Tony Blair Testimony To Iraq War Inquiry – The Influence Of Iran

Flopping Aces ^ | 01-21-11 | Curt

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Former British PM Tony Blair testified in front of another Iraq inquiry today and for the second time this year he testified about the very real danger of Iran and al-Qaeda working together. Of course the storyline by the British papers, the biased MSM, and the lefty blogosphere, is regarding the regret offered by Blair over the loss of life:

At the end of his evidence this afternoon he said it had never been his meaning. "Of course I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life,"

I'm sure everyone else would cheer the loss of life huh? I mean come on, of course he regrets the loss of life. This is news? Some kind of acknowledgment that he screwed up? Please.

In his written testimony (PDF) he gave much needed attention to the collusion between Iran and al-Qaeda:

The Role of AQ and Iran

This, in my view, merits a special section. This was the game-changer, the dimension not foreseen, that almost tipped Iraq into the abyss. There is no analysis of what happened after May 2003 that is anywhere near the mark, without consideration of how and why Al Qaida and Iran played the roles they did. The truth is: without their interventions, the situation would have been manageable. It was AQ that staged the bombing “spectaculars” that killed thousands of innocent people, drove the international community and development organisations and UN out of Iraq, committed the outrage on the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006 to trigger sectarian violence and created a climate of fear in the country and a sense of a slide into chaos abroad. It was Iran that financed and armed militia groups who created the worsening security situation in the south, contributed to the problems in Baghdad, and through EFPs and IEDs killed coalition and in particular UK soldiers.

The pre-war intelligence made mention of AQ. Various JIC assessments alluded to them and to the possibility of AQ in the north attacking coalition forces. But the bulk of the assessments were focussed on the risks of greater AQ attacks on coalition interests elsewhere in the world, in the Gulf, in Britain etc. There was no sense that AQ would mount a full-scale operation in Iraq after the removal of Saddam. In retrospect as I said in my evidence, the intelligence that al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian AQ leader, had been in Baghdad in May 2002 should perhaps have been given more weight. But actually most of the British authorities were at pains to separate Saddam from AQ in 2002 not to link them.

As far as Iran’s involvement, that was specifically assessed as unlikely given the hostility to Saddam. If anything, it was thought that whilst Iran would have a keen interest, naturally, in what happened in Iraq it would be more interested in promoting stability than instability.

And just as many people have taken pains to point out that Saddam and al-Qaeda would not work together because one is secular and one is not (a theory proven wrong) many people thought Iran and al-Qaeda would not work together because one is Shia, the other Sunni. Tony Blair brought this up when he testified last year: