WASHINGTON – Even in the thick of a historical tragedy, Tony Blair never seemed like a Shakespearean character.
He’s too rabbity
brisk, too doggedly modern. The most proficient spinner since
Rumpelstiltskin lacks introspection. The self-described “manipulator”
is still in denial about being manipulated.
The Economist’s
review of “A Journey,” the new autobiography of the former British
prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and
more like “the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon.”
Yet in the section
on Iraq, Blair loses his CEO fluency and engages in tortured arguments,
including one on how many people really died in the war, and does a
Shylock lament.
He says he does not
regret serving as the voice for W’s gut when the inexperienced American
princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for “the nightmare that
unfolded” – giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib
promises – Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.
“Do they really
suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fibre of my
being the loss of those who died?” he asks of his critics.
In Iraq, marking
the transition to the “post-combat mission” for American troops,
Defence Secretary Robert Gates was eloquent with an economy of words.
Asked by a reporter
if Iraq would have to be a democratic state for the war to benefit U.S.
national security, Gates cut to core: “The problem with this war for, I
think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going
to war proved not to be valid – that is, Saddam having weapons of mass
destruction.” He added, candidly: “It will always be clouded by how it
began.”
Iraq will be “a
work in progress for a long time,” Gates said, and, “how it all weighs
in the balance over time, I think remains to be seen.”
Blair writes that
he thought he was right and that he and W rid the world of a tyrant.
But he winds up with a bitter anecdote: “I still keep in my desk a
letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began. She
told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced
having fallen foul of Saddam’s son. She begged me to act. After the
fall of Saddam she returned to Iraq. She was murdered by sectarians a
few months later. What would she say to me now?”
There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.
He concedes that
the invasion of Iraq was more about symbols than immediate security,
about sending “a message of total clarity to the world,” after 9/11,
that defying the will of the international community would no longer be
tolerated.
In other words,
Osama bin Laden had emasculated America, and America had to hit back,
and did so against a country that had nothing to do with him or 9/11.
Blair did not want
to be W’s peripheral poodle. He wanted to “stand tall internationally”
with Britain’s main ally and not “wet our knickers,” to use a Blair
phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).
Blair fantasized
that Saddam might someday give WMD to terrorists. This, even though the
dictator didn’t like terrorists because they were impossible to
control, and even though, as Blair admits, (the secular) Saddam and
(the fundamentalist) Osama were on opposite sides. (When Saudi Arabia
felt threatened by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Osama offered to fight
the Iraqi dictator.)
It is criminally
naive, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W
muffed the post war planning because they never perceived what Blair
now acknowledges as “the true threat”: Outside interference by al-Qaida
and Iran. So the reasoning of the man known in England as Phony Tony or
Bliar amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq because Saddam could
hypothetically hook up with al-Qaida. But they didn’t properly prepare
for the insurgency because they knew that Saddam had no link to
al-Qaida.
He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience for “namby-pamby peacenikery.”
“He would have
worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran,” as well as
“Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair writes of Cheney, adding: “He was for
hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you,
so change or be changed.”
The religious Blair
fancied himself a conviction politician who had intervened for good in
Kosovo and Sierra Leone and would do so again in Iraq. So he did not,
as he said others did, “reach for the garlic and crucifixes” when Dick
hatched his sulfurous schemes.
If he had
challenged W and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might have
stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a
weaker Iraq that is no longer a counterweight to Iran – which actually
is a nuclear threat – and that seems doomed to be run one day by
another brutal strongman.
Maybe Blair should
have realized the destructive Oedipal path W was on. At their first
meeting at Camp David, W screened “Meet the Parents.”
© 2010 New York Times News Service
