As we can see in the picture above, Tony Blair does not look well these days. This is understandable, when you bear in mind that so many people around the world regard him as a liar and a war criminal. He is reviled as the man who, in 2003, sent British troops into Iraq in support of US President George Bush, leading to countless deaths, the destabilizing of the Middle East and the bringing of British democratic institutions into disrepute. But is this a fair picture? Well, by and large, I would say yes, but, later on, I would like to attempt a fuller explanation of his actions over a decade ago. Not by focusing upon what Blair did so much, but why he did it and what went wrong.
I am not going to quote the Chilcot report, which runs into millions of words, although here is a link to that report for those who wish to read it. Instead, for those interested, I recommend reading "Not the Chilcot Report", by Peter Oborne. This is a concise, lucid and informative account of how we went to war in 2003, and is better suited for the general reader than Chilcot's report itself. As Stop the War Coalition says:
"...its (the Chilcot report's) monumental scale makes almost certain that just a few of its contents will reach the public eye, and that much else of interest will be missed. True, academic researchers will pore over it and in due course will publish further analyses; but for most people, and for the more immediate debate over the report's relevance to current wars, that will be too late in the day"
Now, as we know, Blair has no regrets about helping to start the war in 2003, and, as Oborne says in his foreword:
"Tony Blair has consistently asserted that he did not lie in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq...he might have made mistakes...However, he has been adamant that, whatever the faults of others, he himself acted in good faith". (My italics - Blogmeister) The implication here is that he was given erroneous information by the intelligence agencies.
Oborne goes on to destroy this claim, quoting Lord Butler's 2004 report on the war as saying: "...neither the UK nor the USA had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons [weapons of mass destruction]. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that."
The whole book is a fascinating and blistering expose of the whole disastrous mess. I do not intend to summarise every chapter, but can only encourage all interested to read the book. Instead, I intend here to look at what I believe was going on in Blair's mind in the run-up to invasion. Oborne again:
"In order to claim that he was acting in good faith, defenders of Mr Blair have no choice but to concede that he also took leave of reality"
I am not aiming to defend Blair, but I intend to show that he did take leave of reality, and the way in which it happened is a warning to us all for the future.
The key questions here are, then: why did Blair join in George Bush's invasion to effect regime change in Iraq? Next, why did he ignore all warnings against getting involved in the debacle, and distort intelligence reports about Iraqi weaponry ?
The simple answer to the first question is that Blair wanted to be seen as the "best friend" to the USA after 9/11. As Blair himself said to Bush:
"We were with you at the first, we will stay with you to the last".
Blair does not seem to have bothered assessing the true reasons for Bush's desire to invade Iraq, but his statement does have some rational basis, however wrong and misguided. However, his descent into deceptiveness about the intelligence reports he was receiving, which clearly showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) requires another approach. In Oborne's words, we must: "...enter the realm of psychology rather than politics".
So, what went wrong? Well, in an earlier blog, I surmised that Bush and Blair's blotting out of warning signs about the invasion was a continuation of their religious commitment. I argued that, as Christians facing doubt, skepticism and opposition hold true to their faith, Tony and George clung to their belief that Iraq was an existential threat to the world in the face of contrary evidence. I remember watching Blair facing a TV audience of mothers in 2003, prior to the invasion, and he did not seem to be hearing them, almost as if he was catatonic. He actually said that the invasion was in line with his Christian principles. As he is now a Roman Catholic convert, I can only wonder what he tells his priest in the confessional box.
All this could be right, but there is more to it than these two points, I believe. I think we should take into account that, until Iraq, Blair had been widely regarded as a successful Prime Minister. His tremendous achievement in 1997 (with help from others) in becoming the first Labour PM since 1979, the national minimum wage, the Good Friday Agreement and humane military interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo could well have made him overconfident. Had he left office after these achievements and before the Iraq fiasco, as Oborne says, we would remember Tony Blair very differently. But, if I am right, and he felt empowered by an overweening belief in himself, this could explain his moment of hubris over Iraq.
The last factors which I think may have affected Tony Blair, and which are appropriate, given the military angle, are evident in two Allied military disasters from 1944 - Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. Market Garden was a dangerously reckless attempt by Field Marshal Montgomery, by using paratroopers, to seize and hold a bridgehead over the Rhine at Arnhem, in north-east Holland. It failed disastrously because, despite intelligence warnings that two SS Panzer divisions had moved into the vicinity of Arnhem, British military planners disregarded those reports. As Norman F. Dixon, in "The Psychology of Military Incompetence" comments: "...since these ugly facts did not accord with what had been planned they fell upon a succession of deaf ears".
One intelligence officer who showed a General aerial photos of German armour in the area was sent home on medical grounds! How similar is this to the reckless way Bush and Blair ignored contrary evidence to their spurious justifications for launching their planned invasion and its chances of success?
