The world according to Tony Blair

British prime minister during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and now envoy for the Quartet on the Middle East, Tony Blair published his memoirs earlier this month, impressing some but doubtless infuriating many others, writes David Tresilian
British Labour Party prime minister from 1997, when he won a convincing victory in elections that put an end to more than 15 years of Conservative Party rule, to 2007, when he resigned the premiership to make way for his successor Gordon Brown, Tony Blair has seemed for many observers to be a mass of contradictions.
Why was he a Labour Party prime minister at all, some British commentators have asked, when his instincts seemed to put him in the orbit of big business? How did he manage to persuade many in his own country and abroad that, unlike his Conservative Party predecessors, he was a fundamentally European politician, when his actions suggested he was even more dazzled by the United States than his predecessor Margaret Thatcher?
What happened to the so-called "ethical dimension" of British foreign policy, announced when the Labour Party took office in 1997 as a way of marking the new government out from its predecessors and altering Britain's relationship with the wider world? During Blair's time in office the familiar pattern was if anything even more deeply scored, the country following the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the latter case to the despair of its continental European partners.
Perhaps it has been people's inability to make sense of Blair's career and actions while in office that explains the striking success enjoyed by his political memoirs, entitled A Journey, which were published simultaneously in various English and foreign-language editions on 1 September.
Probably more so than those from almost any other country, British politicians almost always want to have their word to say on their actions while in office after they have left it, and Blair is no exception to this rule. What distinguishes Blair's book even from those of his predecessor Margaret Thatcher, whose several volumes of memoirs were perhaps more talked about than actually read, is its apparently characteristic insouciance and disregard for contradiction.
These are the memoirs of a "public service man," as Blair described himself in an interview with a BBC journalist when A Journey appeared, who has a genius for individual self-promotion. They are the reflections of a man who by his own account has long been motivated by a desire to work for others, with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, an organisation set up after he had left office, providing evidence of various charitable initiatives worldwide, but who has also had a keen sense of marketing and seems actually to relish his own celebrity status.
Those who admire Blair will doubtless find much to enjoy in his memoirs, which have already made it onto the bestseller lists in several countries. Those who do not admire him will find the book sometimes excruciating, possibly even embarrassing. However, those who are somewhere in the middle and are prepared to give the man the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps the majority of readers, at least in the author's native Britain -- will probably be if anything rather non-plussed by this latest installment from Blair's life journey.
While his publishers have promoted the book as containing the truth about Tony Blair, going so far as to inform potential readers that the author wrote it himself in fountain pen without the aid of ghostwriters, as if to underline its appealing, maybe even slightly old-fashioned, sincerity, in fact A Journey does not contain much that has not been heard before.
Fountain pen or not, the book is anonymously written, often reading like an extended press release from the Desk of Tony Blair. While it is full of the author's convictions, to some readers at least it may appear as being strikingly bereft of real reflection.
Nevertheless, it does contain a summary of Blair's views on both his domestic agenda and achievements, associated with the so-called "third way" that he and his party sought to introduce into British politics, and the "modernisation" of the Labour Party, turning it into "New Labour," that he and his colleagues achieved before the 1997 elections.
Of greater interest to the book's non-British readers, however, including those in the United States for whom the book can, in fact, sometimes seem to have been written, are the chapters dealing with British foreign policy during the author's time in office, notably regarding the war in Afghanistan and the decision to follow the United States into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These chapters, numbers 12 to 15, can be read independently of the rest of the book. They provide a kind of potted summary of the world according to Tony Blair.
IN THE INTRODUCTION to his book, Blair says that his aim was to write "not as a historian, but rather as a leader," emphasising "what it is like to be the human being at the centre of that history." He wrote the book thematically, rather than chronologically, he says, in order to bring out the main themes of his premiership, among them what he describes in the book's Postscript as the agenda set by "'our' type of nation: open, democratic, committed to a market economy, confident militarily (certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall), and led by the world's only superpower, the USA." Our type of nation is not afraid to be seen "projecting strength and determination abroad, not weakness or uncertainty."
