Retired British Army General Sir Michael Rose has echoed the demand first made by the British National Party for Tony Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes trials following the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.

Writing in a daily newspaper today, Sir Michael used the language that the BNP has already been using for several years by calling for Mr Blair to stand trial and “face charges for war crimes.”

Referring to the Chilcot inquiry into the war, Sir Michael wrote that it should be the “first step in a judicial process that brings those responsible for the disasters of the Iraq war before the courts  -  and could, as I shall explain, ultimately result in Tony Blair being indicted for war crimes.”

Sir Michael then reviewed the past week’s evidence to the Chilcot inquiry which proved that Mr Blair lied blatantly to the House of Commons and the public about Iraq’s alleged “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

The evidence spelled out how Mr Blair and other senior government figures had been specifically told that there were no WMDs, no missiles, no atom bombs and that there was no legal basis to pursue a war against Iraq.

“Despite these compelling accounts of what happened, the truth is that we already know the main lessons of Iraq: Britain was taken unprepared into war on false grounds, and the inevitable result was the destruction of Iraq, enormous loss of life and continuing political turmoil in the Middle East. Worse, the war has radicalised Muslim opinion against the West throughout the world, even spawning terrorism on the streets of London,” Sir Michael said, echoing almost word for word what the BNP has been saying all along.

The BNP has warned for years that the main source of terrorism in Britain is British foreign policy which incites the Muslim world against us, and mass Third World immigration which creates a huge pool from which radicalised Muslims can recruit.

Sir Michael also pointed out the “horrific” human cost to this war generated on “false grounds.”  He wrote that “over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,500 soldiers from coalition forces have been killed during almost seven years of the occupation — and probably ten times that number have been injured. Two million Iraqis have fled their country and another two million have been internally displaced.”

Sir Michael then repeated another BNP point by writing that the decision to go to war was one “in which the majority of MPs . . . were complicit.”

He goes on to write that if “one of my military students at the British Army Command and Staff College had produced such a sloppy and weak case for war as did Tony Blair before Parliament, I would have sacked him.”

He added that Britain has a tradition of holding its leaders to account when they lead the country to disaster. He points out that when the British Army was defeated at Yorktown in 1781 at the end of the American War of Independence, the entire British Cabinet resigned.

“When Winston Churchill, who as First Sea Lord had been the main architect of the Empire’s Gallipoli campaign against the Turks, saw the scale of the disaster that happened there in 1915, he immediately volunteered for the trenches in France — where, no doubt, he hoped to find death or redeem his honour.

“In contrast, Blair today swans about the world making millions from business contracts and lectures. And, to make matters still more distasteful, much of these earnings are only made possible because of the American and Middle Eastern contacts he made as a result of his unconditional support for Bush during the Iraq war,” Sir Michael wrote.

“That is why I believe that, if justice is to prevail, and faith in democracy is to be restored in this country, Tony Blair and those officials responsible for the disasters of the Iraq war should appear in a court of law which could lead to them being indicted for war crimes.

“We owe this much at least to those many brave and courageous people who have died or been injured in Iraq as well as to their families,” Sir Michael concluded.

Exactly what the BNP has been saying all along, long before it was fashionable to do so. The BNP would also seek the prosecution of those reckless media owners and editors who played a role in encouraging the deception, and of those civil servants who helped compile the tissue of lies for which so many have now needlessly died.