Events | 2010.02.04
The real problem was Blair's policy towards America, not Iraq
He was not wrong about intervention. It was his political judgment that went badly awry. If only this was Chilcot\'s focus
Tony Blair does not make it easy for those who still insist on trying to judge him and his era in the round. The money has become disturbing. The lapses into solipsism, even sanctimony, strike an undignified note. And then, much more seriously, there is always Iraq.
To say Blair got the national interest wrong over Iraq, and that Iraq was the pivotal error of his premiership, is true. But to say such things now feels like weirdly perverse understatement. The level of hyperbole has been raised so high, and the level of Blair-hatred is so intense in some quarters, that anyone who says "Yes, but" about Blair and his era struggles to make themselves heard, much less have themselves taken seriously.
Yet heard we should be. And heard we probably still are – by rather more people than some may credit – the further one journeys away from medialand self-absorption and the rantings of parts of the blogosphere, I suspect. Only 29% of voters think Iraq was Blair\'s fault, said a PoliticsHome poll last night. The issue plays less in the hard-grind Britain that elected Blair and his party three times and that – who knows? – might even elect him again if it had the chance. I\'d certainly back him to give it as good a shot as the other fellow, anyway.
All of us are a mix of virtues and vices, and a lot of other stuff in-between. Blair is no different. Right now, the market is exclusively interested in his vices. Yet even on Iraq, where in the end he made a very large wrong call, the picture is more mixed than is often allowed. Listening to hours and days of the Chilcot inquiry , it is hard to recognise the totality and the nuance of these sessions in some of the later reports. Just as during the Hutton inquiry, there is a demand, often media-led, for a simplistic version of events that is simply not supported by the evidence as a whole.
This will again be true in spades tomorrow, when Blair finally comes before the Iraq inquiry. I have absolutely no inside knowledge of what Blair is going to say. But I am certain that his account will not just be an accomplished one – the concession that even his enemies allow – but also that it will be far more principled and believable than too much liberal opinion now ever pauses to acknowledge.
Blair\'s decision to invade Iraq may have been, as Elizabeth Wilmshurst put it this week, a lamentable one. The lament endures. Wilmshurst, who with Robin Cook made one of the few principled resignations on Iraq, has a right to use the word. But the invasion of Iraq was not, in principle, lamentable. Blair was right to want to stand up to Saddam Hussein. He was right to support tough action from the United Nations against Iraq. He was right to fear the dangers from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of both tyrants and terrorists. And he was right, especially in the light of the major defects of the UN – powerfully exposed in Rwanda – to argue for a wider doctrine of international intervention in catastrophic states. A lot of people will die until that idea is revived intelligently.
Where Blair\'s judgment was wrong was on two big things, both of which are more political than moral or legal. First, he was wrong to believe that all these objectives came together to justify the UK giving such priority to the kind of invasion of Iraq, carried out by the kind of US administration then in power, that was mounted in March 2003. Second, he was also wrong to allow the domestic credibility of the only British centre-left government of modern times to have ever overcome the challenge of successful re-election, to be wagered on such a manifestly divisive foreign sideshow. It bears repetition that the phrase that best encapsulates the Iraq policy is Talleyrand\'s: "It was worse than a crime. It was an error."
Instead of rehearsing who said what to whom and when over Iraq – there are surely very few significant secrets about Iraq still to be revealed – the Chilcot committee should be exploring two bigger questions with Blair and his minions. First, how and why did a centre-left British government lock itself so incautiously into such a subservient military relationship with the most rightwing, unilateralist and internationally toxic US administration in all of our lifetimes? And second, how and why was a Labour leader who had worked so hard, so seriously and so successfully to build and sustain a governing centre-left majority in Britain, so ready to squander it on a neocon adventure?
To this day, these questions are hard to answer satisfactorily. It certainly won\'t do just to dump on Blair. A full answer may start by grasping that it was Labour\'s America policy, not his Iraq policy, that was the real problem. Maybe that policy might have withstood a more statesmanlike US administration in the frenzied aftermath of 9/11. But the British political class as a whole failed to recognise that the Bush administration was something different and that, in responding to a crisis such as 9/11, it would test the traditional British embrace of the US to breaking point. For this, the collective self-interests of our diplomats, spooks and military were at least as culpable as our too-easily-impressed-by-America politicians and their greenhorn advisers.
\'I look back at what has happened to my constituency since 1997 and it really is very impressive," a veteran Labour backbencher observed to me this week. "Life there is transformed. Labour has made an incredible difference. A dozen new schools. A new hospital. Don\'t kid yourself. These things exist in large part because of Tony Blair. I\'ve always had a lot of time for him. And I still have. But it all went wrong with Iraq. Why on earth did he tie himself to Bush?" He is one of many.
In that sense, Iraq really does go to the heart of the story of the Blair government. If the MP\'s question was Chilcot\'s focus, this inquiry might really get somewhere useful. Instead, the inquiry is serving two less vaunted purposes, neither of them attractive. On the one hand it is providing an opportunity for Vicar of Bray officials in Whitehall, the foreign and security services and the military to disclaim responsibility for a policy of which many of them shared full ownership at the time. On the other, it is a chance for an angry articulate minority to rage with increasing hysteria at Blair. I hope it does not overflow today. I am dismayed by the mistakes of Iraq. But I am glad I do not live in a country that is ruled by the people who seem to want nothing more than to hang Tony Blair from Tyburn tree and hold up his severed head to the howling mob.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rica-iraq-intervention-chilcot
