(1)
Here’s the London Times, reporting on Tony Blair‘s appearance before the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:

Tony Blair’s claims that Iran now poses as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein‘s Iraq have been dismissed as a “piece of spin” by the British ambassador to Tehran.

Sir Richard Dalton was fiercely critical of Blair’s testimony at the Iraq inquiry yesterday, in which the former Prime Minister compared Iran’s nuclear proliferation to the perceived threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program before the war.

One way to look at this, of course, is that Tony Blair — who, by any objective standard, stands thoroughly disgraced by all the revelations about the way he blindly and single-mindedly took Britain to war in Iraq — is trying to argue that Saddam Hussein posed as big a threat in 2003 as Iran poses now.

Well, no sane person right now is advocating that the free world needs to invade Iran in order to neutralize the threat it poses (to world peace, or to the strategic interests of the U.S. or Britain).

So even by Tony Blair’s own argument, there was no call to invade Iraq in 2003.

On top of that, if we note that most people who are not card-carrying neo-cons firmly believe that Saddam Hussein posed even less of a threat in 2003 than Iran poses today — Iran, at least, does give the appearance of making progress towards a nuclear weapon (although the very public manner in which they are going about it raises its own questions) — the invasion of Iraq starts to look even more indefensible.

(2)
Tony Blair, of course, is now a Middle East peace envoy. Somebody thought it was a good idea to take this unrepentant warmonger, with a pathetic-desperate need to justify his hard-on for invading Iraq, and give him a platform for advocating what next needs doing in the Middle East.

By all appearances, Blair now has a hard-on for invading Iran:

Tony Blair has been accused of warmongering spin for claiming that western powers might be forced to invade Iran because it poses as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein.

Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Iran, accused Blair of trying to make confrontation with Iran an electoral issue after the former prime minister repeatedly singled out its Islamic regime as a global threat in his evidence to the Iraq war inquiry yesterday.

Blair said many of the arguments that led him to confront the “profoundly wicked, almost psychopathic” Saddam Hussein seven years ago now applied to the regime in Tehran.

“We face the same problem about Iran today,” he told the Chilcot inquiry.

Dalton, the UK ambassador to Iran from 2002 until 2006, said it was essential that all the political parties made clear in the run-up to the general election that there would be no repeat of Blair’s actions in respect of Iran.

“One result of Tony Blair’s intervention on Iran – he mentioned Iran 58 times – is to put the question of confronting Iran into play in the election,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

“We need to be much clearer, as voters, with our politicians and with our candidates that we expect a different behaviour and a greater integrity in our democracy next time.”

This hard-on has already lasted well over four hours. If the dude had any sense (or shame) he would retire from public life, and go see a doctor.

(If I were crafting a fitting epitaph for our Tony, I can see myself borrowing some of his own words. To wit, “profoundly wicked, almost psychopathic” would appear to fit like a glove. Though, I might, on reflection, change that last word to sociopathic.)

(3)
Any way you slice it, “Tony Blair, Middle East peace envoy” is an oxymoron.