Gwynne Dyer: Ignorance Blair's worst war crime

At the Iraq inquiry in London on January 29, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair found a new way to defend his decision to join George W Bush in invading Iraq in 2003: the "what-if" defence. What if they hadn't invaded Iraq and Saddam Hussein (right) had remained in power there?

"What's important is not to ask the March 2003 Question, but to ask the 2010 Question," Blair said. "Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons, which were going to follow him, in charge of Iraq - people who used chemical weapons, caused the death of over one million people ... If we had left Saddam in power, we would have to deal with him today, where the circumstances would be far worse."

Blair obviously thought this was the one argument nobody could disagree with. Maybe he'd cooked the intelligence about Iraq, maybe Saddam actually had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) - as Blair admits nowadays - but if he had left this evil monster in power, we would all be sorry now.

Blair is offering only two choices - either he and Bush invade in 2003, or Saddam is still in power in 2010.

It's really more complicated than that. All transfers of power in Iraq since independence have been accomplished by violence, and Saddam could have lost power through an internal coup.

He might also just have died. We know Saddam would have survived until 2006, because that's when they hanged him, but if he were alive today he would be almost 73.

Blair and Bush clearly think they were God's chosen instruments for removing Saddam from power. But God, if he exists, has many alternative instruments at his disposal. Some of them wouldn't even involve starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned four million Iraqis into refugees.

What would the world be like if Saddam were still in power in Iraq? Much the same as it is now, in all likelihood.

Many people asked exactly the same question in 1991, after the first President Bush decided not to overthrow Saddam at the end of the first Gulf war. In the next 10 years, until 2001, Saddam attacked no neighbours, built no weapons of mass destruction, did nothing that gave the world reason to regret he had been left in power. Many Iraqis regretted it, partly because the United Nations sanctions against Saddam were impoverishing their country.

The sanctions had been imposed to ensure Saddam could not rebuild his armed forces, most of which had been destroyed in the Gulf war, and that he could not restart the projects for developing WMDs that had been dismantled by UN inspectors during the early 1990s.

The sanctions were still working well in 2003. The proof is that no weapons of mass destruction were found, nor even any evidence Saddam was trying to revive his pre-1991 WMD programmes, after the invaders arrived in 2003 and ransacked Iraq looking for evidence to justify their actions.

I could have told you that. In fact, if you were a reader of this column seven years ago, I did tell you that. It was obvious to any reasonably well-informed person in 2003 Saddam no longer presented a military threat, even to his neighbours.

There is no reason to believe sanctions would have ended if the US and Britain had not invaded Iraq in 2003, or that Saddam would be any more dangerous today than he was then. But what about the million people he killed? The great majority of those million people died on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and Saddam only "killed" them in the same limited sense Blair "killed" several hundred thousand people by invading Iraq in 2003.

The people who died in the hands of Saddam's secret police, or in his suppression of revolts like the Shia uprising of 1991, were much less numerous. The mass killings only happened in response to direct threats to the regime, and none occurred after 1991.

The number of people killed in Saddam's jails in a normal year was probably in the low hundreds. He was just another vicious dictator, not a "monster of evil".

So why did Bush and Blair invade Iraq? Maybe for US strategists it had something to do with oil, but for Blair, at least, it was pure ignorance. If anybody ever explained to him Saddam had nothing to do with the terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11, he didn't listen.

Blair didn't realise Saddam was a pragmatist who had been happy to accept US support during the war that killed a million people, not some hater of the West.

He didn't understand Ba'athists like Saddam were the sworn enemies of religious fanatics such as the al Qaeda, each killing the other whenever they got the chance.

For him, they were all Arabs, they were all Muslims; they were all the same. It's all history now and maybe it's not worth bothering about. Except people just as ignorant as Blair are now peddling us the same kind of nonsense about Iran.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.