[A version of this article appeared in The Mail on Sunday (25th October, 2015):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3288189/Damn-Tony-Blair-Iraq-ISIS-Fear-abroad-home-sins-hugely-respected-writer-issues-simple-devastating-verdict-former-PM.html ]
Sorry never was the hardest word for Tony Blair – at least
before Iraq .
For twelve years until his carefully choreographed interview
with America ’s
CNN, Mr Blair had presented himself as the innocent victim of bad intelligence
who at least had made the world a safer place by toppling Saddam Hussein. No
need to apologise then for the consequences of his actions in 2003. Long before
the ex-Prime Minister adopted a new profile as prophet-in-chief at his
not-for-profit Faith Foundation (modelled on the not-so-transparent Clinton
Foundation), his messianic self-righteousness left little room for
acknowledging his own faults, but plenty of energy for addressing those of
others.
Symptomatic of Mr Blair’s peculiar mindset was his
willingness from the arrival of New Labour in Downing St. in 1997 to apologise for dark episodes in
Britain’s past, while refusing to take the blame for any bad consequences of
his own policies, least of all for the ever-expanding chaos in the Middle East,
Mr Blair was happy to glow with a perverse pride by apologising for the Irish
Potato Famine in 1846 and ended his term as prime minister expressing his shame
about the slave trade abolished in 1807. To be he even let slip his regrets for
his pre-PC spanking of his children, but only to draw attention to what a
paternal model he was now setting!
But this happy scapegoat for Britain ’s past sins was remarkably
tight-lipped about his own responsibility for squandering British lives, not to
mention Iraqi ones, from 2003. Nor until now has ever admitted that his
policies have made people in Britain
less safe.
Tony Blair used to taint anyone who said his actions had played
into the hands of hate-preachers here and had helped fuse the bombs which hit London in July, 2005,
with the brush of apologists for terrorism. Yet in his cosy chat on CNN, when
the subject of the emergence of the most brutal terrorist threat yet in
post-Saddam Iraq came up, he let slip, “Of course,
you-you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no
responsibility for the situation in 2015.”
That double-negative is the
nearest TB has ever got to admitting that he helped to fuel the flames now
licking Britain Iraq and Syria ,
but the jihadi terrorists are burrowing away inside Britain Iraq
Maybe we can sympathise a bit with Blair’s unwillingness to
come clean. All of us confront the dilemma from time to time that conscience
prods us that we have behaved shabbily but our self-esteem tries to silence it
by whispering, “I couldn’t have done that, not me”! As Prime Minister of “Cool Britannia” Tony
Blair embodied the “Me Generation”. If only we knew how sincere he was, nobody
would doubt his motives. A mental block stopped him following his spin doctor,
Alistair Campbell’s advice always to kill a bad story by fessing up straight
away and urging people to move on. Instead Blair’s pride insists, “Don’t hold
me responsible. I was only Prime Minister.” He denies that he can be faulted
for believing – if he did – faulty intelligence as though the tenant of Downing St. just
swallows what is served up by his staff. (Since Blair was clearly dependent in
his interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on the flow of scripted responses through
an ear-pierce pioneered by Ronald Reagan and perfected by Barack Obama, maybe
he was never more than a mouthpiece.)
Although “Better late than never” will be the kindest
response that Tony Blair will get from the widows and orphans created by his
feckless policy in the Middle East, in reality this was not an apology but a
pre-emptive strike to dull the impact of criticisms likely to be contained in
the Chilcot Report, which may even appear within months after years of careful
drafting to meet Blair’s replies to his critics. What formed the Semtex in his
interview was his admission that the spreading cancer of Middle Eastern
terrorism is a result of his policies.
Even with Blair in perma-tanned retirement, his poisonous legacy still threatens us here
at home and abroad because too many policy-makers can’t shake themselves free
from him as their role-model for success in modern Britain . Until Jeremy Corbyn was
elected Labour leader there was no official opposition to Blair’s approach to
foreign policy which was embraced by
most Labour MPs as well as the majority of Tories.
