I really have to pay more attention to the British inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war if this is what it’s producing:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction.

“I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat,” Blair told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast this morning.

I suppose it’s past time to start a fund to create Tony Blair’s headstone, just to have this craven, blithe admission of pretext permanently affixed to his legacy. Yes, Prime Minister, “obviously” once the justification for a war that has killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people turns out to be disproven, one must pivot to a new rationale for its existence. What one must never do is recognize that the war is in error and work to correct it.

Because for Blair it’s not an error, “obviously.” Whatever he told us is whatever he needed to tell us at that moment, as the war was a fixed idea. I wonder why people occasionally say that Blair was the only one who could have prevented the war from happening. He was an active architect of the invasion. His gaudy and theatrical public pronouncements of doubt are just part of the fucking ruse.

Part of me looks at this horror and can’t wait for this decade to end. But the truth is it will never end, no matter what the calendar says. Only Americans think that the clocks reset and the scales balance because of years that end in a zero. Or elections.