Rundle’s UK: Tony Blair’s very ordinary madness
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By 8am, the hardiest of protesters from the Stop the War Coalition had already assembled at the entrance of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster. An unprepossessing building, the centre is almost equidistant between the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the Churchill Museum, sitting atop the old 1939 Cabinet War Rooms, deep buried to ensure that the government could continue, even if the city were scraped off the face of the earth. The day was raw cold, the sky low and white, the stone city of Westminster near-sepia. The protestors’ placards were identically printed — Blair, with a bloodspot, where the hole of the ‘a’ was — the only colour of the day, courtesy of the redoubtable Socialist Workers Party, which keeps the anti-war movement going. By mid-morning there were about 200 of them. Everyone said that move had been expected, but it is hard to imagine why. A hearing for a man long gone from power, into a war Britain has now quit, with no real powers to take matters further, and reporting at the end of the year….it was a cold dark day, and it was amazing that as many as 200 had turned up. As with all such British protests, they looked less like a mass of ranked Bolsheviks than a ramble of trainspotters, dressed like Paddington Bear, all anoraks and scarves. Herded around the various nooks and crannies — the centre is in a street called, near unbelievably, Broad Sanctuary — by police who have become expert at controlling protests through the judicious scattering — one man yelled “if we’re going to have a police state, you might at least organise it properly!” Ah, Les Anglais. Mr Tony had arrived two hours earlier, through a side entrance under cover of dark, and then cooled his heels in a room until the hearing started at 9.30. To say it was going to be a tough day for him was something of an understatement. Among those in the public gallery — the places awarded by ballot — were the families of twenty of the 150 UK soldiers killed in the conflict. By the account of those inside, Blair looked like death itself when he emerged into the auditorium — your correspondent was watching it outside, on his iPhone — and his hands shook as he reached for the water-glass. Was it the sense that the eyes of not merely the living, but those standing behind, were upon him? Or the simple fear that someone would have smuggled a concealed shiv into the proceedings? Whatever state he began, by a quarter of an hour into the six-hour session he had got well into his stride. “Most British Prime Ministers in such a situation sound like a bloke running a corner shop,” one comedian noted, “Blair sounded like the President of the United States.” Surrounded by papers and books, he was out of the gate on each question before any of the board could finish, urging them to read speeches he’d given on the topic, and, until explicitly restrained, threatening to read whole sections of them into the minutes. Much of the subsequent commentary on his appearance there has focused on his refusal to make any statement of regret, towards the end of the hearing, even when giving a few explicit opportunities by the panel. For the British public, this refusal to take the opportunity to empathise was the very opposite of what they’d come to expect from Mr Smiley. Indeed it was practically, an anti-Blair, brusque, physically rigid, never defensive, but never for a moment relaxed. He reminded me of a small claims petitioner, who has taken his own case to heart — live as a wire on his one day in court, determined to show the ways in which he has been wronged, shamed, maltreated. The man’s adamant refusal to express any disquiet at the mayhem and suffering he helped unleash appears to have soured his reputation with much of the public, creating a mild feeling of disgust in many quarters. But it is the least important part of his testimony, the particular emotions of this or that leader being irrelevant to the moral and political issues. What was most amazing came in the first few hours of his testimony, as he unrolled at great length his whole operational picture of the world and the Middle East at the time. Piece by piece, he put in place an overarching view of international relations which, while plausible and rational at every part, was, when combined, stark staring mad — a belief that the West, with the US and UK at its core, can continue to define global security wholly in terms set by those nations, who can then project power across any borders at will. Many have suggested that over the course of his premiership, Blair became a US-style neocon. He did nothing of the sort. He became — or always was — an old fashioned British-first imperialist, seeing the various states of the region as nothing more than the porous, treaty-rigged fiefdoms they had been at the time of their creation after the First World War. As he recounted the various calculi that had gone into his decision to put the UK to war, one was reminded of Lloyd-George’s remark about why he had to sack Churchill: “he kept getting out his maps. Chap wouldn’t stop getting out his maps.” By Blair’s wide-ranging account, the Americans were almost never in it — no more than the big, dumb guys with the guns one would have to persuade, not merely into wrecking the joint, but remaking it in a new image. Kipling’s White Man’s Burden was the text — his poem at the time of the US invasion of the Philippines, an adventure that sparked a ten year insurgency, the brutal suppression of which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, urging America to take up the imperial adventure under Europe’s tutelage. It was gob-smacking. The panel took him through the years prior to the invasion, and the manner of his thinking about the overall situation. For Blair, by his own account, the crucial fact of 9/11 was not whether or not there had been any connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda — he accepted that there wasn’t — but that the events of that day made the combination of dictatorial viciousness and an appetite for lethal weapons something that could no longer be ignored, wherever