Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid warrior, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and general mensch, this weekend published an editorial in The Observer explaining his decision to pull out of a scheduled appearance at last week’s Discovery Invest Leadership Summit, in Johannesburg. His reason: Tony Blair would be there. Tony Blair, according to Tutu, shouldn’t be onstage in Johannesburg. He should be on trial at The Hague. George W. Bush, too. Probably some others.

Archbishop Tutu’s editorial begins with a sentence that is neither grammatical nor historical:

The immorality of the United States and Great Britain’s decision to invade Iraq
in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater
extent than any other conflict in history.

Surely Archbishop Tutu means to say it was the conflict itself, and not its immorality, that did the “destabilising”? (And didn’t the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia in July, 1914, cause at least as much trouble?) Archbishop Tutu calms down a few paragraphs later, writing:

On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the
International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international
speakers’ circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be
invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr
Bush’s chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to
get rid of Saddam Hussein?

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of
its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering,
beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there
each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project.
More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and
millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500
American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

There are no satisfactory answers to Archbishop Tutu’s questions, as a tired-sounding Tony Blair seems to acknowledge in his rebuttal:

I have a great respect for Archbishop Tutu’s fight against apartheid –
where we were on the same side of the argument – but to repeat the old
canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every
single independent analysis of the evidence has shown.

And to say
that the fact that Saddam massacred hundreds of thousands of his
citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre … his slaughter of his political opponents, the treatment of the Marsh
Arabs and the systematic torture of his people make the case for
removing him morally strong. But the basis of action was as stated at
the time.

In short, this is the same argument we have had many
times with nothing new to say. But surely in a healthy democracy people
can agree to disagree.