For the future, even a fulsome Blair apology for past errors
will be a dead-letter if the government still clings to the Blairite approach
to foreign problems. David Cameron and his peers belong to that long Blairite
generation that knew only peace and prosperity as they grew up in the security
of the Cold War. Tony Blair casually launched Britain into a succession of hot
wars. Kosovo worked out bloodlessly for us in 1999, but it seduced Mr Blair
into thinking any casualties would always be Theirs not Ours.
Sadly, despite the our forces’ heavy toll in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, where nothing has been achieved worth the blood of a British
grenadier, Tony Blair’s deadly political legacy to his successors in power
today is a knee-jerk reliance on military force to grab today’s headlines even
if no planning for tomorrow’s consequences has been made. It is also that for
all the talk about terrorism, no responsibility is taken for policies which
help to promote it.
So let’s not heap all the blame for Iraq and
terrorism on Blair. Too many are still anxious to share the guilt - or claim the credit for another misguided war after one more poorly-planned intervention.
Just as he demonised Saddam Hussein as the root-and-branch
of all Iraq’s problems and argued that deposing him would transform the country
for good, so critics of Tony Blair tend to blame him as the sole villain in the
sorry tale of our futile involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. But remember
how the self-proclaimed “heir to Blair”, David Cameron casually sent the RAF to
bomb Libya in 2011 without a
thought for the morrow, despite the
experience of Iraq
since 2003. Let’s face it, the same mindset which saw a majority of MPs vote
for war in Iraq in 2003, now
sits in a majority in Westminster
today.
Until now Tony Blair has refused to apologise for anything
which went wrong in Iraq, but it is much worse that the House of Commons is
still teeming with MPs, on both sides, who have learned nothing from it. Do
those who want to bomb Syria
as a panacea for the problems caused by invading Iraq really know what will come
next?
The Blairites blithely insist that there was no alternative
then or now to their failure to consider what might go wrong and that anyone
who doubts that theirs was the only choice are friends of dictators like Saddam,
Gaddafi or Assad. Complacent Blairites never have to face the brutal reality
that life in the terrifying uncertainty of civil war is far worse than under a
dictatorship. Instead in the USA
as well as the UK , promotion
and prosperity are the wages of waging dead-end wars in the Middle
East .
The Blairite default position of bomb now and improvise if
things go wrong compares badly with how past leaders dealt with their policies
going pear-shaped. In 1997, many
commentators compared the photogenic Blair with his smart wife and young
children with Jack Kennedy entering the White House in 1961. But no-one can
imagine Blair responding to the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs with President
Kennedy’s frank admission, “Not only were our facts in error, but our policy
was wrong because the premises on which it was built were wrong.” Over Iraq , Blair
blames his subordinates for briefing him wrong: it wasn’t his job to get the
facts right, merely to spout spurious justifications on the basis of “the
intelligence crossing my desk.”
Like many neo-conservatives, Tony Blair like to posture as a
Churchillian figure who would never had truck with appeasement. Could there be
a sharper contrast than that between “Bombs Away Blair” and Neville
Chamberlain? Chamberlain’s appeasement is universally condemned today as the
folly it was, but, however flawed his foreign policy, unlike Blair Chamberlain
prepared for the worst even while dealing with Hitler. His fiercest critic,
Winston Churchill, noted that Chamberlain had drafted detailed plans to
mobilise Britain ’s
economy for war, to prepare evacuation and rationing if – when - Hitler cheated
him. Without Chamberlain, there would have been war anyway, but Britain would have been even worse prepared for it
than was the case. Blair sat on his sofa in 10 Downing St. preening himself as the
new Churchill but failed to dictate a memo about what to do after his
anticipated triumph brought British troops back to the Euphrates .
(Of course, as briefers of Blair admitted, the Prime Minister clearly did not
know that British troops had been in Iraq
after the First World War until well into his war preparations, but then in
2001 he knew not that he was embarking on Britain ’s Fourth Afghan War!)
Marching into Iraq
in 2003, or parachuting into Helmand three
years later, Blair operated on the principle that our forces would be welcomed.
