Tony Blair’s widely panned appearance at last week’s Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war reminded the world about the former British prime minister’s role in that lethal fiasco. Like many of the Iraq war’s instigators here in the United States, Blair has gotten a free pass while flaunting his lack of remorse. Indeed, the failure to hold him accountable resulted in his appointment as the special envoy of the “Mideast Quartet” in June 2007,  charged with reviving the peace process on behalf of its members — the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and the Russian Federation.
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During Blair’s long-winded justification of his actions, he compared the current threat from Iran’s nuclear program with the supposed threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD arsenal no fewer than 58 times. “We face the same problem about Iran today,” he said — a call to war that sounded weirdly discordant coming from a man committed to encouraging peaceful negotiation.

via Joe Conason – Did Tony Blair blow it as Mideast envoy? – Salon.com.

Tony Blair as Mideast Peace Envoy is a ridiculous position for someone who either grossly miscalculated  or lied through his teeth to magnify the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the rest of the world. At this point, all that matters is that Tony Blair is the absolute wrong choice. Conason captures the worst thing about Blair’s inquiry appearance: “We face the same problem about Iran today,”.

As he vociferously defends his decision to lead his nation into a costly invasion of Iraq Blair’s belief that 2010 Iran is the “same problem” as 2003 Iraq means that he believes we should attempt to bomb and bribe them into a functioning Democracy as well. Not the best mindset for a peace convoy.

The British said cheerio back in July, around the same time the Romanians cleared out “Camp Dracula,” their compound on a U.S. base in southern Iraq. Tonga and Kazakhstan left ages ago, and no one seems to remember if any Icelandic forces ever made it to Iraq.

It doesn’t matter now, anyway, because as of Friday, former president George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” formally ceased to exist, leaving only the U.S. military’s 130,000 or so forces to shepherd their Iraqi counterparts through a volatile election season before a full American troop withdrawal that’s expected by the end of 2011.

via The ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq becomes an army of one | McClatchy.

This skit makes me laugh. And then I think about how its more truth than fiction. This skit makes me sad. Damn you Chappelle.

Iraq is not the place to spend any more American Blood and Treasure:

Text of memo from Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, Baghdad, Iraq.

It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home

As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose. Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Read the rest of this entry…