The news that a young man recently tried to carry out a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair for war crimes, reported in the Grauniad this morning, is replete with ironies, coming as it does amidst the outrage over the 50,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria showing systematic torture by the government.
Last summer the UK Government tried to get Parliament to back the principle of intervention in Syria. Their attempt was unsuccessful, because there were enough Tory rebels who sided with Labour. At the time I quoted Lord Ashdown, who wrote, "MPs cheered last night. Assad and Putin this morning".
I realise that deciding to intervene in a foreign country is a difficult and problematic thing to do. There is an enormous amount of public anger still over our little Iraqi adventure. It's that anger that motivates people like the young man who tried to arrest Blair.
These people have forgotten however that Saddam Hussein killed a lot of his own citizens too, that his successors would certainly have carried on doing the same thing, and that without intervention they would still be doing it now. Iraq is not perfect, but it is a good deal better than it would have been if Saddam, then his sons, then some other Ba'ath party hard man, had been allowed to keep their foot on the neck of the Iraqi people.
And yet it is the wilful blindness and partiality of this section of the public which made President Obama and then British MPs hestitate last summer. It may be increasingly clear that events have proved them wrong, but they are still shouting the loudest. We have moved beyond denial but are still languishing in the anger stage.
However as I wrote at the time, even a decision to do nothing has its consequences. We are now seeing in Syria what those consequences are. They are written on the emaciated and disfigured bodies of those unfortunate enough to have fallen into the hands of President Assad's torture squads.
I'd like to see the chap who tried to arrest Blair in a London restaurant flick through those 50,000 images of the dead. It might teach him what war crimes really look like.
