Johann Hari/The Independent: Blair's legacy lies in the Baghdad morgue.
As one who made an equally foolish misjudgement, I've some insight on how his thinking went so wrong
Published: 14 May 2007
As the crowd clapped along to the old back-to-the-Nineties tune of "Things Can Only Get Better" in Trimdon Labour Club, awaiting Tony Blair's swansong, there was a bleaker postscript to the Blair years piling up half a world away.
In Baghdad morgue, these days they separate out the hundreds of Shia bodies and Sunni bodies that are dumped on them every day. It's easy to do: the Shia have been beheaded, while the Sunnis have been tortured to death with power-drills.
I phoned an Iraqi friend in Baghdad whose family was murdered by Saddam. Like me, she supported the war because she thought anything - even an Anglo-American invasion headed by Bush - would be better than Saddam and his sons slaughtering onto the far horizon.
"Oh, is Blair going?" she said acidly. "You know, I'm more worried about the three bodies at the bottom of my street that have been there for a week now. I'm more worried about how I'm going to get through the next day without being killed. I'm really not thinking about Tony Blair. Not ever again."
How did Blair's story end here, with 650,000 dead Iraqis, according to a medical report described by Blair's own scientific advisors as "close to best practice"? As somebody who made an equally foolish misjudgement on Iraq, albeit for very different reasons, I think I have some insight on how Blair's thinking went so wrong.
Tony Blair came to office with very few views about foreign policy. In his Trimdon farewell sonata, he admitted he "came to political maturity at the end of the Cold War". The Cold War defrosted just three years before he became Labour leader.
So his formative foreign policy experience - the place where his whole mindset was smelted - was Kosovo. Like everyone who followed the news, he had been aware throughout the 1990s that the Milosevician forces of Serbian nationalism had been ravaging the Balkans, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The world had offered nothing but a passive shrug. In 1997, with fears that the violence would begin again, Blair had a naive, noble desire to stop Serbian ultra-nationalism in its bloody tracks.
So he did something messy. He coaxed Bill Clinton into acting and started a bombing campaign with an unclear mission, no mandate from the UN until after it had begun, and no plain end in sight. The only core to this action was Blair's belief that Something Must Be Done.
And it sort-of worked. The Albanian refugees got to go home, Milosevic was toppled just months later, and Blair was welcomed on the streets of Kosovo as a liberator-hero. There are messy after-details we rarely discuss: the more than 100,000 Serbs who have been ethnically cleansed have not returned home. But the Balkans are still a somewhat-better place than if Milsoevic had continued unhindered and unhinged.
From this example, Blair inferred a string of general principles, where he proposed to use British military might to stem the oppressions of tyrants. He got an opportunity to flex this belief system in 2000, when he ordered British troops to stop a gang of hand-chopping thugs from seizing power in Sierra Leone. Babies there are still named Tony Blair in thanks.
When it became clear the Bush administration was priming for a show-down with Saddam Hussein, Blair thought his Kosovo approach would work again. Don't worry too much about legality or the UN - it will end with cheers on the streets of Baghdad. The WMD lies were slathered on top, another motive to do The Right Thing.
Where was the flaw? It was in his analysis of American power. In a terrible misjudgement, he projected his own broadly good motives on to an American state with very different purposes, tied to geopolitics and corporate influence. As Dick Cheney said at the time of the 1990-91 Gulf War, "We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil."
But Blair knew suprisingly little about American power and its purposes. In a conversation with John Snow, he revealed he had never heard of Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratic leader of Iran who was toppled by the CIA in 1953 because he wanted to control his own country's oil supplies. As recently as 2005, he had never even heard of the Project for a New American Century.
One friend of Blair's recently told me she was shocked in 1997 when she saw Blair welcoming Henry Kissinger into Downing Street and lauding him as a great statesman and friend of democracy. She challenged him over it, but discovered "he just doesn't know about this history - how the Americans toppled democratic governments in Latin America and the Middle East. He really didn't know anything about it. It was shocking."
Here is where Blair's beliefs about foreign policy intersect with the ideas he formed in domestic politics. Tony Blair's core belief is that politics is all about being at the heart of power. In the 1980s, he fought against the Bennite infestation of the Labour Party, and was appalled by followers of a man who proclaimed cheerfully that the Labour Party's 1983 general election catastrophe was "a great victory for socialism" because so many people voted for a "pure" socialist manifesto.
Confronted with people who preferred this impotent moral purity, Blair was determined to be the opposite. As he once put it, "opposition is a waste of time". Wherever there is power, use it. Never back away. So when he came close to US state power, every instinct he had formed in his political life told him to cut away any doubts and embrace the power. To retreat and offer a criticism was contrary to everything he had learned. But to hold together his twin beliefs in his own humanitarianism and in cleaving to power, Blair had to learn a selective blindness towards the actions of the US state. This ability had always been there, enabling him to support deadly sanctions on Iraq or arms deals to foul regimes, but now it became swollen.
He offered weasel words of denial about the US policies of using chemical weapons in Iraq, and would only condemn Guantanamo as "an anomaly". He refused to see how his Coalition of the Willing was really a Coalition of the Drilling, saying it was a "conspiracy theory" to talk about Iraq's oil. His early humanitarianism bled into an unthinking pro-Americanism, and he lost the ability to tell the difference.
And as Iraq descended, he clung to increasingly desperate soundbites to gloss over the tension. He declared that the disasters in Iraq were the work of al-Qa'ida and the Iranian regime, rather than a largely indigenous string of Shia and Sunni insurgencies descending into civil war after Bush-era brutalisation.
And still the drilled and hacked bodies pile up in Baghdad morgue, even more - incredibly - than under the psychotic Saddam. The stench of these corpses will choke discussion of Blair's legacy long into the historical night.
