Tony Blair Bears 'Total Responsibility' For Isis, Says Academic Who Advised Him On Iraq

There is "absolutely" a link between the invasion of Iraq and the rise of terror groupIsis, for which Tony Blair bears "total responsibility", says a leading academic who advised the then prime minister in the run-up to the war.

Speaking exclusively to The Huffington Post UK, Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University said Tony Blair had a "shallow mind" and had refused to heed his warnings of post-war chaos and sectarianism in Iraq.
In November 2002, Joffe was one of three Iraq experts invited into Downing Street to brief Blair on the potential fallout from an Anglo-American attack on Baghdad.

"We were not allowed to talk about whether or not it was a good idea to invade, but only about what the aftermath would be," he told HuffPost UK, adding: "It was clear that the decision had already been made.. to invade Iraq”.

Joffe says Blair wasn't interested in listening. In response to warnings from the Cambridge academic and the two other Iraq experts, Dr Toby Dodge and Dr Charles Tripp, that the country could descend into civil war and a Sunni-led insurgency, Blair merely responded, in reference to Saddam Hussein, "But the man's evil, isn't he?"

According to Joffe, Blair "personalised" the whole issue in the form of Hussein and thus "the whole structure of Iraq was utterly irrelevant.. It was very two-dimensional."

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/17/iraq-tony-blair_n_5503110.html?1403016773&utm_hp_ref=uk

"Let's keep in mind, the war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

- reply to a CIA officer who expressed misgivings over the use of intelligence from alcoholic Iraqi defector, code named "Curve Ball," from his supervisor

Of course, "Curve Ball" was the source of nearly every shred of "intelligence" regarding Iraq the U.S. had leading up to the invasion -- and was discredited as a fraud.

The impression over here was always that Blair was going to follow Bush's lead on Iraq. Bush, who famously did not know Shiites from Sunnis: http://theobfuscationreport.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-thought-they-were-all-Muslims.html

Let's not forget the Downing Street Memo ... http://downingstreetmemo.com/

I actually got the chance to interview, back in 2003, an Iraqi official who had defected. Even this anti-Saddam guy had a problem with the invasion. He said he wished the argument had been made on the basis of Saddam's human rights violations rather than upon the fiction that Saddam posed any sort of threat to the West.

It might not seem like a big thing, but the rationale could have made a huge difference, I think. The West was seen as self-serving, naive and oblivious to the situation of the Iraqi people.