Carter attacks Blair's Iraq role

Former President Jimmy Carter has lambasted Blair's blind support for Bush in the run up to the Iraq war calling it, "abominable, loyal, blind, and apparently, subservient".

He has also said that, had Blair stepped back from Bush in the run up to the war, it might have made Bush's march to war harder, as the support of the British gave Bush a credibility that it would not otherwise have had.

He says he feels sad as the "war was unjustified, unnecessary and has brought tragedy to the Iraqi people."

He also hopes that the election of Brown as Prime Minister might bring about the US and UK's exodus from that country.

This is not the first time that Carter has been critical of Blair's obsequience to the Bush regime. Last September he stated:

"No matter what kind of radical or ill-advised policy was proposed from the White House, it seems to me that almost automatically the government of Great Britain would adopt the same policy without exerting its influence.

This was the case "in the Middle East peace process, in the case of the Lebanese/Israeli war in the recent past and certainly in the ill-advised abandonment of the war against terrorism to substitute the war in Iraq", he said.

Asked if he thought Britain was exerting its influence behind the scenes, Jimmy Carter replied he had seen no evidence of that.

"I haven't seen the corrective effect of British disagreement with what the White House has proposed. It may be there, it hasn't been evident to the public," he said

I am glad that Carter has the courage to speak so plainly about a man who should be his political ally. Blair has never been a Labour leader in the way that most of us had hoped, and it's good that a man as respected as Carter has called him out. If only to mark Brown's card that the road Blair walked must never be travelled again by a Labour Prime Minister.

Blair leaves the world stage almost humiliated by the way the Bush regime has treated him. It is unlikely that Gordon Brown will give Bush the opportunity to treat his political future as lightly as he has treated Blair's.

Listen to Carter's comments here.

Click title for full article.