Comment: Blair the eternal world policeman
Tony Blair gives his evidence to the inquiry
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By Michael Younger. |  |
Friday, 29, Jan 2010 06:52
Robust, vigorous and wholly unrepentant; Tony Blair still sees himself as the world's policeman, seven years after the invasion of Iraq. The people of Iran can sleep more soundly knowing he no longer is.
By Matthew Champion.
In the last week Sir John Chilcot's inquiry had heard a succession of former government lawyers intone that the Iraq war was an illegal conflict, raising the expectation that the man who took Britain into that war would be under pressure today.
He wasn't, and it never looked like he would be. The question of illegality of the war was brusquely passed over by Tony Blair, who hid behind the independent advice given to him to attorney general Lord Goldsmith. The panel didn't push him on the issue, a recurrent theme during a lengthy evidence session that rarely lived up to its billed expectations.
Rather than being on the defensive as all the indicators suggested he would be, Blair survived some initial nerves betrayed by a shaking hand and cracked voice to somehow turn the day into advocating an Iraq-style intervention in Iran.
Despite the Bush doctrine - pre-emptive strikes in foreign trouble spots viewed as having the potential to launch their own attacks - being profoundly illegal in international law, Blair did his best to justify it at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre.
In proof that he coordinated his testimony with former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, ex-chief of staff Jonathan Powell and then foreign secretary Jack Straw, Blair gave a lengthy discourse on the psychological impact of the September 11th attacks; something all four men agreed "changed everything".
The attackers changed the "calculus of risk" forever, making it impossible for a destiny politician such as himself and the hawkish Bush administration to avoid taking Saddam on.
Somehow Blair managed to deflect questioning about just when his commitment to Bush, a man who most Labour prime ministers would have baulked at associating them with, was made. He denied claims that military backing was "signed in blood" at the infamous Crawford meeting of April 2002; the letters he shared with Bush that would prove the issue one way or another not unlikely to ever be available to the inquiry.
Problematic questions swirling around the intelligence and the way in which it was presented to parliament and the British public never materialised for Blair, who somehow dissected the entire issue by focusing on the decision he knew he would have to make and the judgment it would be based on.
There is no doubt that the UK was more inclined to the United Nations route, but ultimately both Bush and Blair were adamant that Saddam was a threat to world peace and had to be removed - and no intelligence reports or legal concerns could stop them in that respect.
Blair knows full well that his role in history is still unclear, and it is evident that by sticking to his guns today he hopes the revisionist approach will bear in mind the crimes that Saddam committed against his own people and the incomparable impact that the 9/11 attacks had upon world leaders.
It is also quite clear now that accusations of Blair being Bush's poodle were false; he wanted Saddam out as much as the US president.
For Blair's critics today will have left them with a deep sense of dissatisfaction. Not only have the millions of protestors who took to the streets on the eve of war been replaced by several hundred braving the snow and rain today; not only has the inquiry failed to rattle the former prime minister; not only do hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths not amount to a humanitarian catastrophe in his eyes; but Blair remains absolutely resolute in his belief that what he did was right, so much so that he would do it again.
The recurring theme throughout today's evidence was Iran, who Blair said was just as big a threat to international security and nuclear proliferation as Iraq was in 2003.
At least they and the rest of us can sleep more soundly knowing that Blair and his judgment are no longer the guiding forces of Britain.