Take real responsibility for once, Mr Blair
Mr Blair again calls for support for a policy of keeping British troops in Iraq.
There is room for legitimate debate regarding whether pulling out of Iraq now would be the best policy. However, Blair muddies this debate by his continued refusal to take responsibility for the original invasion in the proper manner, by resigning.
It is my belief that one reason (perhaps the "real reason") he is determined to stay there is that pulling out would represent the final admission that his personal project of seeking to achieve political ends in Iraq by the use of military force was a disastrous failure. I believe that the consequent deaths of British military men, and all the other costs to Britain of remaining there, are "a price worth paying", for him, to postpone this admission. Whether he is consciously aware of this motivation or not, I have little doubt it is there. He clearly has few scruples about killing innocent people in order to achieve personal goals, since he was willing to use war as a tool of policy in the first place.
Whether I am correct in this belief or not (and assessments of personal motivations must always ultimately be speculative), the fact that this possibility exists explains the deep wisdom of the now old-fashioned view that politicians responsible for contentious decisions which are widely perceived as failures, or as based upon error or deceit, should resign as a simple matter of honour.
This allows the successor to try to deal with the consequences unhampered by the suspicion that retrospective self-justification forms a large part of his motivation.
It is generally believed that Mr Blair deceived the nation regarding the reasons for attacking Iraq. If he did not deceive the nation, then the only viable alternative explanation is that he actually believed what he said at the time, which suggests monumental incompetence. I believe the former is the case, but even if it is not, if Mr Blair had any sense of personal honour or shame he would have resigned anyway when it became clear that the general belief in it cannot be shaken. Instead he has clung desperately to his position, in the hope that some sort of victory will allow him to claim personal vindication. It is at least somewhat satisfying that, by doing so, he has probably irretrievably further tarnished what remained of his own reputation and that of his party along with it.
Apart from the widespread suspicion about the reasons for attacking Iraq, it cannot be seriously disputed that the invasion of Iraq has been objectively a disaster for Britain.
We have lost over a hundred soldiers, spent millions, further damaged our international reputation by association with a US regime widely regarded as rogue and by blatantly breaching our own treaty commitment to renounce the unilateral use of force, and been complicit in an invasion which has caused tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths along with massive destruction of property and essentially destroyed the viability of Iraq as a unified state. The Iraqis will be paying the butcher's bill for our gung ho decision to resort to military force, probably for many years to come.
And all we have to show for this catalogue of disasters is the destruction of the former Iraqi regime. It is difficult to see how this is a benefit to us at all. If one adopts a hard-eyed realpolitik position, Saddam's Iraq was no real threat to us at all in 2003 (certainly less of a threat than the current and foreseeable future situations in the region). Saddam himself would eventually have been killed or overthrown or died naturally. Our interests have only been damaged by destabilising Iraq.
If one adopts a humanitarian position, there is likewise no reason to suppose that anything has been gained, unless one has a fanatic's ideological devotion to some notion of Democracy as the ultimate cure-all. It may be that Mr Blair and some of his fellow paternalists follow that particular ideology (it is widespread in the west these days, especially the US and UK). Certainly many of them claim to do so. However, there is no reason why such an absurd notion should be given credence by the sane. Iraq had a democracy in the past, and there is no reason why the current democracy should not end the same way. The current Iraqi government, maintained in partial power by US and UK guns, is sectarian and will only retain control in minority areas by the use of death squads and torture (just like Saddam). As usual, our intervention has merely switched the identities of the repressors and the repressed, but we will doubtless turn a blind eye to the ongoing repression on the basis that it is "understandable revenge". Certainly people are now being killed and tortured at far higher rates than under Saddam, except for during the periods in which he was fighting wars, civil or otherwise.
So even if there was no actual deceit in the justification for war, certainly the war itself has been an unmitigated foreign policy disaster. A leader responsible for such a disaster should resign.
There is room for legitimate debate regarding whether pulling out of Iraq now would be the best policy. However, Blair muddies this debate by his continued refusal to take responsibility for the original invasion in the proper manner, by resigning.
