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by Ray Fleming

In Sunday's Observer the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair's and George W Bush's roles in the Iraq War should be investigated by the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

He accused them of lying about the need for the war by claiming wrongly that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. (The Archbishop had recently withdrawn from a conference on leadership in South Africa when he heard that Mr Blair was participating -- for a fee of 1'500 pounds -- and his article was to some extent a defence of that action.)
Until the stalled UK Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war is given access to key documentation on telephone calls between Mr Blair and Mr Bush there cannot be a definitive view on the British prime minister's role but there is enough other evidence to suggest that Archbishop Tutu is entitled to press his point. At least 100'000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war and the number may be as great as one million.

The displacement of civilians was called by the UN Refugee agency as the biggest movement of people in recent history.
Yet Mr Blair's response to Desmond Tutu's accusations was this: “Iraq today is better off than in Saddam Hussein's time with an economy three times or more in size than before.” Is that what the war was about, after all?