Having sponsored and armed an Israeli genocide in Gaza, Donald Trump now wants to impose himself on Palestinians: his latest peace plan, involving the demilitarisation and development of Gaza, centres on an international transitional body, the “Board of Peace,” that will provide “the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza”.
The chair of that board? Donald J. Trump.
Moreover, “a Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.. A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.” Having funded the near-total destruction of Gaza under both Joe Biden and Trump, you can bet the US will ensure that US firms will be first in line to profit from its rebuilding in a “Trump economic development plan.”
The United States, of course, has a sterling record under both Democrat and Republican administrations in rebuilding countries it helped to destroy. Even American officials admit they wasted tens of billions of dollars in a futile effort to rebuild Iraq.
Ah… Iraq. A not irrelevant comparison to Gaza, even beyond the role of the United States. For who will join Trump on the hilariously named Board of Peace? There are “other members and heads of State to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair”.
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What better person to put in charge of the rebuilding of Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been butchered, than Tony Blair, a man whose hands are smeared with the blood of the at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians slaughtered in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US, the UK and allied countries like Australia?
Blair was officially found to have misrepresented the intelligence, deliberately exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his fictional weapons of mass destruction, as part of the goal of a US-led invasion of Iraq. He and George W. Bush were also warned by intelligence agencies that Iraq would descend into a nightmare of sectarian violence after the invasion, and ignored the warning.
Even conservatives agree that Blair’s actions, along with the lies peddled by the Bush administration, meant that the war — the most spectacular disaster of western policy since the Vietnam war — was fought on a lie. And it was fought, as participants, US defense secretaries and heads of the US Federal Reserve all admitted, for oil.
And that war made western countries, and particularly the US, the UK and supporting countries like Australia, significantly less safe from terrorism. Blair was also warned about that by intelligence agencies, and ignored that warning too. Ordinary citizens who became victims of terrorism after the Iraq war paid with their lives for Blair’s folly. Intelligence agencies have since routinely admitted that the Iraq war fueled terrorism in the west.
Blair’s crimes, like those of Bush, and others like John Howard who misled their nations over the Iraq war, have never led to any accountability. The death toll, among Iraqis, among allied soldiers and among western civilians; the multi-trillion-dollar cost, the empowerment of malignant actors in the Middle East like Iran and the alienation of Muslims across the world, have never been properly laid at the door of those leaders who deliberately inflicted those disasters.
Blair and co stand as exemplars of western double standards, in which slaughtering thousands of Muslims is just a statistic, the destruction of communities and countries in the Middle East a cause merely for embarrassment and regret at most, in which strategic disaster is rewarded with wealth and honour after public life is over, rather than opprobrium and prosecution.
And those unprosecuted, unaccountable leaders paved the way for what we have now: a US president who lies with total impunity, gaslights entire countries and behaves unchecked by any political or moral instinct or multilateral institution, and who readily backs an ally in Benjamin Netanyahu who is unapologetic about the genocide he has inflicted on Palestinians. Blair, Bush and their backers like Howard helped create the nightmare world of 2025.
In a way, it’s entirely appropriate that Blair should stand shoulder to shoulder with Trump in inflicting yet another western atrocity of Middle Eastern Muslims. The Board of Peace offers the peace Blair knows best, that of the graveyard.
