MANY OF US have long had our suspicions, but it’s useful – just for the historical record – to have them finally confirmed: Tony Blair is indeed among the most ruthlessly Machiavellian national leaders produced by an English-speaking liberal democracy since the second world war. In an era that gave us the likes of Anthony Eden, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, John Howard and Tony’s own crony, George W. Bush, to suggest as much is to pay a back-handed tribute of the first order. It’s by no means unfitting that Blair’s only supporter among the European leaders in his recent quest to become president of the European Union – apart from Gordon Brown, of course – was Silvio Berlusconi. That a man such as Blair was in office for a decade provides a large part of the answer to the riddle of how British democracy has reached its current parlous state.
“If you had known then that there were no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction], would you still have gone on?” he was asked in a BBC interview that has just been screened here in Britain. The interviewer was Fern Britton, a former daytime TV presenter; the interview was one of a four-part series of Sunday morning religious chat shows screening in the lead-up to Christmas. (I caught a few minutes of the one on Dolly Parton a couple of weeks ago. After the inevitable “Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink” reference to Dolly’s “assets” in an opening sequence, Britton asked how Dolly managed to reconcile her Christian faith with her sexy image? Dolly thought God really wanted us all to have fun. I turned it over to Friends re-runs at that point.)
It would be fair to say that the interview with Blair was not intended as political hard-ball. Yet Britton certainly got results when, in reply to some astute questioning, Blair confirmed that it would still have been right to remove Saddam Hussein if he had known there were no weapons, and continued: “I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.” It’s worth pausing over this line. The reasons that Blair gave in public for the invasion of Iraq are now admitted to be nothing more than a convenient pretext for action that his government took for other reasons again: because he believed Saddam Hussein a danger to the whole region. Blair wanted to get rid of Saddam but lacked the honesty and courage to advocate this course openly, on the humanitarian and security grounds that he clearly believes warranted the dictator’s removal. He wanted to give the actions of the British government a spurious claim to legality, a cloak of United Nations legitimacy that the UN itself was, in the end, unwilling to provide. And if the rationalisation he offered the British public back in 2003 had not been able to do the job required of it at the time, the implication is that he would simply have cooked up some other story. Whether or not it happened to be a fib is a secondary consideration; so long as it achieved the desired result.
Is it any wonder that respect for elected leaders is at such a low ebb in this country? This is a man so thoroughly entangled in a self-spun web of mendacity that he now not only takes his own deceit and hypocrisy for granted, but expects that others will do the same. The difference between a lie and the truth is for Blair a mere technicality; it’s the end that really matters. There was not a word in any of this about the right of citizens to expect their leaders to speak truthfully, in order that they might engage in the political process as well-informed people embedded in relationships based on trust. No, it’s doing what you believe to be “right” that really matters, and you tell the public what will get you the result you want. One might almost call it honesty – except that the halting manner in which Blair delivered his already much-quoted lines would suggest he half-understands just how wicked and unscrupulous this approach to political leadership actually is. It made for excruciating viewing; like watching a man surrender the remaining slivers of a personal integrity in whose substance most people stopped believing long ago.
Part of the background to this disarming “honesty” – if that’s the word for it – is the Chilcot Inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war, which has been sitting for a fortnight, and before which he will eventually appear. Sir John Chilcot, the chairman, announced in his opening statement that “we are not a court or an inquest or a statutory inquiry... No one is on trial. We cannot determine guilt or innocence. Only a court can do that.” In one sense, Sir John is quite correct. No one is under oath, and Gordon Brown wanted the hearings to be held out of the public eye. The chairman at least insisted on an open inquiry.
But one critic of the hearings so far held – a diplomat and Iraq expert who resigned over the decision to invade – has described them as “like a fireside chat at a Pall Mall club.” There have been claims that the questioning has lacked both vigour and rigour. The panel’s composition also attracted criticism from the outset. Some pointed to the lack of military and legal expertise among members. Some wondered why two out of five members were historians. One of them, Sir Martin Gilbert, suggested in 2004 that Bush and Blair might one day be regarded in a similar light to Churchill and Roosevelt. (Sir Martin might be correct, but revisionist historians would still need to do a lot more hard demolition work on the reputations of both second world war leaders.) The inclusion of Sir Lawrence Freedman (a professor of war studies in my own university) was questioned on the grounds of his alleged role as architect of the Blairite doctrine of humanitarian military intervention.