it was. Given these two conditions, nothing but the strongest action could be taken against Saddam. That came up against two major problems mid-morning: firstly that the UK’s infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ — which had said Saddam had WMDs “45 minutes from use” — was ridiculed at the time as a farrago, and secondly, Blair had already told an interviewer in 2009 that he would have gone after Saddam anyway. Faced with the former, Blair simply quibbled about the meaning of the phrase “beyond doubt” attached to the dossier, insisting entirely falsely that no-one had seriously questioned its veracity. In the incriminating interview, he simply sidestepped by referring to the persuasive techniques of the interviewer Fern Brittan — a woman who, were she any fluffier, could be used for cleaning flues. She was a lot more forensic than the inquiry which time and again let Blair get away with blue murder, raising questions as to what exactly the inquiry was. Was it meant to have a genuinely forensic quality, to play people’s contradictions back to them? Or would that be an abrogation of the authority of parliament? But if not, what was the point of it in the first place? Take Blair’s slightly angered defense of the options open to Saddam to avoid a full-scale invasion — a vital point if he was to avoid the charge that he had engaged the whole nation in a years long con: “…look if Saddam had done a Gaddafi, if he’d said ‘look here’s our weapons, here’s our programmes talk to our scientists, taken them out of the country…’ etc etc. Yes, all very reasonable , if only Iraq had given up its WMD programme, until you remember that IRAQ DIDN’T HAVE A WMD PROGRAMME! So they were being asked to prove what they didn’t have. Furthermore, Gaddafi’s Libya has no immediate enemies on its doorstep, whereas Iraq could rightly say that an exposure of all its facilities (which it gave up anyway) was a tip of the hat to Iran, with whom it had had, erm, some issues in the past. For Blair, the post 9.11 doctrine was that you couldn’t just go around regime-changing because people were dictators – there had to be a security threat – but that such a threat could be far more liberally interpreted when a country happened to be run by a dictator. What few seemed to have picked up – in all the stuff about Blair’s lack of emoting – was that this doctrine is like an Escher picture, the different parts connecting together in impossible ways. On the one hand it seems to present the Westphalia idea id the integrity of nation-states as a guiding principle, the security of which must be guaranteed by the ability of some to reach into states they don’t like and completely re-arrange them. By lunchtime, Blair was talking about how the failure of the post-invasion effort had made it necessary to consider whether Iran would not be next in the sites. By afternoon tea, Yemen was enrolled as a future target for invasion – “you see the thing is other people see these as separate” Blair noted, “whereas I’m afraid I don’t.” You can say that again. As he rolled out the maps, metaphorically speaking, the magical thinking turned it into a magical carpet, a delusional space bearing no relation to the real place. In Blair’s Middle East, the post-invasion insurgency produced by its brutality, and rewarding fanatics “was the very people we’d gone into fight.” Casually speaking of Muqtaddar Al-Sadr, Blair spoke of discussions as to whether to legitimise him or arrest him – the imperial attitude in a nutshell. The legitimacy of any local institution is reduced to zero, and any recognition of it is purely tactical, which is no recognition at all. Simultaneously boring yet riveting, predictable yet deeply disquieting, Blair’s evidence was that of a man for whom the plan was everything, the actual people subject to it nothing at all. Saddam was a monster because he killed thousands of civilians, whereas the Coalition’s killing of similar or greater numbers was “doing what had to be done.” In the end, it was all ultimately dissatisfying. Blair held his own intellectually, even though he could have been held to account on half a dozen major points, and the one heckle, at his lack of regrets — “what not even one” — had a feeble, defeated air about it. He was asked if he had anything he wanted to add, he said no, and then he was gone, impatient to be out of the country whose shitty little island status offends his deep-seated imperial desires. Off back to his pointless, embarrassing non-role as ‘middle east peace envoy’, to dodging an international war crimes writ, and to his insane and vaulting ambition, now focused on glittering unobtainable prizes — UN Sec-Gen, EU President. He is fleeing of course neither guilt, nor shame, but the simple emptiness that attends him, and will take him in the darkness, should he ever stop moving forward. He would cave in like an abandoned church. The only leader to take Labour to three consecutive victories, he is nevertheless a pariah in his own party, a reminded of its wasted promise and missed opportunity, a mood that will only have deepened with this performance, its contempt for party and voters, and their doubts, and their failure to see the brilliance of the plan, barely concealed. By day’s end, the protestors, of whom only 50 or so remained, had managed to surround several entrances, but they never found the one he came out of. A woman who had lost a son had broken down in the public gallery and had to be helped out. It was a grey day, useful for an insight into Blair’s thought processes, but yielding nothing new. Deeply unpleasant without being in any way formidable, it was an unwelcome return by a man we thought we’d seen the back of. I hope to hell I don’t have to sit through the arrogant, unctuous death’s head rictus of his very ordinary madness for many years to come, unless it is to answer charges rather than questions. The world is wide, but it may prove no broad sanctuary for him in the long run. |
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31 Comments
Pity John Howard’s not being subjected to the same scrutiny. Why the Rudd Government doesn’t want to pursue it after our former leader slavishly followed George W is beyond me.
