Perfect Excuse
Now here's something you don't come across every day - a thoughtful, rational and balanced opinion piece about the former Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair written by
someone who clearly regards himself as a political opponent.
The 'baying mob' that jumps into action every time Tony Blair sets out his views or tries to make a public appearance somewhere is a disgrace if you ask me and as Charles Moore says, the decision to invade Iraq was a collective one and any MP who says they were duped at the time is simply lying through their teeth.
How Tony Blair made bedfellows of Deirdre Spart and Col Blimp
Critics of the former prime minister are wrong when it comes to the subject of Muslim extremism
Tony Blair says it was not the American-British overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 that caused the mayhem today Photo: Geoff Pugh/The Telegraph
By Charles Moore - The Telgraph
I never voted for Tony Blair. I have expended tens of thousands of words criticising Tony Blair. I have attacked his superficiality, Europhilia, political correctness, messianism, evasiveness and even his dress-sense. When I edited this newspaper, and the Tories were prostrated by electoral defeat, The Daily Telegraph was so relentless in its resistance to Tony Blair that people sometimes described it as “the only Opposition”. To this day, in the corner of our kitchen stands a placard drawn by our then eight-year-old son and borne by him at the Countryside March of 1998. It depicts Tony grinning unpleasantly and says, in a childish hand, “Tony Blair doesn’t care”.
But perhaps because I am one of those who never loved Mr Blair, I do not hate him. I was unseduced, and therefore did not feel betrayed later on. This makes it easier to see that he is now being treated with a venomous, un-British unfairness.
A week ago, Mr Blair published online, in the light of the latest disaster in Iraq, an essay about the state of the Middle East. He ventured to suggest that it was not the American-British overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 that had caused the mayhem today. He tried to identify the wider and deeper causes of what he sees as an inevitable revolution across the region. He gently reminded us of the plain chronological fact that the Twin Towers in New York were hit by murderous hate before America and Britain invaded Iraq, not the other way round. We had not poked the hornet’s nest: the hornets had flown at us.
How the virtual mob howled. Blair had blood on his hands; he was the cause of all the suffering, a liar, a warmongering “Crusader”. In a strange mixture of populism and constitutional scholasticism, the Father of the House, Sir Peter Tapsell, even called for Mr Blair to be impeached.
No doubt Sir John Chilcot, when we are finally allowed to know most of his thoughts, will have some hard things to say about Mr Blair and the Iraq war. Probably Mr Blair would have done better, years ago, to admit his part in major errors in the aftermath of military victory – the lack of enough troops to guarantee security, the failure to rebuild civil society. And although he did not “take us to war on the basis of a lie” – like virtually everyone in the West, pro- or anti-invasion, Mr Blair genuinely thought that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction – he should have conceded that his famous intelligence dossiers were substandard.
But there is a crazy vanity, just like that of which Mr Blair himself is accused, in thinking that any modern British prime minister could possibly be the Great Satan (or even the Little Satan) in all of this. If we imagine that British policy is capable of such power, we really are stuck in the old imperial mindset which thinks the only real actors in events are white men. In the Twenties, our Colonial Secretary (one Winston Churchill) was able to create the new nation of Iraq by drawing lines on a map. Mr Blair must feel quite flattered to be considered comparably important.
Actually, there is also something worse than vanity involved. This assault on Mr Blair resembles what happens in dictatorships after a coup. The actions of the previous regime are treated as criminal. The ex-leaders are tried, maimed and shamed. That is not how a free country should behave. When Britain went to war in March 2003, it did so after extensive media and parliamentary debates which Mr Blair never shirked. The invasion was endorsed by votes in the House of Commons, supported by most of Labour and most Conservatives. Any legislator who later says he was hoodwinked into voting the way he did is only making himself look ridiculous.
Why does this weird alliance of Left and Right – Clare Short, the Stop the War Coalition, The Guardian, the BBC, some old soldiers, the Daily Mail, some of the noisier Tory backbenchers, much of Ukip and even, I regret to say, Boris Johnson – get up such a noise? Presumably several emotions are involved, including the disappointment of the jilted lover, the rage of the bested opponent and the scramble for votes. But the biggest single explanation is that blaming Mr Blair is the perfect excuse.
It is perfect for the current generation of politicians who refuse to think about these matters. If it is all Tony Blair’s fault, it is not theirs. If invading Iraq was what made everything go wrong, the answer is simply not to invade anything ever again.
It is the perfect excuse for the Left, because it fits their view that the West is always in the wrong. It performs a comparable service for the isolationist Right. If you believe, like Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew, that “abroad is utterly bloody and all foreigners are thieves”, you want Mr Blair’s intervention to have proved your case. Thus does Deirdre Spart climb into bed with Colonel Blimp.
But consider the core of Mr Blair’s argument. He says that the Middle East suffers from “bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion”. Muslim extremism is the enemy. At the end of his memoirs, A Journey, Mr Blair notes Barack Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, about the West’s relation with Islam. He applauds the president’s declaration of respect for the religion, but suggests he was not precise enough about what should be respected and what shouldn’t. Blair defines the problem thus: “The extremists are small in number, but their narrative – which sees Islam as the victim of a scornful West externally, and an insufficiently religious leadership internally – has a far bigger hold.”
So we could not ignore the problem even if we never needed another barrel of oil out of the whole region. The Islamist narrative spreads networks of hatred which inspire murder and can undermine whole Muslim countries. They can threaten even ours. Islamism is a thriving import-export business, with bustling sales activity in many British cities. At present, about 400 British jihadis are thought to be active in Syria and Iraq. The West needs to do and say more than “We’ll be nice to you, so please be nice to us.” Does it make one a raving neo-con if one thinks that Mr Blair is right about this?
It is a pretty wretched reflection on our current politics that Mr Blair is the best known advocate for this cause. After all, he is tainted by severe policy failures. His portfolio career, in which he tries to solve the Middle East and unite all religions, while collecting large sums of money from unappetising regimes, is enough to make a grand ayatollah roll on the floor laughing. Current leaders who essentially agree with him on Islamism – such as David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove – find his endorsement politically difficult.
But Tony Blair did and does see how the world is changing, faster than others do. He is a statesman with years of relevant experience who has, I suspect, learnt more from what went wrong than he likes to say in public. He should be listened to and debated with. It is a lazy, rotten public culture in which he is libelled and insulted instead.
I note, in passing, that the general public have a better reading of Mr Blair than those who fill the airwaves and blogosphere. A poll last week reported that support for him as Labour leader, seven years after he left office, outnumbers that for Ed Miliband by two to one. I am not saying “Come back, Tony, all is forgiven”. But I am saying that his absence still leaves a big gap.
