One can only be impressed at the scale of the man’s delusion: on the weekend, Tony Blair issued a manifesto nearly 3000 words long calling not merely for a new intervention in Iraq but for intervention in Syria — and indeed more widely in the Middle East.
Blair insists we need “a plan for the Middle East and for dealing with the extremism world-wide that comes out of it”. His one-time press secretary, Alastair Campbell, even tweeted the link, bringing an enjoyably 2002 feel to things — can a sexed-up intelligence dossier be far away?
The essay is part desperate attempt to salvage Blair’s own shattered reputation and part rallying cry for neoconservatives to revive the project of Western intervention in the Middle East.
Blair asserts that the collapse of Iraq is nothing to do with the illegal war that he and George W. Bush orchestrated — at best he will allow that the invasion exacerbated ethnic tensions in that country, something neither the British nor the Americans evidently considered before using confected claims about weapons of mass destruction to remove Saddam Hussein.
This call for a repetition of the Iraq debacle coincides with increasing pressure in the UK for the long-delayed release of the Chilcott Inquiry report into the circumstances that led the UK into Iraq under Blair. The British, at least, have undertaken a serious process of examining the disaster that was the Iraq War and why the UK participated. It is a process that Australia has never undertaken — despite Labor’s commendable and public opposition to our participation.
Thus we find ourselves once again debating intervention in Iraq, when Australians haven’t even been told the truth about why we joined that intervention a decade ago.
From this Limited News Party government’s seemingly inexhaustible “thirst for truth” we need one of these “Beetle & Abbott Commission/Witch-hunts” into why we “did Iraq” – it cost our economy far more (we’re still paying) than those pink batts, let alone God knows how many lives.
Then we can take a look at East Timor?
[Their “Comical Ally” Murdoch might prove a bit embarrassing – with his “embedded” PR advertorial of “what was going on”, through his Ministry of Misinformation and Obfuscation – but if that’s the price, of truth, so be it?]
Blair evidently still considers the plan for turning Iraq into a peaceful, democratic, thriving economy as a beacon for rest of the Middle East is still attainable.
Just a few more air strikes and she’ll be right……
And does Blair specify how it might go better the next time? Any tips on an intervention with a difference?
Blair would be more convincing if he toured the major universities and cities of Iraq to explain his deluded theory. I’m sure he would not require any bodyguards because the people of Iraq are so grateful for his past deeds.
It’s a bit hard to say the invasion of Iraq “exacerbated ethnic tensions” after Saddam’s Sunni army gassed and massacred Kurds, Massacred Shia in the south after the 1991 war, and drained the marshes so he could wipe out the Aarsh Arabs.