But seen from another perspective, the Iraq inquiry is indeed a trial. The aggressors in this war, Blair included, will never be taken to court. For this reason alone, the Chilcot inquiry is very much about Tony Blair and, for the anti-war movement, angry and grieving families, and disgruntled former civil servants who opposed the war, it is their day in court. And even if the inquiry is not uncovering exciting new revelations, there is a sense in which it is providing a forum for the presentation of details previously known but lost in the fog of everyday political debate in a country with God-knows-how-many media outlets.
It’s early days yet, but a coherent picture is emerging. Although Saddam Hussein was regarded as threatening in early 2001, and there was discussion among both the British and Americans about how regime change might be effected, there was no serious consideration given to military force. But 9/11 shifted the balance of power within the US administration in favour of hawks willing to use force to get rid of Saddam. During 2002, the personal relationship between Bush and Blair kicked in, and from then on Britain might as well have been an American client state so far as both the Iraq war and postwar planning were concerned. A position that was treated before 9/11 as the preserve of a radical right-wing fringe by British officialdom – and indeed within the State Department of the United States – was now supported by a Labour prime minister with considerable rhetorical and political gifts and no scruples at all about putting them to work for what was “right.”
In some respects it really shouldn’t be such a surprise that Blair was willing to countenance war as something other than a last resort. Like Reagan, Thatcher and the younger presidential Bush, he sees the international order as based on a struggle between good and evil in which we all have a clear choice of joining one side or the other. More seriously, I think, he led a cabinet that, when it came to office in 1997, was the first since the second world war that contained not a single minister who had ever served in the military. In a recent sermon during an Iraq War memorial service, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, drew attention to the fact that those who decided for war in 2003 were of a generation – his own generation – that had come to doubt that countries would again have to fight a conventional war, and were therefore poorly qualified to understand its likely price. Blair, in the congregation, looked suitably haunted.
By way of contrast, almost half of Margaret Thatcher’s first cabinet fought in the second world war. Many of these men, some of them D-Day veterans, were the most hesitant when the Falklands war loomed in 1982; they well knew what such an enterprise might cost. A Blair (or a Bush or Howard) can take his country to war with no first-hand knowledge of this kind, nor any real prospect that they or their families will be directly affected by their decision-making. Presidents and prime ministers do not send their children off to battle these days. What could Blair really say when, at a recent memorial service, a grieving father refused to shake his hand because it had blood on it? I feel your pain? Even he had the grace, in the interview with Britton, to acknowledge that his own suffering over the war is much less acute than that of grieving families.
All the same, the ex-prime minister simply no longer belongs to the same moral community as the families of those who’ve lost loved ones in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He can move on to the lucrative world of the company boardroom, the paid lecture and the book advance – oh, and Middle East peace-making and the promotion of religious tolerance and all sorts of other good works – while pretending to be a world statesman of towering sagacity. Grieving families, by way of contrast, will live with the scars of loss for the rest of their lives. I do not mean to suggest that the Iraq war was undertaken without a great deal of personal anguish on the part of Blair or, for that matter, other supporters of the war within the government. No doubt, in due course, we’ll have a better idea of just how much.
It’s also easy enough to believe even the former prime minister when he tells us that his religious faith, while not affecting his decision to take the country to war, nonetheless reinforced him in his willingness to hold to the decision once made. But that doesn’t lighten the consequences of his behaviour for British politics. It’s one of the avowed purposes of the Chilcot inquiry to see whether lessons can be learned for the future from Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War. What the inquiry will not do is assess how much damage this war has done to the fabric of democracy in this country. It will not determine just how much public trust it has eroded, nor will it offer any solutions to the re-building of public confidence in politicians’ honesty. The Iraq inquiry cannot bear the weight demanded of a truth and reconciliation commission, not least because Tony Blair believes he has nothing for which to apologise. •