Prior to the launch of the German offensive against American troops in the winter of 1944, Allied intelligence received a number of warnings that would have given indication of German intentions, but ignored them, and the Battle of the Bulge began with a devastating surprise attack by the Germans. As Carlo D'Este says:
" Lulled by deception measures worthy of Operation Fortitude, the Allies, from Eisenhower on down, were convinced that German intentions were purely defensive. The Allies seemed wedded to the belief that it was Rundstedt who was making the military decisions in the west in December 1944, failing to grasp that they were not the “rational, ‘traditional’ decisions of von Rundstedt but . . . those of Hitler. The Allied High Command,” wrote French historian Jacques Nobecourt, “was indulging in wishful thinking.”
And wishful thinking, I believe, was indulged in by Bush and Blair, to such an extent that dissenting voices and truthful intelligence warnings were ignored. They made the same mistakes as the Allies made in the two examples given above, and disaster ensued in Iraq, just as it did at Arnhem and in the opening stages of the Battle of the Bulge.
But should the blame stop with Blair? Why is George Bush never pursued with the same venom? Surely Blair's advisers, which included Alistair Campbell and Jack Straw, deserve censure for not pressing upon Blair the true nature of the intelligence received? MI6 could have leaked their findings to the media, but did not. Oborne, to his credit, owns up frankly to the fact that he, and the rest of the media, did not do enough to expose Blair's deceit:
"...it was perfectly possible for an assiduous journalist at the time to have uncovered many of the lies and falsehoods being uttered by politicians and officials".
As I said, Oborne includes himself in this media failure.
If Tony Blair is a war criminal, and some say he is, he will never stand trial. He seems to have checked on this. In March, 2003, Lord Goldsmith (Attorney General) told him that the ICC (International Criminal Court) had: "...no jurisdiction over the crime of aggression and could therefore not entertain a case concerning the lawfulness of any military action".
That, perhaps, is why Blair backed the invasion of Iraq, which was an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign state that did not menace its neighbours and an invasion which was not authorized by the UN Security Council. This led to the ongoing disaster that is the Middle East today, with an estimated one million dead (so far), and a crisis of terrorism and refugees that is reaching our shores. Like Peter Oborne and millions of others, I believe that Tony Blair lied to Parliament, but it is my contention that he began by lying to himself.
I am not going to quote the Chilcot report, which runs into millions of words, although here is a link to that report for those who wish to read it. Instead, for those interested, I recommend reading "Not the Chilcot Report", by Peter Oborne. This is a concise, lucid and informative account of how we went to war in 2003, and is better suited for the general reader than Chilcot's report itself. As Stop the War Coalition says:
"...its (the Chilcot report's) monumental scale makes almost certain that just a few of its contents will reach the public eye, and that much else of interest will be missed. True, academic researchers will pore over it and in due course will publish further analyses; but for most people, and for the more immediate debate over the report's relevance to current wars, that will be too late in the day"
Now, as we know, Blair has no regrets about helping to start the war in 2003, and, as Oborne says in his foreword:
"Tony Blair has consistently asserted that he did not lie in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq...he might have made mistakes...However, he has been adamant that, whatever the faults of others, he himself acted in good faith". (My italics - Blogmeister) The implication here is that he was given erroneous information by the intelligence agencies.
Oborne goes on to destroy this claim, quoting Lord Butler's 2004 report on the war as saying: "...neither the UK nor the USA had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons [weapons of mass destruction]. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that."
The whole book is a fascinating and blistering expose of the whole disastrous mess. I do not intend to summarise every chapter, but can only encourage all interested to read the book. Instead, I intend here to look at what I believe was going on in Blair's mind in the run-up to invasion. Oborne again:
"In order to claim that he was acting in good faith, defenders of Mr Blair have no choice but to concede that he also took leave of reality"
I am not aiming to defend Blair, but I intend to show that he did take leave of reality, and the way in which it happened is a warning to us all for the future.
The key questions here are, then: why did Blair join in George Bush's invasion to effect regime change in Iraq? Next, why did he ignore all warnings against getting involved in the debacle, and distort intelligence reports about Iraqi weaponry ?
The simple answer to the first question is that Blair wanted to be seen as the "best friend" to the USA after 9/11. As Blair himself said to Bush:
"We were with you at the first, we will stay with you to the last".
Blair does not seem to have bothered assessing the true reasons for Bush's desire to invade Iraq, but his statement does have some rational basis, however wrong and misguided. However, his descent into deceptiveness about the intelligence reports he was receiving, which clearly showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) requires another approach. In Oborne's words, we must: "...enter the realm of psychology rather than politics".
