Peter Oborne is associate Editor of the Spectator, former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, columnist for the Daily Mail and prolific author. His latest book, “Not the Chilcot Report” (1) is a forensic analysis of the duplicities of Tony Blair and his administration relating to Iraq’s invasion and the cataclysmic effect on the region.

 “The defining calamity of the post-cold war era”, he writes, took place in 2003. As his publisher writes:

“Oborne provides a forensic examination of the way evidence was doctored and the law manipulated in 2002 and 2003 in order to justify a war for regime change. The government bent facts to fit its determination to join the US invasion, Parliament failed to scrutinise evidence, the intelligence service was perverted, and the media lost its head.” The all was: “the making of a disaster.”

This week in a piece headed: “How I long to see Blair in the dock being called to account for Iraq”, Oborne writes:

“After almost a decade of making money by milking the contacts he had made as Prime Minister, Tony Blair recently made a surprise comeback to domestic politics … I dare say that Mr. Blair is hoping we will all forget that he led this country to war against Iraq – a calamity that is still unfolding today with the horrors of ISIS.”

However, as the article points out, all is not forgotten and Tony Blair and his colleagues arguably lied their way to a war of aggression, described by the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Robert H. Jackson as:

“the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

It is on the basis of this crime that Mr. Blair:

“faces being taken to court in a private prosecution charging him with telling lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in order to take Britain into an illegal war.” 

Whilst many have attempted and are still trying to hold Blair to account, this litigant is justified in having a special grievance. He is both an Iraqi and none other than:

“the former Chief of Staff of Saddam Hussein’s army, General Abdul-Wahid Shannan ar-Ribat (who) is seeking a judicial review of a District Judge’s decision last November that Blair had ‘immunity’ from criminal prosecution.”

There are uncounted round the world who will fervently wish the General well in another battle of enormity.