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Comment by HatchedLake721 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I still remember Colin Powell image showing "irrefutable evidence" in his hands to the United Nations, which ended up being a lie.

But again, did Tony Blair know it was a lie and misled the Parliament?

I remember the Chilcot report, but never read it. It's on my reading list now!

But from your quote, I don't see anything related specifically to Tony Blair?

Again, my point is, the executive power (Government/Prime Minister) came to the legislative power (The Parliament) with a motion to invade another country.

Both powers were using the same intelligence that they believed were genuine at the time, debated it for days, and then decided with 412 to 149 votes to start the invasion.

Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?

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Worth noting that MPs don’t vote entirely independently, but rather are marshalled (using a variety of implicit threats) by the party officials to vote in support of party leadership. Many of those 411 would have been backbench MPs with scarcely more access to government information than the general public. So they probably either believed what the government were saying about WMDs, or were incentivized to vote for war by the party machine. I wouldn’t give them a pass as such, but it’s several steps removed from the culpability level of Blair (who in turn was a rung down from Bush, incentivized to support the USA in much the same way as the British MPs were incentivized to support the PM).

> Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?

My very simplistic understanding is that he is singled out because he was responsible for pressing on it and the thing was voted based on the “evidence” he was presenting.

My understanding is also that Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld are treated equally to Blair by some people.

> My understanding is also that Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld are treated equally to Blair by some people.

That's unfortunate. The fact of the matter is that it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who personally architected the lie. Bush, Blair, et al, deserve plenty of blame for abrogating the duties of their leadership, but the history lesson here is that you don't ever let people like Cheney and Rumsfeld through the front door. Not because they're malicious (I admittedly always found Rumsfeld's politics beguiling), but because they're instigators and prime movers that won't hesitate to abuse power for their desired ends. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Notably, the Bush campaign and administration had plenty of warning (including from conservatives) about who they were inviting into their inner circle. That, of course, makes Bush doubly culpable for a failure in leadership. But Bush's failures are of a different kind, and if we equivocate with those of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their undersecretaries, we'll have learned nothing.

> Both powers were using the same intelligence that they believed were genuine at the time

Didn't the US and UK both fabricate "evidence"? Even then, it was obvious to many observers that the evidence simply wasn't credible, and the only outcome was disaster.

Certainly "Sexed up" the evidence, the entire Dodgy Dossier killed the BBC - Greg Dyke (the Director General / CEO, who was on holiday at the time) had to resign because of it.

The Hutton Report claimed that the dossier was not sexed up (as the BBC claimed) and that it's all the BBCs fault. A few years later, Chilcott report basically said that the government did lie.

> Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?

Your point that the legislature voted on the invasion is a reasonable one, but Blair's government gave them incorrect information on which to base their vote.

Blair was the head of the government that produced that bad intelligence. It makes sense to single him out.

"The buck stops here," and all that.

> But again, did Tony Blair know it was a lie and misled the Parliament?

Yes. This is why the British troops were under-equipped because Tony Blair was intentionally holding back the knowledge that the choice to invade had already been made but he couldn't do this while also requesting parliament to fund war funding.

He was holding two narratives open at the same time. The public one where everything was above board, following all approved channels, ratified by the UN and due to WMD that he used to gain approval from the UK and a private one where it was clear the UK would go to war with the US regardless of what transpired.

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