Denise
Tony Blair is no better or worse than dozens of other politicians, with the exception that his delusional preoccupation with applying his lips to George Bush’s backside had serious repercussions not only for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but the hundreds of his own countrymen maimed and killed in the service of their country in the pursuit of his delusional grab at greatness.
Like most politicians his primary ability is in motivating others to either follow him or do his dirty work. When the task goes “pear-shaped” they are generally conspicuous by their absence.
It is very rare for a politician to admit that he will she had made a mistake because they are so enamoured with their own personality that such a situation could not possibly occurto them.
John Howard is still in denial about his detrimental effect on the Liberal party the result of which was to hand government to Kevin Rudd. Similarly Rudd is in denial about his heroic promises concerning global warming, Grocery Watch, Fuel Watch, the 2020 summit and relaxation of border controls and improvements to Freedom of Information to nominate but a few examples.
Of course the easiest way to avoid responsibility is to create new mantras so that the old are soon forgotten, with the exception of individuals not besotted with sport and whose memory span exceeds 12 months. So roll on the new school league tables and attacks on Abbott’s budgie smugglers.
Um, yeah, the Kurds weren’t gassed at all…
Wiki/a>
For me an important factor would have been Saddam paying US$25K to the families of any palestinian family of whom a member dies in a suicide attack or something like that. Motivated by that squalid concentration camp blockade.
Israel being an undeclared major nuke power, at the big table with the UK and USA. Being a murderous dictator alone was never going to be enough for that war.
I think those leaders would have seen that as a bridge too far potentially putting a nuke ally at risk. Or so Israel would be saying to them privately in compelling language?
A google of these keywords: “saddam pays $25 for palestinian families” brings up “FOXNews.com - Saddam Pays 25K for Palestinian Bombers - Opinion
26 Mar 2002”. The timing is about right.
To quote:
“Saddam stokes war with suicide bomber cash
March 26 2002
The Iraqi leader’s payments to the families of dead Palestinian terrorists means more trouble for Yasser Arafat, writes Paul McGeough in the West Bank.
The hall was packed and the intake of breath was audible as a special announcement was made to the war widows of the West Bank - Saddam Hussein would pay $US25,000 ($47,000) to the family of each suicide bomber as an enticement for others to volunteer for martyrdom in the name of the Palestinian people.
The men at the top table then opened Saddam’s chequebook and, as the names of 47 martyrs were called, family representatives went up to sign for cheques written in US dollars. “
It actually cross references Paul McGeogh of SMH with link there as eye witness.
Err, the quote is from SMH, FOXNEWS links to that quote.
Is it just me, or is this piece lacking some editing or sub-editing? Or is it just dodgy typing?
Good piece, but distracting errors.
@Jenny. Agreed - if Crikey can’t be bothered reading before publishing at least hit F7 (spell-check) to get rid of the most egregious errors. I’m not a spelling Nazi, but this is riddled with typoes.
“He became — or always was — an old fashioned British-first imperialist”
“the country whose shitty little island status offends his deep-seated imperial desires.”
So, Blair is just a player of the Great Game. This is Rundle’s explanation of Blair’s perception of and actions in the Middle East. The US is the big dumb Rambo…
What tosh. Everyone in Britain knows that Blair was dominated by Bush. Bush’s poodle. Swaggering Action Man (“this is called walking in Texas”) set the agenda and schmoozed Blair in 2002 to sign him up. Not difficult. Blair’s mental colonisation was so complete he was prepared to alienate his entire party and risk the ostracism of posterity. For years he wore the extreme unpopularity of the war like a campaign medal. What strength of character, what fortitude…facing down bitter opposition. The party bosses sullenly supported the war, but of course will never forgive him.
