Anger in UK over Blair comments on Iraq

FORMER prime minister Tony Blair has faced derision across the British political spectrum after he said the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not linked to the current unrest in the country.

BLAIR, now a Middle East peace envoy, had "finally gone mad," Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, wrote in his regular Daily Telegraph column.

An essay on the Iraq crisis published at the weekend by Blair was "unhinged in its refusal to face facts" and made up of a "chain of bonkers assertions," Johnson said on Monday.Blair, a Labour politician, led Britain into the Iraq war alongside former US president George W Bush, justifying it with the mistaken assertion that the late dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction."The Iraq war was a tragic mistake, and by refusing to accept this, Blair is now undermining the very cause he advocates - the possibility of serious and effective intervention," Johnson wrote.Lord Prescott, who was Blair's deputy prime minister, also attacked his former boss, telling Sky News that intervention in Iraq took the West "back to the Crusades" of the medieval period."I don't agree with Tony as I didn't then," he said, adding that Blair's essay confirmed that the 2003 invasion had always been about "regime change".Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, also criticised Blair, writing in the Mail on Sunday that the decision to invade Iraq was "perhaps the most significant" cause of the current violence.In an essay published on his website Saturday, Blair argued that Britain was not responsible for the current unrest in Iraq: "We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't." It was "bizarre" to argue that "but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis," he said."The fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it," he wrote."The problems of the Middle East are the product of bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion going back over a long time."Blair also repeated his arguments during television interviews and urged the West to intervene, saying that otherwise, it faced future terrorist attacks from extremist Muslim groups."Every time we put off action, the action we will be forced to take will ultimately be greater," he wrote.

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