It is my belief that one reason (perhaps the "real reason") he is determined to stay there is that pulling out would represent the final admission that his personal project of seeking to achieve political ends in Iraq by the use of military force was a disastrous failure. I believe that the consequent deaths of British military men, and all the other costs to Britain of remaining there, are "a price worth paying", for him, to postpone this admission. Whether he is consciously aware of this motivation or not, I have little doubt it is there. He clearly has few scruples about killing innocent people in order to achieve personal goals, since he was willing to use war as a tool of policy in the first place.
Whether I am correct in this belief or not (and assessments of personal motivations must always ultimately be speculative), the fact that this possibility exists explains the deep wisdom of the now old-fashioned view that politicians responsible for contentious decisions which are widely perceived as failures, or as based upon error or deceit, should resign as a simple matter of honour.
This allows the successor to try to deal with the consequences unhampered by the suspicion that retrospective self-justification forms a large part of his motivation.
It is generally believed that Mr Blair deceived the nation regarding the reasons for attacking Iraq. If he did not deceive the nation, then the only viable alternative explanation is that he actually believed what he said at the time, which suggests monumental incompetence. I believe the former is the case, but even if it is not, if Mr Blair had any sense of personal honour or shame he would have resigned anyway when it became clear that the general belief in it cannot be shaken. Instead he has clung desperately to his position, in the hope that some sort of victory will allow him to claim personal vindication. It is at least somewhat satisfying that, by doing so, he has probably irretrievably further tarnished what remained of his own reputation and that of his party along with it.
Apart from the widespread suspicion about the reasons for attacking Iraq, it cannot be seriously disputed that the invasion of Iraq has been objectively a disaster for Britain.
We have lost over a hundred soldiers, spent millions, further damaged our international reputation by association with a US regime widely regarded as rogue and by blatantly breaching our own treaty commitment to renounce the unilateral use of force, and been complicit in an invasion which has caused tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths along with massive destruction of property and essentially destroyed the viability of Iraq as a unified state. The Iraqis will be paying the butcher's bill for our gung ho decision to resort to military force, probably for many years to come.
And all we have to show for this catalogue of disasters is the destruction of the former Iraqi regime. It is difficult to see how this is a benefit to us at all. If one adopts a hard-eyed realpolitik position, Saddam's Iraq was no real threat to us at all in 2003 (certainly less of a threat than the current and foreseeable future situations in the region). Saddam himself would eventually have been killed or overthrown or died naturally. Our interests have only been damaged by destabilising Iraq.
If one adopts a humanitarian position, there is likewise no reason to suppose that anything has been gained, unless one has a fanatic's ideological devotion to some notion of Democracy as the ultimate cure-all. It may be that Mr Blair and some of his fellow paternalists follow that particular ideology (it is widespread in the west these days, especially the US and UK). Certainly many of them claim to do so. However, there is no reason why such an absurd notion should be given credence by the sane. Iraq had a democracy in the past, and there is no reason why the current democracy should not end the same way. The current Iraqi government, maintained in partial power by US and UK guns, is sectarian and will only retain control in minority areas by the use of death squads and torture (just like Saddam). As usual, our intervention has merely switched the identities of the repressors and the repressed, but we will doubtless turn a blind eye to the ongoing repression on the basis that it is "understandable revenge". Certainly people are now being killed and tortured at far higher rates than under Saddam, except for during the periods in which he was fighting wars, civil or otherwise.
So even if there was no actual deceit in the justification for war, certainly the war itself has been an unmitigated foreign policy disaster. A leader responsible for such a disaster should resign.
posted by Randal at 4:54 AM
1 Comments:
What you say about the war in Iraq and the consequences for Iraqi and British image and influnece abroad is true. The conclusions for Blair are unavoidable - he has been a disastrous PM and a failure. But to understand his actions, one has to put them in the context of the psyche of the ruling British establishment. And in that context, the arabs, and to some extent the rest of the world, do not really matter. They are still fodder for GB - to serve QUeen and country. Anything done for this cause is justified and should be excused by, at least, the country and its allies.
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