ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has not only snubbed Tony Blair, he has revived and refreshed sordid memories in danger of being erased from the world conscience. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize-winning South African priest decided to abstain from attending a leadership summit, being held today in Johannesburg, because the former British prime minister was one of the speakers. As a spokesman for the peace icon said, Archbishop Tutu, after “wrestling with his conscience”, came to the conclusion that Mr Blair’s decision to support the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the basis of “unproven allegations” was “indefensible”. Mr Blair more than supported the Bush administration’s invasion decision; he sent troops to Iraq to overthrow a regime which didn’t possesses weapons of mass destruction, as confirmed by Hans Blix, the man who headed the UN’s inspection team. As Mr Blix told the Security Council, he had found no “smoking gun” in Iraq after Saddam Hussein allowed the commission full freedom to undertake its job.

“The unproven allegations” the archbishop spoke of do not fully reflect the full spectrum of the conspiracies and lies that went into the case that was made for attacking oil-rich Iraq, and no one protested against this hoax more than the British people. Some of the frauds were absurd, including the doctored intelligence dossier which said that Iraqi missiles could be made operational within 45 minutes. Militarily Iraq had been defanged after the Kuwait war, and the UN sanctions had impoverished the country. But, as revealed later, the neocons in the Bush administration had made up their minds to fix Iraq because Israel considered the Saddam regime the greatest threat to its security. The invasion, no doubt, ended Saddam’s tyranny but resistance to occupation, terrorism and the sectarian strife led to a minimum of 200,000 civilians dead.