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**[email protected]** · November 30th 09, 06:38 PM posted to rec.aviation.military.naval

In article
,
(Eunometic) wrote:

Not according to General(Rtd) Sir Hugh "Michael" Rose KCB, CBE, DSO,
QGM often known as Mike Rose.

As well as commanding 22 SAS, he was Commander UNPROFOR Bosnia in 1994
during the Yugoslav Wars.

He has called for Tony Blair prosecution as a war criminal.

Good fellow! I'd missed that.

That would be equivalent to Collin Powel calling for the impeachment
of President Bush.

Misleading Parliament is taken very seriously in westminister systems.

Indeed. The clearest case of that is thus:

He told Parliament that Saddam Hussain's Iraq could strike at the UK
with WMD in 45 minutes.

That claim was created by conflation and exaggeration of several pieces
of information, viz:

a) The Iraqi military had a special communications system that was
supposed to be for passing orders to WMD-equipped units. That was
supposed to deliver messages from the president (Saddam) to the units
within 45 minutes. Well, you'd kind of expect any nation that thought it
had WMD to have something like that.

b) The most optimistic estimates of the maximum range of Iraq's extended
Scuds, with no serious payload, /might/ allow them to reach the British
sovereign base areas in Cyprus. Which are, sort of, part of the UK.

c) It seemed distinctly possible that Iraq had chemical weapons and
possibly biological ones. The UK government claimed that this was a
certainly known fact.

This is rather different from chemical-tipped Scuds raining down on
London, but that was the impression that was carefully given. Mr Blair
may have avoided outright lying to Parliament, by carefully-chosen
words, but misleading it was clear at the time, to those following he
details of the news.

The only way under British law - I'm making no claims about US law -
that an attack on Iraq was legal without the UN resolution that never
happened was in immediate self-defence. So those WMD really needed to be
there. And they weren't.

Since then, I have made it my business to try to keep my MP -
fortunately, not a Labour one - updated on actual facts as opposed to
spin on defence matters. And I might consider voting Labour again when
the Parliamentary Labour Party (the caucus of all Labour MPs) votes to
send Mr Blair for trial at the International Criminal Court, or other
competent body. The matter does not seem as important as that to most of
the population, since Labour were re-elected in 2005. But it is that
important to me.

--
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.