Tony Blair and the Self-Exalting Mindset of the West: in Two Paragraphs

Tony Blair today took a little time off from serving the world's despots in order to exploit the 10th anniversary of the July 7 London train bombing. He did so by casting blame on "radical Islam" for the world's violence while exempting himself, pronouncing:

"This is a global problem ... we're not going to allow anyone to excuse themselves by saying that the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government."

The proposition Blair just decreed invalid -- "the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government" -- is exactly the rationale that he himself repeatedlyinvoked, and to this day still invokes, to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq, as in this example from December 2009:

"Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public. . . 'If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?' Blair was asked. He replied: 'I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]'. . . He explained it was 'the notion of him as a threat to the region' because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people."

"Excusing the slaughter of totally innocent people" -- whether in Fallujah orGaza or Yemen -- is a staple of Western elite discourse to justify the militarism of the U.S., the U.K. and their most special allies. It only suddenly becomes inexcusable when carried out by Muslims against the West. It is a stunning testament to Western self-delusion that one of the prime architects and salesmen of the most destructive political crime of this generation -- the invasion of Iraq -- can stand up with a straight face and to applause and declare: "we're not going to allow anyone to excuse themselves by saying that the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government."

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