One of the places where strength and determination have been projected since 2001, with outside military involvement now in its ninth year, is Afghanistan, and Blair discusses the decision to invade that country in chapter 12 of his book, entitled "9/11: Shoulder to Shoulder."
Until the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, "disputes that had seemed unconnected... [in] Kashmir, Chechnya, Algeria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon... did not appear to the eye as a single picture. After [the attacks], the clarity was plain, vivid and defining." The link was "an extreme element that professed belief in Islam," and the September 11 attacks meant that there was "no other course; no other option; no alternative path" in dealing with this element aside from a military one.
Blair reproduces a variant of the "clash of civilisations" argument familiar at the time in justifying the decision to invade Afghanistan. The "battle" was ideological, he says, "the mores and modus vivendi of religious fanaticism versus those of an enlightened, secular system of government that in the West, at least, incorporated belief in liberty, equality and democracy." The battle lines were clear. "It was war. It had to be fought and won."
Writing some years later and in the light of the on-going military operations in Afghanistan, Blair says that while the decision to "confront [this provocation] militarily... was the right choice, the costs, implications and consequences were far greater than any of us, and certainly me, could have grasped on that day." He introduces a Manichean language of good and evil, with Britain and the United States standing shoulder to shoulder on the side of good, and he does not shy away from the kind of messianic or missionary language for which he has often been pilloried.
"I thought it essential that the battle we were about to embark upon was not simply a war to punish. It had to liberate. Yes, the cause was the attack on the Twin Towers, but once the engagement began, it couldn't just be a retaliation, a reprisal, a redress of a wrong done to us. It had to be of bigger reach, intent and purpose. Precisely because this struggle was connected with an ideology that was not confined to Afghanistan -- indeed had been imported into Afghanistan -- the ambition had to be greater."
"This could not be a battle fought on the high ground -- our values versus theirs. The goal was not simply to remove the Taliban but to replace them with democracy, to rebuild the country."
Not for the first time in the book, and certainly not for the last, Blair describes his own role in international affairs, and by extension that of the country he represented, as being that of a useful fixer, a builder of coalitions, an agent that could be relied upon to drop everything in order to help further a shared agenda managed from the United States.
"I was globetrotting -- to the Middle East, Pakistan, Russia -- trying to ensure that we kept the support we had. I wrote a personal, private note to my own staff and senior officials, setting out how we needed to get all the parts of the system, ours and the Americans', better coordinated."
"I thought we had to provide a comprehensive strategy for changing the world," Blair says, and this meant personal visits to Pakistan and Russia to try to make sure that presidents Musharraf and Putin remained on board. Nevertheless, some people did not support the comprehensive strategy, and "the strength of Muslim support for the campaign started to waver. The mindset that our enemies sought desperately to impose -- namely that this was a war against a Muslim nation -- gained traction... Those elements deep within Islam that saw it as a victim reasserted themselves, questioning our motives, seizing on any language of an unfortunate nature," including George [Bush] and Silvio [Berlusconi]'s employment of the word "crusade" to describe operations in Afghanistan.
More space is given to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq in chapters 13 to 16, which deal with the run-up to the invasion, the decision to invade without the explicit authorisation of the UN Security Council in the form of a new Security Council Resolution, and the aftermath of the invasion and occupation, respectively.
As far as the run-up to the invasion is concerned, it is in his discussion of this that Blair spends most time excusing the fact that though their alleged possession by Iraq was the immediate justification for the war no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were subsequently found in the country. "I understand entirely why people take the view" that the war was unjustified, Blair writes. "The stated purpose of the conflict was to enforce UN resolutions on Saddam's WMD, and we found no WMD after taking control of the country. We thought there was an active WMD programme and there wasn't."
However, he goes on, the decision by the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq to "put such a programme into abeyance" could have been a "merely tactical decision." There could have been an intention to begin the programme again at a future date. As a result, "on the basis of what we do know now, I still believe that leaving Saddam in power was a bigger risk to our security than removing him, and that terrible though the aftermath was, the reality of Saddam and his sons in charge of Iraq would at least arguably be much worse."
