I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad. He wrote an essay on his website last Sunday (reproduced in the Telegraph) that struck me as unhinged in its refusal to face facts. In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq, he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help. He said that the allied invasion of 2003 was in no way responsible for the present nightmare — in which Al Qaida has taken control of a huge chunk of the country and is beheading and torturing Shiites, women, Christians and anyone else who falls foul of its ghastly medieval agenda. Blair now believes that all this was “always, repeat always” going to happen.
He tells us that Saddam Hussain was inevitably going to be toppled in a revolution, to be followed by a protracted and vicious religious civil war and that therefore Britain (and more especially he) does not need to blame itself for its role in the catastrophe. As an attempt to rewrite history, this is frankly emetic.
The reality is that before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was no Al Qaida presence in that country, none at all. Saddam was a ruthless Baathist tyrant who treated his population with appalling brutality. But he did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and he did not possess weapons of mass destruction. The truth is that the West has destroyed the institutions of authority in Iraq without having the foggiest idea what would come next.
As one senior British general once put it to me: “We snipped the spinal cord” without any plan to replace it. There are more than 100,000 dead Iraqis who would be alive today if we had not gone in and created the conditions for such a conflict, to say nothing of the troops from America, Britain and other countries who have lost their lives in the shambles. That is the truth and it is time Blair accepted it. When Britain voted for that war — and I did, too — I did so with what now looks like the hopelessly naive assumption that the British and American governments had a plan for the aftermath; that there was a government waiting in the wings; that civic institutions would be preserved and carried on in the post-Saddam era.
In other words, I wanted to get rid of Saddam and I fondly imagined that there would be a plan for the transition — as there was, say, with Germany in 1945, where the basic and essential machinery of government was continued, despite the programme of de-Nazification.
I felt so nervous (and so guilty) about this assumption, that I went to Baghdad in the week after the fall of Saddam, to see if I was right. I was not. I remember vividly the mystification on the face of a tall, grey-haired CIA man in his 50s, wearing a helmet and body armour, whom I found in one of the government ministries. He and I were alone among a thousand empty offices. The entire civil service had fled; the army was disintegrated. He was hoping to find someone to carry on the business of government — law and order, infrastructure, tax collection, that kind of thing. The days were passing; the city was being looted; no one was showing up for work.
Britain has utterly blitzed the power centres of Iraq with no credible plan for the next stage — and frankly, yes, I do blame George W. Bush and Blair for their unbelievable arrogance in thinking it would work. As time has gone by, I am afraid I have become more and more cynical about the venture. It looks to me as though the Americans were motivated by a general strategic desire to control one of the biggest oil exporters in the world, as well as to remove Saddam, an unpleasant pest who had earlier attempted to murder the elder Bush.
Blair went in fundamentally because he (rightly) thought it was in Britain’s long-term interest to be closely allied with America, and also, alas, because he instinctively understood how war helps to magnify a politician. War gives leaders a grandeur that they may not otherwise possess. If you hanker after Churchillian or Thatcherian charisma, there is nothing like a victorious war. The Iraq war was a tragic mistake; and by refusing to accept this, Blair is now undermining the very cause he advocates — the possibility of serious and effective intervention. Blair’s argument (if that is the word for his chain of bonkers assertions) is that Britain was right in 2003 and that it would be right to intervene again.
Many rightly recoil from that logic. It is surely obvious that the 2003 invasion was a misbegotten folly. But that does not necessarily mean — as many are now concluding — that all intervention is always and everywhere wrong in principle and that Britain should avoid foreign entanglements of all kinds.
Yes, Britain helped cause the disaster in Iraq; but that does not mean it is incapable of trying to make some amends. It may be that there are specific and targeted things Britain can do — and, morally, perhaps should do — to help protect the people of Iraq from terrorism (to say nothing of Syria, where 100,000 people have died in the past three years). Britain is still a power on the United Nations Security Council. Britain spends £34 billion a year on defence. It has fantastic Armed Services full of young, optimistic and confident men and women who are doing a lot of good — in spite of the cotton-wool legislation that now surrounds them — in dangerous places across the world.
It would be wrong and self-defeating to conclude that because Britain was wrong over Iraq, it must always be wrong to try to make the world a better place. However, Britain cannot make this case — for an active Britain that is engaged with the world — unless it is at least honest about its failures. Somebody needs to get on to Blair and tell him to put a sock in it — or at least to accept the reality of the disaster he helped engender. Then he may be worth hearing. The truth shall set you free, Tony.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2014
Boris Johnson is the Mayor of London.
