"Blair ... delivered a bizarre speech in which he said that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction against Europe in as little as 45 minutes. ... Iraq had no delivery system for getting chemical weapons to Europe"
Weren't there thought to be some missiles capable of reaching Cyprus?
Blair’s "hatred of Islam" ? I can't recall any evidence of that.
But you miss the wider point. It has often been asserted in the last few days that "there was no terrorism or al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, before the invasion". But neither was there in Syria.
"Ironically, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia wanted to take over a whole Iraqi province (it especially wanted al-Anbar, where it launched thousands of attacks in 2006-2007) but never was able to, in part because Sunni Iraqis turned on it when it killed their own sons for ‘collaborating’ with al-Maliki."
On one al Jazeera programme, it was said that the jihadists "may have learned some of the lessons of Iraq".
As Charles Lister points out in a recent report, al-Qaeda did dissociate itself from ISIS on 2 Feb 2014, leaving it with no representative in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/al-qaeda-disavows-any-ties-with-radical-islamist-isis-group-in-syria-iraq/2014/02/03/2c9afc3a-8cef-11e3-98ab-fe5228217bd1_story.html
My understanding is that ISIS / ISIL still holds the al-Qaeda "franchise" in Iraq (but not in Syria).
"Blair ... delivered a bizarre speech in which he said that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction against Europe in as little as 45 minutes. ... Iraq had no delivery system for getting chemical weapons to Europe"
Weren't there thought to be some missiles capable of reaching Cyprus?
Blair’s "hatred of Islam" ? I can't recall any evidence of that.
But you miss the wider point. It has often been asserted in the last few days that "there was no terrorism or al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, before the invasion". But neither was there in Syria.
It's said
[Syria] is a party to the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol
I don't think, though, that anyone has pointed out that Syria was a French colony at this time.
On one al Jazeera programme, it was said that the jihadists "may have learned some of the lessons of Iraq".