the devastating defeat in the last election, has heated up recently by intervention of the old guard. Both former UK prime ministers Brown and Blair made their voices heard. There were even attempts to derail and call-off the vote by members only of the Labor Party, when it appeared Corbyn gained a sizable lead in the polls.
‘Corbyn has links to deranged warmonger’ claims Tony Blair | Evening Harold | (satire)
Tony Blair has intervened again in the Labour leadership contest, this time demanding that Jeremy Corbyn explain his links to a deranged warmonger who launched an illegal war in the Middle East in 2003.
Corbyn, the current front-runner in the leadership race, is alleged to have served in a party led by the war criminal for over ten years.
“We already know about his views and associations where Palestine is concerned, and the type of unsavoury character he is connected to in that region, but we need to be looking closer to home and examining his links to the war criminal Tony Blair.
“I challenged him on this recently and he initially claimed not to know Blair, but when presented with photographic evidence of him sitting in the House of Commons, while I lied to Parliament in order to drag us into an illegal war, he was forced to backtrack.”
– according to Middle-East peace envoy Tony Blair.
Jeremy Corbyn to apologise for Iraq war on behalf of Labour if he becomes leader | The Guardian |
The Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn is to issue a public apology over the Iraq war on behalf of the party if he becomes leader next month, a move Tony Blair repeatedly resisted.
In a statement to the Guardian, Corbyn said he would apologise to the British people for the “deception” in the runup to the 2003 invasion and to the Iraqi people for their subsequent suffering.
Such an apology would be important symbolically – particularly in a party where Iraq remains a sore point, 12 years after Britain joined the US in the invasion – and signal a wider departure from existing Labour’s defence and foreign policy.
The MP made a vow that suggests future UK military interventions will become rarer: “Let us say we will never again unnecessarily put our troops under fire and our country’s standing in the world at risk. Let us make it clear that Labour will never make the same mistake again, will never flout the United Nations and international law.”
This effectively rules out Labour under Corbyn from supporting David Cameron’s government in a proposed House of Commons vote to expand to Syria the current UK air strikes in Iraq against Islamic State.
Analysis: Jeremy Corbyn’s Iraq war apology will do him good – if not Labour
It may be moving into the history books, but Iraq is one ex-puss with a posthumous power to shock. There are many reasons why Iraq remains charged with unique political poison – and the personal association with the divisive figure of Tony Blair is only the start.
Resentment is also kept alive by the ludicrous delays on the Chilcot report, about which even the rightwing press fumes.
After Lord Hutton stuck to his narrow remit about David Kelly, and Lord Butler fluffed the chance to write the damning concluding lines that his report justified, the small but not trivial part of the country that continues to regard Iraq as a live political question fears another whitewash.
It is surely doubtful, as Corbyn claims, that his apology move will do much to help Labour “to win in 2020”, 17 years after the great London march. But he is right that it continues to bear upon important questions of trust.
There is no need to wait for Chilcot: papers already in the public domain reveal that London knew that Washington was fixing the facts about the supposed Iraqi threat, and furthermore that the evolution and editing of the infamous intelligence dossier, and the attorney general’s legal advice, were unusual and suspect.
Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly C.M.G. by Lord Hutton