There would be no need to fire a shot. Muslim tribes would settle down to adopt
a New Labour lifestyle overnight.
Past prime ministers were voracious readers of history.
Think of Churchill living a soldier’s life on the North-West Frontier and
reading by candlelight as much as he could in that university of life. That
kind of self-education taught past prime ministers how to avoid old mistakes –
even if they couldn’t avoid new ones. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron give
the strong impression that their lives were shaped by a Harry Potter version of
Britain .
Instead of being places of learning and inquiry, Oxford ,
like Eton and Fettes, was just a stepping
stone on that effortless path to the top. Reality, past or present, plays little part in
their showman’s version of history. Both have claimed that in 1940 the USA was
fighting on our side during the Battle of Britain! A Disney version of history
clutters their minds with sound-bites of battles fought on the back-lot at Hollywood . People used to
sneer at the Prince Regent’s account of how
he led cavalry charges at Waterloo ,
but Blairite virtual reality – with only the squaddies and towel-heads shedding
actual blood – is loyally repeated by BBC and SKY News.
Since their careers were facilitated with magical ease as
they rose to the top, perhaps Blair and Cameron should be forgiven for assuming
that their touch, like that of medieval monarchs, could heal the sick and transform
every problem they handle. Their good intentions are so self-evident that any
doubt is malign or mischievous. Words of warning are insults.
How could anyone have thought that the only alternative to
the dictatorships of Saddam or Gaddafi would be democracy? Shouldn’t chaos have
been on their radars?
Even if chaos had been avoided why should anyone have
expected thanks from Iraqis or Afghans for our intervention. Stendhal, who was a
soldier in France ’s
revolutionary armies, noted with a novelist’s eye how bitterly humiliating
Italians found being liberated by foreigners.
Think of General de Gaulle’s taunting of the British and
Americans after the war. He knew that France ’s
liberation in 1944 was due to the “Anglo-Saxons”, so he spent the next
twenty-five years trying to expunge that shameful dependency by twisting our
tails whenever he could just to prove France was truly independent – even
of its liberators.
Many Iraqis or Libyans had to die so a Blair or a Cameron
could pose briefly before a carefully selected adoring audience of locals singing
exactly the same songs of praise with which they had adored yesterday’s fallen dictators.
Little wonder that resentment boiled up among the rest of the population.
Should we be surprised that after Blair’s admission that he
had helped spark the rise of the murderous IS cult tearing Iraq apart that so many Iraqis today are making
eyes at Russia
that did nothing to topple Saddam? After all, the Russians also didn’t create
the security vacuum into which fanatics like IS stepped. With local rulers
either blaming us for spawning IS or actually funding and arming the radical
jihadis, the situation is running out of control for us in the West.
An apology from Tony Blair won’t unmake the mistakes since
2003. Worse still it may act as an alibi for carrying on with the same policies
only without him at the helm of state. As the sinister hand of IS spreads into
suburban Britain from the anarchy spawned by intervention in Iraq, parliament
needs to think more about defending us at home rather than hoping that a
re-play intervention abroad will produce a better result.
Maybe it no longer matters if Tony Blair is never going to
learn from the terrible human costs of wars blithely entered into. But David
Cameron has paid no political price for helping to plunge Libya into
chaos. Luckily, so far no British dead there. But what about sending our Tornadoes
tearing away into Syria ?
Has a House of Commons which forgets that it voted to invade Iraq in 2003 and which had no problems imploding Libya , really escaped from the
shadow of Tony Blair? It is not only the PM of the day who should examine his
conscience and try to learn lessons. A lot of MPs need to think before they
vote to bomb. Even a good cause needs more than a knee-jerk reaction. From Afghanistan in 2001 via Iraq and Libya , our rulers have failed to
ask what comes next – and then feign innocent surprise when it’s chaos.
One truth Tony Blair likes
to repeat is how interconnected the world had become and he insists
there is no escape from globalism. But
by creating conditions for the log-rolling growth of global jihadi terrorism,
his legacy has left us at home and the world at large in a daily more dangerous
place.
