Tony Blair: Faith as alibi

Appearing before the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war, Tony Blair compounded his unrepentant justification of his decision to invade Iraq with an equally uncompromising call to get tough with Iran. In his version of the world, the Iraq war was merely a dress rehearsal for what is to come.

Jeremy Seabrook

PERHAPS the most astonishing aspect of Tony Blair's aggressive 'performance' in front of the mild and unprobing Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war was his impenitence. Not for the first time, he adduced the profundity of his belief in the correctness of his action as a justification for what he had done.

In the presence of the often-repeated accusations - the collusive pre-concerting of action with Bush in a pact 'written in blood' at his Crawford ranch, the dodgy dossier, the doomed effort to get a new UN authorisation for force, the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - Blair showed no remorse, even for the still unnumbered deaths of Iraqis. He said he accepted 'responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think he was a monster, I think he threatened not just a region but the world. Even if you look back now, it is better to deal with the threat, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.'

Everything returns to the unshakeability of Blair's faith. He has consistently plunged into the tepid waters of his own comforting conscience to cleanse himself of all accusations levelled against him. Significantly, this has not been taken up as an issue by the commentators and critics of his policy. This, they seem to believe, defines him and what he is. Certainly, the questions asked of him, undemanding and rambling as they were during his appearance before the Inquiry, were ineffective in denting his sense of righteousness. This is why the overwhelming response of those who disagreed with him was one of impotent rage. Blair's faith, boundless as the ocean, profound as that of any mystic, has the power to absorb and, apparently, nullify criticism.

But there are, surely, deeper questions to be addressed in democracy about the faith of a Prime Minister. During their long and doubtless anguished deliberations before their premeditated attack on an Iraq which posed no threat to them, one thing became clear in the relationship between Bush and Blair: while Bush may be regarded as a conservative fundamentalist, dangerous enough, Blair has a messianic view of his role and purpose.

When Blair says that Saddam had to be removed because he was 'a monster', it is tempting to rejoin that it takes one to know one. Blair's self-attributed role as saviour had been on show well before his fateful commitment to war in Iraq. He had, after all, 'delivered' the Labour Party out of the Egypt of enslavement to Clause Four and its dedication to common ownership of the means of production. He had also, it should be recalled, 'rescued' the royal family from its emotional autism after the death of the Princess of Wales, when it appeared to be icily aloof from a grieving public. It was Tony Blair which had restored it to popular favour by urging upon it the necessity of putting on display its cauterised emotions.

Blair always promoted himself as a 'visionary'; but his was no vision of social change, only one of re-dedication to this, the best of all possible worlds. After 9/11, his first reaction was that 'we' could not leave the Americans on their own, and he rushed to be by the side of George Bush, with the clear implication that this was another mission of salvation. He said, 'I never regarded 11 September as an attack on America, I regarded it as an attack on us.'  Perhaps this was the point at which he realised that the domestic arena of Britain was too narrow for him; and not long afterwards, he cast himself as saviour of a whole world which, he said, was at risk from the menacing reach of Saddam's mythical weaponry.

Blair was always autocratic and intolerant of criticism; and indeed, in his early days as Prime Minister it was often facetiously said of him that he was a kind of political miracle-worker: he 'could do no wrong', he 'walked on water'. He had a saintly presence, a juvenile eagerness to please, and a popular touch unequalled by any other Prime Minister in living memory. Perhaps one of his most spectacular pieces of sorcery was his ability to transform the perception of the Attorney-General which had originally been that an invasion would be illegal, but who came to see the light just in time.

Alastair Campbell, a key aide to Blair during his time as Prime Minister, writes in his diaries that Blair prayed to God, at times of trouble and anxiety. Campbell also revealed that before the Iraq invasion, Blair was guided by his faith and regularly spoke to 'his maker'. It seems that, far from living in the democracy we are supposed to cherish, we have been living in a kind of ventriloqual theocracy, in which Blair communed with God far more than with the people.