As one who made an equally foolish misjudgement, I've some insight on how his thinking went so wrong
Published: 14 May 2007
As the crowd clapped along to the old back-to-the-Nineties tune of "Things Can Only Get Better" in Trimdon Labour Club, awaiting Tony Blair's swansong, there was a bleaker postscript to the Blair years piling up half a world away.
In Baghdad morgue, these days they separate out the hundreds of Shia bodies and Sunni bodies that are dumped on them every day. It's easy to do: the Shia have been beheaded, while the Sunnis have been tortured to death with power-drills.
I phoned an Iraqi friend in Baghdad whose family was murdered by Saddam. Like me, she supported the war because she thought anything - even an Anglo-American invasion headed by Bush - would be better than Saddam and his sons slaughtering onto the far horizon.
"Oh, is Blair going?" she said acidly. "You know, I'm more worried about the three bodies at the bottom of my street that have been there for a week now. I'm more worried about how I'm going to get through the next day without being killed. I'm really not thinking about Tony Blair. Not ever again."
How did Blair's story end here, with 650,000 dead Iraqis, according to a medical report described by Blair's own scientific advisors as "close to best practice"? As somebody who made an equally foolish misjudgement on Iraq, albeit for very different reasons, I think I have some insight on how Blair's thinking went so wrong.
Tony Blair came to office with very few views about foreign policy. In his Trimdon farewell sonata, he admitted he "came to political maturity at the end of the Cold War". The Cold War defrosted just three years before he became Labour leader.
So his formative foreign policy experience - the place where his whole mindset was smelted - was Kosovo. Like everyone who followed the news, he had been aware throughout the 1990s that the Milosevician forces of Serbian nationalism had been ravaging the Balkans, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The world had offered nothing but a passive shrug. In 1997, with fears that the violence would begin again, Blair had a naive, noble desire to stop Serbian ultra-nationalism in its bloody tracks.
So he did something messy. He coaxed Bill Clinton into acting and started a bombing campaign with an unclear mission, no mandate from the UN until after it had begun, and no plain end in sight. The only core to this action was Blair's belief that Something Must Be Done.
And it sort-of worked. The Albanian refugees got to go home, Milosevic was toppled just months later, and Blair was welcomed on the streets of Kosovo as a liberator-hero. There are messy after-details we rarely discuss: the more than 100,000 Serbs who have been ethnically cleansed have not returned home. But the Balkans are still a somewhat-better place than if Milsoevic had continued unhindered and unhinged.
From this example, Blair inferred a string of general principles, where he proposed to use British military might to stem the oppressions of tyrants. He got an opportunity to flex this belief system in 2000, when he ordered British troops to stop a gang of hand-chopping thugs from seizing power in Sierra Leone. Babies there are still named Tony Blair in thanks.
When it became clear the Bush administration was priming for a show-down with Saddam Hussein, Blair thought his Kosovo approach would work again. Don't worry too much about legality or the UN - it will end with cheers on the streets of Baghdad. The WMD lies were slathered on top, another motive to do The Right Thing.
Where was the flaw? It was in his analysis of American power. In a terrible misjudgement, he projected his own broadly good motives on to an American state with very different purposes, tied to geopolitics and corporate influence. As Dick Cheney said at the time of the 1990-91 Gulf War, "We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil."
But Blair knew suprisingly little about American power and its purposes. In a conversation with John Snow, he revealed he had never heard of Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratic leader of Iran who was toppled by the CIA in 1953 because he wanted to control his own country's oil supplies. As recently as 2005, he had never even heard of the Project for a New American Century.
One friend of Blair's recently told me she was shocked in 1997 when she saw Blair welcoming Henry Kissinger into Downing Street and lauding him as a great statesman and friend of democracy. She challenged him over it, but discovered "he just doesn't know about this history - how the Americans toppled democratic governments in Latin America and the Middle East. He really didn't know anything about it. It was shocking."
Here is where Blair's beliefs about foreign policy intersect with the ideas he formed in domestic politics. Tony Blair's core belief is that politics is all about being at the heart of power. In the 1980s, he fought against the Bennite infestation of the Labour Party, and was appalled by followers of a man who proclaimed cheerfully that the Labour Party's 1983 general election catastrophe was "a great victory for socialism" because so many people voted for a "pure" socialist manifesto.
Confronted with people who preferred this impotent moral purity, Blair was determined to be the opposite. As he once put it, "opposition is a waste of time". Wherever there is power, use it. Never back away. So when he came close to US state power, every instinct he had formed in his political life told him to cut away any doubts and embrace the power. To retreat and offer a criticism was contrary to everything he had learned. But to hold together his twin beliefs in his own humanitarianism and in cleaving to power, Blair had to learn a selective blindness towards the actions of the US state. This ability had always been there, enabling him to support deadly sanctions on Iraq or arms deals to foul regimes, but now it became swollen.
He offered weasel words of denial about the US policies of using chemical weapons in Iraq, and would only condemn Guantanamo as "an anomaly". He refused to see how his Coalition of the Willing was really a Coalition of the Drilling, saying it was a "conspiracy theory" to talk about Iraq's oil. His early humanitarianism bled into an unthinking pro-Americanism, and he lost the ability to tell the difference.
And as Iraq descended, he clung to increasingly desperate soundbites to gloss over the tension. He declared that the disasters in Iraq were the work of al-Qa'ida and the Iranian regime, rather than a largely indigenous string of Shia and Sunni insurgencies descending into civil war after Bush-era brutalisation.
And still the drilled and hacked bodies pile up in Baghdad morgue, even more - incredibly - than under the psychotic Saddam. The stench of these corpses will choke discussion of Blair's legacy long into the historical night.
Wait behind the line ..............................................................