Tony Blair is not a war criminal....

I am a huge fan of Nick Cohen - a true voice of moral clarity on the left...and here's his take on Tony Blair...

We are now enduring our fifth Iraq inquiry. Tribunals have called Alastair Campbell so many times he could imitate Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities and declare: "I am a career defendant. I now dress for jail, even though I haven't been convicted of any crime." They do not seem to know it but if they hold inquiries until the crack of doom, the war's opponents will never convict him or the Labour leadership. Their central allegation that the second Iraq war was "illegal" is unsustainable and not only because no competent court has validated it.

I am growing old and grey waiting for John Humphrys or Jon Snow to show a spark of journalistic life and ask Nick Clegg, Philippe Sands and all the rest of them the simple question: "What do you mean by an 'illegal war'?"

However vigorously they seek to parse UN resolution 1,441, the use of "illegal" demonstrates that Tony Blair's lawyerly critics believe that the Ba'athist regime, which was guilty of genocide and under UN sanctions, remained Iraq's legitimate government, entitled by law to treat the country as its private prison.

After the war, not even Saddam's business partner Jacques Chirac went so far as to say that the Ba'athists should have their "illegally" stolen country restored to them. The UN, instead, recognised the occupation and the democratic government that followed and lost some of its bravest workers in the struggle for a freer country.

The inability to accept that a policy they honestly opposed still had moral virtues is producing levels of dementia unusually high even by the standards of British public life.

But, read the whole thing....and while you are at it, go buy Nick Cohen's book, "What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way."