TONY BLAIR
Intro: An open letter led by ex-diplomats, and signed by thousands more, calls for the former British Prime Minister who went to war on a lie and based on a false prospectus to be axed as Middle East peace envoy
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THREE former UK ambassadors to the Middle East have joined a new demand and are campaigning for Tony Blair to be removed from his role as Middle East ‘peace’ envoy.
Signatories to an open letter, led by Mr Blair’s former ambassador to Iran Sir Richard Dalton, describes his achievements in the region as ‘negligible’, criticising his money-making activities and accuse him of trying to ‘absolve himself’ of responsibility for the crisis in Iraq.
Other former diplomats lending their weight to the letter are Sir Oliver Miles, Britain’s ambassador to Libya when relations were severed after the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, and Christopher Long, ambassador to Egypt between 1992 and 1995. Joining more than 4,000 signatories are human rights barrister Michael Mansfield QC, former London mayor Ken Livingstone and former Conservative prisons minister Crispin Blunt.
The letter has been organised by the makers of Respect MP George Galloway’s film The Killing of Tony Blair. It has been deliberately timed for this week’s seventh anniversary of Mr Blair’s appointment as envoy on the Middle East for the ‘quartet’ of the UN, the EU, Russia and the US, and is addressed to John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and to the EU’s ‘foreign minister’.
It argues that Mr Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq is to blame for the rise of “fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously” and that he should be removed from his position.
The letter says: “We are appalled by Iraq’s descent into a sectarian conflict that threatens its existence as a nation, as well as the security of its neighbours. We are also dismayed at Tony Blair’s attempts to absolve himself of any responsibility for the current crisis by isolating it from the legacy of the Iraq war.”
It is alleged that Mr Blair ‘misled the British people’ by suggesting Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It adds: ‘It is a cruel irony for the people of Iraq that perhaps the invasion’s most enduring legacy has been the rise of fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously.
‘We believe Mr Blair, as a vociferous advocate of the invasion, must accept a degree of responsibility for its consequences.’
Criticising the former prime minister’s business interests, the letter alleges that his ‘conduct in his private pursuits also calls into question his suitability for the role’, and accuses him of ‘blurring the lines between his public position as envoy and his private roles at Tony Blair Associates and the investment bank JPMorgan Chase’.
The letter adds to growing calls for Mr Blair to stand down. In the last few days the former foreign secretary Lord Owen criticised Mr Blair for his claims that the 2003 invasion was not a factor in the current unrest in Iraq. “Tony Blair should no longer be allowed to speak for the EU on the Middle East, and someone else found for helping Palestine without his past record and crusading messianic fervour,” he said.
A spokesman for Mr Blair said: ‘These are all people viscerally opposed to Tony Blair with absolutely no credibility in relation to him whatsoever. Their attack is neither surprising nor newsworthy… They include the alliance of hard Right and hard Left views which he has thought against all his political life. Of course he completely disagrees with them over the Middle East.’
People are being urged to support the call for Mr Blair to be removed by signing the petition at www.change.org.
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