So, what went wrong? Well, in an earlier blog, I surmised that Bush and Blair's blotting out of warning signs about the invasion was a continuation of their religious commitment. I argued that, as Christians facing doubt, skepticism and opposition hold true to their faith, Tony and George clung to their belief that Iraq was an existential threat to the world in the face of contrary evidence. I remember watching Blair facing a TV audience of mothers in 2003, prior to the invasion, and he did not seem to be hearing them, almost as if he was catatonic. He actually said that the invasion was in line with his Christian principles. As he is now a Roman Catholic convert, I can only wonder what he tells his priest in the confessional box.
All this could be right, but there is more to it than these two points, I believe. I think we should take into account that, until Iraq, Blair had been widely regarded as a successful Prime Minister. His tremendous achievement in 1997 (with help from others) in becoming the first Labour PM since 1979, the national minimum wage, the Good Friday Agreement and humane military interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo could well have made him overconfident. Had he left office after these achievements and before the Iraq fiasco, as Oborne says, we would remember Tony Blair very differently. But, if I am right, and he felt empowered by an overweening belief in himself, this could explain his moment of hubris over Iraq.
The last factors which I think may have affected Tony Blair, and which are appropriate, given the military angle, are evident in two Allied military disasters from 1944 - Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. Market Garden was a dangerously reckless attempt by Field Marshal Montgomery, by using paratroopers, to seize and hold a bridgehead over the Rhine at Arnhem, in north-east Holland. It failed disastrously because, despite intelligence warnings that two SS Panzer divisions had moved into the vicinity of Arnhem, British military planners disregarded those reports. As Norman F. Dixon, in "The Psychology of Military Incompetence" comments: "...since these ugly facts did not accord with what had been planned they fell upon a succession of deaf ears".
One intelligence officer who showed a General aerial photos of German armour in the area was sent home on medical grounds! How similar is this to the reckless way Bush and Blair ignored contrary evidence to their spurious justifications for launching their planned invasion and its chances of success?
Prior to the launch of the German offensive against American troops in the winter of 1944, Allied intelligence received a number of warnings that would have given indication of German intentions, but ignored them, and the Battle of the Bulge began with a devastating surprise attack by the Germans. As Carlo D'Este says:
" Lulled by deception measures worthy of Operation Fortitude, the Allies, from Eisenhower on down, were convinced that German intentions were purely defensive. The Allies seemed wedded to the belief that it was Rundstedt who was making the military decisions in the west in December 1944, failing to grasp that they were not the “rational, ‘traditional’ decisions of von Rundstedt but . . . those of Hitler. The Allied High Command,” wrote French historian Jacques Nobecourt, “was indulging in wishful thinking.”
And wishful thinking, I believe, was indulged in by Bush and Blair, to such an extent that dissenting voices and truthful intelligence warnings were ignored. They made the same mistakes as the Allies made in the two examples given above, and disaster ensued in Iraq, just as it did at Arnhem and in the opening stages of the Battle of the Bulge.
But should the blame stop with Blair? Why is George Bush never pursued with the same venom? Surely Blair's advisers, which included Alistair Campbell and Jack Straw, deserve censure for not pressing upon Blair the true nature of the intelligence received? MI6 could have leaked their findings to the media, but did not. Oborne, to his credit, owns up frankly to the fact that he, and the rest of the media, did not do enough to expose Blair's deceit:
"...it was perfectly possible for an assiduous journalist at the time to have uncovered many of the lies and falsehoods being uttered by politicians and officials".
As I said, Oborne includes himself in this media failure.
If Tony Blair is a war criminal, and some say he is, he will never stand trial. He seems to have checked on this. In March, 2003, Lord Goldsmith (Attorney General) told him that the ICC (International Criminal Court) had: "...no jurisdiction over the crime of aggression and could therefore not entertain a case concerning the lawfulness of any military action".
That, perhaps, is why Blair backed the invasion of Iraq, which was an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign state that did not menace its neighbours and an invasion which was not authorized by the UN Security Council. This led to the ongoing disaster that is the Middle East today, with an estimated one million dead (so far), and a crisis of terrorism and refugees that is reaching our shores. Like Peter Oborne and millions of others, I believe that Tony Blair lied to Parliament, but it is my contention that he began by lying to himself.
Just two points.
ReplyDeleteHe acted in good faith: Blair seems to believe that this assertion (although he states it as though it were a proven fact) of his motives excuses him from blame. It doesn't. If a surgeon amputated your leg by mistake when you'd gone in for a routine hip replacement, would you say that it's all right because he did it in good faith? No, you'd be furiously suing him for all he was worth. Blair cannot wriggle off that particular hook so easily.
Blair's Christianity: just because someone calls themselves a Christian doesn't mean they are one. Commandment six prohibits killing, and nine prohibits bearing false witness. As a result of Blair's actions, the number of deaths in Iraq alone may exceed a million. As the politician who chose to go to war, he is responsible for those people being killed. His lies about the threat from Iraq, including WMDs, constitutes bearing false witness. If he were truly a Christian, why does he think he is exempt from Jesus's injunctions to “Love your enemies” and “whoever shall strike you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also”.