(Zaman Al Wasl)-Even though 15 years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, the picture of the former Prime Minister of the UK Tony Blair is still haunting many as the biggest engineer, warmonger, and influencer of that invasion.
Today, Blair’s name is trending again as the possibilities for a potential strike against Bashar al-Assad regime are notably rising in the aftermath of the chemical attack in Douma town in Eastern Ghouta subrubs, which left 78 civilians dead.
The veteran politian who engineered the Iraqi invasion, has surfaced recently on several TV channels to talk about an “intervention in Syria” instead of merely a one-time punitive strike, which suggests that whatever a number of states are cooking might not be over before the Assad regime is no more.
Zaman al-Wasl tracked some of the statements made by Blair recently, in which he explicitly called for “intervening” in Syria, recalling the scenario of how a number of regimes have been taken down under popular pressure since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011.
Blair stressed that Bashar al-Assad would have met the same fate had he was left alone to face the Syrian people without the help of Iran, Hezbollah militias, and of course Russia.
At the expense of nearly half million Syrian killed and millions displaced, Russian managed to save Assad and insure that he stays in power to set the stage for the worst displacement crisis since World War II, as Blair puts it.
The 64-year-old Britain politician acknowledged clearly that “intervening in Syria is considerably difficult as the Iraqi scenario proves, but not intervening in Syria is also considerably difficult and will have repercussions.”
Blair goes on to say that his country’s government will not need a permission from the parliament to take part in the “intervention”, unlike what the British government claimed in the summer of 2013 when it absolved itself from any obligation, similarly to what the US government did, to “punish Assad” for overstepping “the redlines” under the pretense of the absence of a parliamentary approval.
Blair inferred that Assad will use chemical weapons again and will manage to seize back Syria this way should the use of chemical weapons wasn’t addressed, but there won’t be a long-term solution for the crisis in Syria which will, Blair notes, always be a source of problems for the region and the world.
Blair tried to defend London’s reluctance to punish Bashar since the most major chemical attack (Ghouta, August 2013), claiming that they were told that “the matter was resolved” and that Assad had surrendered his chemical stockpile.
Nonetheless, Syria suffered 12 chemical attacks since then. The lack of action on the international stage sends a very clear message to Bashar al-Assad as the British politician stated. Blair is still involved in international policies despite stepping down from power positions.
Zaman Al Wasl
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