Who is responsible for the violence in Iraq?

On her show tonight, Rachel Maddow said Tony Blair "would have advocated war against Iraq even if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction there," but in the interview Blair said "I would have still thought it right to remove him..."  So is arguing for Saddam's removal the same thing as advocating a war against Iraq?

I don't think it was Blair's intention to see the deaths of so many Iraqi civilians.  Blair and Bush wanted to remove a dictator from power; they did not intend to cause the sectarian war that followed the invasion.  If we can blame all the carnage that took place after the 2003 invasion on Tony Blair and George W. Bush, we can also blame George HW Bush and John Major for the deaths of Iraqis that resulted from the 1991 invasion.

If Tony Blair can be held responsible for the crimes of Saddamists and Salafi slime, the same logic can be used to try John Major for war crimes, because the 1991 invasion of Iraq also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  I'm sure John Major did not intend to cause Saddam's Republican Guards to mass murder Iraqis in 1991, but the mass murder of Iraqis nevertheless happened as a result of the 1991 invasion of Iraq. Yet nobody demanded that John Major be tried as a war criminal after the 1991 invasion of Iraq.

Was the 1991 invasion of Iraq acceptable because Saddam was not removed?  Judging by how differently the Arabs and media reacted to each war, that appears to be the case.

I find the people who insist that we must punish George Bush and Tony Blair without punishing the Arab terrorists who are directly responsible for crimes against Iraqis to be naive.  On the NYT's At War blog, an Iraqi wrote a post titled 'I Have No Living Friends in Iraq Now' in which he discusses the death of his father and his ex-girlfriend.  The first comment was from a "Jim" in Austin, and it has been recommended by 15 readers: 

You can thank Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfield for killing your family and friends. If these three rulers were from any country but the US, they would be at the Hague facing charges of genocide. As an American, I apoligize for these individuals for the tragedy they brought to your country.

The Iraqi "can thank Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld" for killing his family and friends.  I wonder if "Jim" realizes how insensitive his comment may seem to Iraqis.  I hated the Arabs who said that every bombing and shooting in Iraq is the responsibility of America and said nothing about the Arabs who actually committed the crimes. This kind of talk no doubt encouraged the Arab "resistance" to mass murder more Iraqis, and that made me very angry.  To see Americans saying the same thing is quite disheartening.