Tony Blair will forever be remembered for Iraq. Not for peace in Northern Ireland or the
minimum wage, nor the Human Rights Act or devolution to Scotland and Wales. Blair does little to help this: he rarely
comments on political developments in the UK, but always does the rounds of the
television studios when questions of UK military intervention are raised.
And Tony Blair’s Iraq legacy is a dreadful one. It is rightly remembered as one of the worst
foreign policy disasters in British history.
Millions who marched against the war understood the situation far better
than the Prime Minister and those close to him.
It was a disaster that cost at least 100,000 lives, two thirds of whom
were civilians.
The arguments that Blair made in 2002 and 2003, along with
his colleagues in Washington, collapsed one by one. There were no weapons of mass destruction and
there was no link between the Iraqi regime and 9/11 or Al Qaeda. The last argument – one that was not central
to the case for war at the time – was the need to remove Saddam Hussain, a
brutal dictator. Anti-war voices rightly
pointed to the dictators and repressive regimes that Bush and Blair not only
tolerated but even actively supported.
But the defence against that was that this was “whataboutery” – it wasn’t
an argument against removing Saddam. So
the final refuge of the dinted and damaged pro-war case was that, but for the
intervention, Saddam would have remained in power.
Tony Blair’s latest written intervention in the Iraq crisis
unwittingly erodes that case. The
current crisis in Iraq sees a jihadist group (ISIS), battle-hardened in the Syrian
civil war, approaching Baghdad, taking northern cities and the Iraq army
deserting its posts and its US and UK-funded equipment. There are very disturbing reports of
massacres. Blair thinks it “bizarre” and
“wilful” that people should blame the 2003 invasion for this situation. He correctly identifies other sources of the
crisis (the Syrian crisis and al-Maliki’s sectarianism) though he chooses to
ignore any western culpability in either.
But he also chooses to point out that Iraq would be no more stable today had
they not intervened in 2003 and therefore the current crisis might still have
happened. It is dangerous to indulge in
counter-factuals, but I suspect he is probably right. He correctly points to the extraordinary
events of the Arab Spring. But in doing
so, Blair raises the question of whether Saddam could have been removed by the
Iraqi people, without intervention. At
the very least it undermines the argument that the only way there could have
been change in the Iraqi regime was the path taken in 2003.
More problematic, it is no longer at all clear which side
Blair would have chosen in such a situation.
His position on the Arab Spring is, at best, ambiguous. While last summer, Blair backed air strikes
against the Syrian regime, he now appears to back air strikes against elements
of the Syrian opposition and, back in April, proposed a Syrian settlement that
would leave Assad in power. Furthermore,
in the same speech he gave full support to the military coup in Egypt. While
conceding that he “strongly disagreed” with the mass death sentences handed out
to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, he urged people to “show sensitivity” to
the regime.
In the light of this, it is darkly ironic that Blair
(correctly) notes the “inconsistency” of recent UK policy towards the Middle
East. It is hard to escape the
conclusion that – in any given situation – Blair would have made his decisions
about the future of Saddam’s regime in terms of his impression of British (or,
more accurately, western capitalist) geopolitical interest, not on the basis of
the rights of the Iraqi people or even a democratic mandate. If Saddam was president today, it is entirely believable
that Blair would be calling for western intervention to protect his
regime. This is the last nail in the
coffin of the “regime change” case for war.
Where I am sure we all agree with Blair is that what happens
now is more important than “differences of the past”, but unless we can learn
from the mistakes of the past we will get it wrong again. Tony Blair seems incapable of learning from
the past, he simply wants to try and rewrite it in order to recast himself as
hero rather than villain. Discussions about what is happening in Iraq are urgently needed but a period of silence from Tony Blair would be welcome.
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