"The fact is that by 2001, the existing sanctions framework [against Iraq] was disintegrating... Saddam had successfully conned people into believing sanctions were responsible for the appalling plight of his people." Moreover, while "it was true that, in certain respects, you could say that groups like al-Qaeda and regimes like that of Saddam were on opposite sides... I thought I could see something deeper, that at a certain level down beneath the surface there was an alliance taking shape between rogue states and terrorist groups."
"Was there a real risk of proliferation, not only from Iraq but elsewhere, leeching into terrorist groups which would not be averse to using WMD? I certainly thought so."
"After September 11, the thinking was this: if these terrorist groups could acquire WMD capability, would they use it? On the evidence of September 11, yes. So how do you shut the trade down? How do we send a sufficiently clear and vivid signal to nations that are developing, or might develop, such capability to desist? How do we make it indisputable that continued defiance of the will of the international community will no longer be tolerated?"
It turned out that the "clear and vivid signal" was the invasion of Iraq. "If there was a message to be sent about defiance of the international community, it should be sent to Iraq. If there was a regime whose detestable nature and penchant for conflict was clear, it was Saddam's. If there was a people in need of liberation, it was the Iraqi people."
Furthermore, Blair writes, "I also felt that the Middle East should be viewed as a region whose problems were ultimately interlinked and whose basic challenge was very simple: it was urgently in need of modernisation... I looked at the region and felt the chances of steady evolution were not good, and undoubtedly worse if Saddam remained in power. I never quite understood what the term 'neocon' really meant. To my bemusement, people would say: it means the imposition of democracy and freedom, which I thought odd as a characterisation of 'conservative'. But what it actually meant was, on analysis, was a view that evolution was impossible, that the region needed a fundamental reordering."
As had been the case during the run up to the earlier conflict in Afghanistan, Blair's contribution to this was chiefly that of helpful go-between. Others did not share Blair and Bush's views, not least Britain's most important European partners and sizeable chunks of the rest of the world. A majority of Britain's domestic population was believed to be against the war, as was indicated by huge demonstrations in London, as were sizable portions of Blair's own Labour Party. "The truth is we believed, without any doubt at all, that Saddam had an active WMD programme." The problem was that few other people did.
"For me... the prospect of a second UN resolution" explicitly authorising the invasion "was central," Blair writes, though while "of course a case could be made that a further resolution expressly authorising force was necessary... it was equally valid to argue that it wasn't; that 1441 was clear; and that if there was not in fact full compliance [on the part of Iraq], Saddam was in material breach, 678 still applied and action was lawful" even in the absence of a new Security Council Resolution.
There was thus no real need for a new Security Council Resolution, but Blair set out to obtain one anyway in the teeth of French and Russian opposition, both countries permanent members of the Security Council. The French were particularly unhelpful, and "they were clearly enjoying a new and very strong trilateral relationship between themselves, Germany and Russia."
For Blair, the failure in fact to obtain a second UN Resolution does not in any way dent his conviction that his was the right path to take. In passages meant to underline the necessarily subordinate role that should be played in world affairs by European and indeed all other nations, Blair writes, in an odd turn of phrase, that "for all its faults and the limitations natural in any entity containing humanity, America is a great and free country... [Nothing] should diminish its strength, its appeal or its essential goodness as a nation."
With strength, greatness, freedom and essential goodness on your side, how can you possibly go wrong?
BRITISH COMMENTATORS reviewing Blair's memoirs have focused on their author's failure to admit, given the disasters that subsequently enveloped the country, the possibility that he might have been mistaken about the best way of dealing with Saddam's Iraq, even as he was certainly mistaken about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. What Blair has to say in his chapter on this subject, entitled "Iraq: the Aftermath," is swiftly stated: "the point is this: we and the majority of Iraqi people wanted the same thing -- Saddam out, the country helped to its feet, then us out. And a new and representative form of government."
