Tony Blair should be taken to ICC for Iraq invasion: Salmond

Scottish National Party (SNP)’s Alex Salmond says former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for involving the country in the 2003 invasion of Iraq if an inquiry reveals that Blair made a secret commitment to Washington to support the war.

The SNP foreign affairs spokesman has begun rallying support for the impeachment of Blair, pending the publication of the Chilcot inquiry report into the UK’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq invasion on July 6.

A cross-party group of MPs launched a campaign in 2004 to have Blair impeached. Salmon is now trying to reassemble the group to make plans ahead of the publication of the long-awaited inquiry.

While a number of lawmakers still want to use the impeachment procedure to hold Blair to account for his role in the invasion of the Arab country and its following occupation, Salmond said any prosecution of Blair should be conducted by the ICC. 

"If, as I believe...Chilcot finds that there was a prior commitment from Blair to Bush at Crawford ranch in 2002, that would provide the reason for pursuing the matter further," Salmond said, referring to Bush’s then private ranch in Crawford, Texas.

The former Scottish First Minister added, "My own view is that the best route would be to use the ICC because the prosecutor is able to initiate action on his or her own behalf on presentation of a body of evidence, which Chilcot would provide.”

The initial impeachment campaign failed, as the motion tabled by the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties defeated by 298 votes to 273 votes in the House of Commons.

“One of the reasons for reassembling the group is that our collective wisdom ten years ago is what gave such impetus to that campaign. We are not talking about the latest GDP figures. We are talking about peace and war. We are talking about 179 (dead) British service people, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,” Salmond said.

“We are talking about setting off and detonating a sequence of events that has left the Middle East in chaos and much of the world suffering from the consequences. We are talking about a sequence of events, the end game of which is Daesh,” he added.

Blair told British MPs before invading Iraq that intelligence showed that Saddam Hussein had “active”, “growing” and “up and running” nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were the basis of launching the war.

In 2004, however, a US report said that Saddam had destroyed his last WMD over a decade ago and had no capacity to build new ones.

The Chilcot inquiry was launched in 2009 by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown into the Iraq invasion by the United States and the UK and its aftermath that saw British forces remained in the Arab country for six years.

The 2.6 million-word report will be published in July, but was originally due within a year. Local reports said Blair was responsible for the delay in the publication of the report.

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