Thus it appears that the war into which the people of Britain were reluctantly dragged, and against which large numbers protested at the time, was actually a consequence of a private relationship between Blair and God. The only other significant world figure to have invoked divine inspiration for such acts of gratuitous destruction in recent times has been Osama bin Laden; and it may be that the spark of fanaticism which has never been far from the surface during the Blair years was set off in response to an adversary who was motivated by the same moral certitudes, even if these were handed down by another God in another culture.

Blair's faith ceased to be a personal matter when it took the country to war. It is an enduring irony that he should have done so against the secular, if confused and contradictory, ideology of Ba'athism. At the inquiry, Blair expressed astonishment that al-Qaeda, which had had no presence in Iraq before the invasion, subsequently became a major player and 'almost' ruined the mission in Iraq. Perhaps when he says that the world is a safer place than it was before the invasion, his view of reality is coloured by the fortune he is said to have made in personal appearances since leaving office - by some reckonings more than œ10 million. Substantial rewards and bonuses, it seems, are to be made out of political bankruptcy, just as they are out of  collapsed financial institutions.  

But the most revealing aspect of Blair's testimony was the number of times he referred to Iran - 58 according to those who counted. Here, we leave the misty realm of faith and enter the even more murky area of emotional disequilibrium, psychopathology. By trying to attach the errors committed in Iraq to the as-yet-unresolved 'issue' of Iran, Blair desires to re-enact the whole grisly episode, in order to 'redeem' his mistakes. Iraq, in this version of the world, was merely a dress rehearsal for what is to come. Among his post-hoc justifications was that, had Saddam not been overthrown, 'Iraq may have become involved in a race against Iran to develop nuclear weapons'. One down, one to go.

The focus on Tony Blair as an individual is also, of course, part and parcel of a dysfunctional system which dissimulates itself behind the grandiose posturings of a single - if compelling - leader. Perhaps, had the neoliberal movement, particularly that version of it of which the US and UK have been such emphatic advocates, not been in a state of crisis, the true nature of the archaic and doomed imperial venture in Iraq might conceivably have been less obvious. The attempt to lay hold of a major oil supplier to prolong by a few years the supremacy of the US was an enterprise beneath which it is not difficult to detect a strong whiff of desperation, if not quite despair: for not only is an oil-based globalism (designed to support and spread what is sometimes called the 'Western way of life') tottering towards terminal decline, but the role of the US and its eager accomplice (in this instance Blair, but could anyone imagine that Brown, Cameron or any other conceivable leader would have behaved differently from Blair?) is fast being overtaken by other players in the global game.

One aspect of the Iraq misadventure which will be subject to no 'inquiry', by Chilcot or any other less-than-inquisitive appointee of the British government, is the enduring nature of the belief of the US and the UK in their right to re-arrange the governing arrangements of any country in the world, and to possess themselves of any treasures required for the maintenance of their economic pre-eminence. For this purpose, it is necessary that other peoples in the world continue to be regarded as lesser, however absurd and difficult to sustain this proposition has become. Xenophobia and racism are always exacerbated by decline: there is nothing easier than for countries, like individuals, to rise in the world. They invariably regard it as their due. But coming down is another story. When Blair said he regarded 9/11 as an attack on 'us', which first person plural was he referring to, if not that 'we' who are the appointees of Providence to safeguard civilisation and morality? If the US and Britain constantly invoke the lessons of history, this is almost certainly because they are incapable of learning them; and this is why the tragedy of Iraq is being re-enacted in Afghanistan (are all US presidents required to make some war or other their own?), and a future conflict pencilled in at some not-distant date in Iran (perhaps even now being diarised in the future schedule of a President Palin).  

Blair declared, in a moment of apparent incoherence, the meaning of which was nevertheless very clear,  'My fear was - and I hold this fear stronger today than I did back then as a result of what Iran particularly today is doing - my fear is that states that are highly repressive or failed, the danger of a WMD link is that they become porous, they construct all sorts of different alliances with people.' Despite the lenience of the Chilcot interrogators, Blair came over as unrepentant, isolated, paranoid, talking to God; just the qualities to qualify him uniquely as Peace Envoy to the Middle East.                                  

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 234, February 2010, pp 31-32