Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Party Hard Politics Update

Party Hard Politics Update

Can’t we stop the madness?

Posted: 28 May 2012 02:41 PM PDT

Tony Blair was by all accounts a transformational Leader of the Labour Party, and Prime Minister. Along with Peter Mandelson, Alistair Campbell and Gordon Brown, he built the most successful election machine that Labour has ever known, winning majority after majority and illustrating the full potential of so-called ‘Third Way’ politics. He made Labour credible with business and on security, he pioneered a new and improved National Health Service, improved and decentralised education, he brought the United Kingdom to the heart of decision making in Europe and made incredible strides in gay rights and anti-racism campaigns. On a personal note, it is thanks to him and his New Labour revolution that with the background I have I can still be part of the Party, and know that my concerns will always be heard. He dragged Labour kicking and screaming into the 21st century and made it I would argue the ‘natural’ party government for the UK more so than at any other time in our history.

But Blair is not remembered for any of that. Blair is remembered more than anything for being too close to the Murdoch empire, for cash-for-honours, and of course for Iraq. Certainly, much of the promise of the New Labour revolution was undermined by whoring to the press and wealthy donors, and there are those who will never forgive Blair for the decision to join with the United States and invade Iraq in 2003. That is what provokes these vicious protests every time Blair speaks in public, or gives evidence to inquiries like at Leveson this morning. They call him a ‘war criminal’, and say he should be tried in the Hague. They hold him responsible for the deaths of thousands or sometimes millions of Iraqis, apparently not considering relevant the lack of accuracy in the numbers they quote or the misappropriation of blame they engage in. So now let me ask, from the point of view of someone who opposed the war when it was fought and has since come around, can’t we stop the madness?

 

 

This article will primarily focus on what Blair is most reviled for; the War in Iraq. While the other criticisms of Blair are valid, and I subscribe considerably more to those that focus on some areas of domestic policy, they are not the ones you hear most often when discussing the former PM. Blair is accused of having lied to go to war, to have backed President Bush like some kind of lapdog and then maintained UK operations in Iraq even as the cost to both Coalition and Iraqi lives was going through the roof.

I remember very clearly the debates had around Iraq in the UK, the vitriol that was being used to attack Blair and accuse him of lying about the supposed arsenal of Saddam Hussein. Those who said that Bush and him were inseparable, and the UK was only interested in deploying to Iraq because of that personal relationship. Slippery Blair was being used as the more articulate leader to push for military action against a regime that America did not like, rather than because anyone was actually threatened. Having read a lot around that decision to go to war in 2003, the evidence simply does not support such an interpretation. The decision to invade Iraq was made after a series of catastrophic intelligence failings, as well as over-zealous members of the US Administration looking for the evidence to lead an invasion. The jury is still out as to whether that desire to go after Iraq led people to draw conclusions that they knew to be false, but I remain unconvinced. It seems considerably more likely to my mind that analysts and policy-makers who believed Hussein to be evil and Iraq to be plotting against the US saw in evidence that was incomplete at best things that confirmed preconceived beliefs. That is certainly poor intelligence work, and considering the cost in blood and treasure worthy of investigation. However, it is not incompetence that most of the Blair-haters charge him and his people with, but evil.

Beyond accusations regarding the original decision to go to war, there are the accusations of Blair being ‘a lapdog’ to Bush. Accepting the desires of the President, and supporting him in the face of overwhelming evidence and political dangers. I have already written on the subject of the UK-US relationship, and my feelings are well known. A strong rapport between the UK-US political, military and economic leadership should be the number one foreign policy priority for any British Government. We are one another’s biggest economic investors on any measure, we have the same commitments to democracy and human values, we share security burdens across the world and have deep personal bonds that bind us together. The interests of the United States are almost always inextricably linked with the interests of the United Kingdom, and opposing US policy just for the sake of irritating the President seems to me a particularly weak reason for not joining with President Bush on Iraq.

Finally for Blair, there is the accusation of ‘war crimes’, and of massacring Iraqi civilians. This is where the protesters really lose me. Certainly, there were isolated cases of horrendous violence, death and abuse perpetrated by Coalition forces against Iraqi civilians detainees. An inevitable byproduct of any major conflict is civilian casualties, and yes isolated cases of soldiers not behaving in an acceptable way. These cases were investigated, and in some cases prosecuted as appropriate. Was Prime Minister Blair responsible for them? Not by any standard of International Criminal Law. No order was given to carry out abuse, Blair was not a commander in the field and appropriate measures were taken through training and legal oversight to avoid such abuses.

Then there is the question of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed on the streets since the invasion. Estimates vary, but it is clearly false to claim the millions that usually go on the placards of those protesting Blair events. It does not appear to be relevant when people discuss this issue that these people did not die at the hands of Coalition or Iraqi Security Force soldiers. The vast majority of these tragic victims were caught up in sectarian violence between armed Iraqi militias, using suicide bombings to kill people of different strands of Islam. Tony Blair is responsible for the fact Sunni and Shi’ite despise one another? He is responsible for the fact teenagers would strap bombs to themselves to destroy people in their own country because they believed in a different form of Islam? Saddam Hussein stopped sectarian violence through executing anyone who questioned his leadership. Blair is criticised for not doing the same. It would be laughable if the charges involved were not so morally powerful.

Having considered the realities of the time leading up to the Iraq War, its execution and the subsequent violence, there are of course criticisms to be made. Certainly, one can look at the cost to Coalition forces, and the loss of life in Iraq and argue the invasion should not have been undertaken. However, one can also reasonably argue that the invasion removed a potentially dangerous dictator, that it cemented Western influence in the region and established deterrence against those who would threaten to develop WMDs. It would take a brave person indeed to argue today that Iraq is not better off without Saddam than it was under his barbarous and aggressive rule. My point is that to see Iraq as either all good or all bad is simplistic and unreasonable. To paint Tony Blair as a war criminal is not only false but undermines the claims of legitimate victims against the war criminals in Sudan and Mali (to name but two) who operate with impunity to this day.

British political debate is admired for the nuances that make our Parliamentary process a slow but impressive mechanism. When people dismiss Blair as this awful war criminal who didn’t achieve anything for the UK or for that matter the European Union, we do ourselves a disservice. Blair was a long way from perfect, but the progress he made in domestic affairs, the relationship he made better with the United States, the strengthening of the UK role in EU affairs, the progress he made with the Commonwealth and the intervention he led and executed so effectively in Sierra Leone are all reasons why an appraisal of his time as Prime Minister should be more balanced.
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