Of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners committed by US security personnel at Abu Ghraib and allegations made against British forces, Blair says that "it was so completely monstrously unfair that these isolated acts of misconduct completely overwhelmed the wonderful work most soldiers were doing to help Iraq and its people."
Of the disastrous reconstruction process in the country, still uncompleted, he says that "the plain fact is that with the money and effort committed, any defects would have been overcome, had the problem been administrative or bureaucratic" in nature. However, the problem lay on the Iraqi side, specifically because of the "linking up of internal dissident factions with al-Qaeda on the one hand and Iran on the other."
"The aftermath [of the invasion] was more bloody, more awful, more terrifying than anyone could have imagined," Blair writes. "The perils we anticipated did not materialise. The peril we didn't materialised with a ferocity and evil that even now shocks the senses."
"A bigger pre-planned effort and a massive civilian reconstruction programme would have filled an early vacuum. It would have been an immediate jobs programme for unemployed Iraqis. But my personal view is that it would be naïve in the extreme to believe that this in itself would have stopped the violence, the origins of which were profound and political."
Real responsibility for the failure of the reconstruction programme in Iraq, made impossible because of the violence that enveloped the country after the 2003 US-led invasion, lies with Iran. Iran introduced improvised explosive devices (IEDs) into Iraq, and "Iran was behind the training and arming of the militia."
"Suppose we had not had al-Qaeda and Iran as players in this drama [in Iraq], would it have been manageable? Without hesitation, the answer was yes. It was this external threat," represented in large part by Iran, "linking up with internal dissidents that very nearly wrecked the prospects for Iraq. They conducted this attempt at destroying a nation with a wickedness and vicious indifference to human life and human suffering that almost defies belief."
Moreover, such "agents of al-Qaeda and Iran are not confined to Iraq. Iraq became for them, and by their choice, the field of battle. Their influence is the same menace we face in Pakistan, in parts of Lebanon, in parts of Palestine, all over the Middle East and beyond it in Somalia, and even in parts of the Far East."
As many commentators have noted since Blair's book was published some weeks ago, the former British prime minister and now envoy for the Quartet on the Middle East, has been adding his voice to those in the United States and elsewhere that have been calling for action, possibly of a military nature, to be taken against Iran. "It is America today that leads the challenge to Iran and its nuclear ambitions," Blair writes in the Postscript to A Journey, designed, as he puts it, to set out his "credo" and vision of future international relations.
What a credo this turns out to be. First of all, it is one that argues for possible military action against Iran. "Let us be frank: Iran is a far more immediate threat to its Arab neighbours than it is to America. It is of course a threat to us, too, but this is partly because of what a nuclear- armed Iran would mean for the Middle East." But further action against Iran is not enough, since this would be just part of an all- encompassing, all-consuming campaign to defeat "the visible and terrifying manifestations of religious extremism."
"People say, 'How long are you seriously saying we should hold out,'" from the context apparently in Afghanistan, but Blair may be talking more globally. "If, in the 1950s, when faced with the threat of revolutionary Communism, I had asked you how long you expected us to fight it, you would have answered: as long as the threat exists. If I had said it may be for decades, you would have raised an eyebrow, as if to say: well, if the threat remains for decades, what choice have we?... That's why Iran matters. Iran with a nuclear bomb would mean others in the region acquiring the same capability: it would dramatically alter the balance of power in the region, but also within Islam."
In his memoirs' final pages, Blair addresses a message of optimism to young people, sometimes unfairly accused of having "lost their passion to do good" and being "obsessed with getting on and the latest gadget." His experience, Blair says, has been quite the opposite, and he has found in young people's commitment and altruism a powerful sign of hope.
If I were a young person reading A Journey, which of course I am not, hope and optimism would possibly be the last things I would take away from it. The author's argument for possible further western military action in the Middle East, this time against Iran, combined with his vision of a new round of global conflict on the pattern of the Cold War, this time stretching out for decades into the future, is if anything a rather depressing and frightening prospect.
Tony Blair, A Journey , London: Hutchinson, Random House, pp.718