He’s an empty shell because he’s a weak, dependent personality who threw in his lot with the biggest thug on the block, and lost. He’s been sent to Coventry, which is now anywhere outside England. People have been run over trying to cross the street to avoid him…
Rundle’s tin ear has clunked again. These “insights” are alternately self-evident and sententious (“the simple emptiness that attends him, and will take him in the darkness.” Jesus Guy… littry fingernails on blackboard…).
I hope shoe-string Crikey isn’t paying for this trip.
You don’t need to be outside the building to follow the inquiry. It’s on the net, video and transcript.
“Blair logic” - his selective comparison with Gaddaffi, which he says, now, would have saved Saddam, not to mention all the others - reminds me of that old joke about the woman who walked into the fruiterer’s shop and asked for some onions, was told there weren’t any, ,so she asked for apples, then onions …….. this went round and round till the shopkeeper asked, “Lady, take the ‘b’ out of banana, and what do you get?”
“anana!”
“Take the ‘a’ out of potato, and what do you get?”
“potto!”
“Now take the ‘f’ out of onions?”
“Fool, there’s no ‘f’ in onions!”
“That’s what I been tryin’ to tell ya, Lady!”
Saddam was saying for so long, “Ladies, there’s no f’n WMD’s!” - but that wasn’t what they wanted to hear!
@Klewso: But Saddam had been shown on other topics to be a serial liar, why believe him on this?
“Um, yeah, the Kurds weren’t gassed at all…”
Nobody is denying Saddam inflicted a great deal of suffering over his lifetime. But that’s not a justification to go around invading willy nilly at some stage way down the track. Short of a specific Security Council authorisation, only a large-scale humanitarian disaster contemporaneous to 2003 would justify humanitarian intervention such as happened in Kosovo. But nothing like that existed. The Iraqi State was contained.
Indeed, the invasion was launched because of a specific set of claims made about mobile chemical labs, hundreds of tons of biological weapons, alleged linkages with al Qaeda and the central conceit that Saddam was rebuilding Iraq’s nuclear program by trying to acquire yellowcake from Niger and using aluminium tubes for centrifuge. We were warned repeatedly by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice that we couldn’t afford to wait for a smoking gun because it would be a mushroom cloud. We were told al Qaeda was operating in Iraq. We were told the threat was so great the UNMOVIC weapons inspectors could not finish their job and we must act now. That was all false. In most cases it was knowingly false because the intelligence agencies had already rejected it, due to notoriously bad sources such as Curveball / Chalabi.
Blair role has escape much criticism outside Britain because most of the outrage has been poured onto Bush/Cheney, and he was able to hide behind the conceit that he was trying to get the US to go through the UN. However, we now know enough about Blair’s complicity that he was a true believer from the outset and his fidelity to the international inspection process was a sham.
“@Klewso: But Saddam had been shown on other topics to be a serial liar, why believe him on this?”
It’s nothing to do with trusting Saddam. The chief weapon’s inspector Hans Blix repeatedly warned before the invasion that Saddam’s cooperation was encouraging, and that any gaps in knowledge could be remedied by continuing the UNMOVIC process. Bush / Blair terminated that process prematurely.
Tom M - I’ve wondered that for a while. Saddam had nothing to do with Al-Quaeda, and wasn’t a threat to the US, but he was aiding terrorists fighting Israel.
And when Israel says “Jump!”, the US says “How high?”…
@William, there is *no* statute of limitations on the war crimes for which Saddam was responsible. So explain, again, why he should not have been brought to trial for using outlawed WMDs in that war?
“KLWESO” A delightful little piece “… there’s no ‘f’ in onions!” is a gem.
Now to the main thing: I liked your article, Guy, and don’t find the typos as troubling as some. I’m from the UK (1966) and still love the old place, but it doesn’t need Tony Blair’s delusions of grandeur. What I would like Britain to do is appreciate that its great days are well and truly over, disentangle itself from the USA and become a true part of Europe — Euro and all. In time this would probably mean an end to the monarchy, which is a sad, but that is likely to quite a time away.
Blair has looked more like an actor than a politician for a long time (however, most successful pollies have the actor in them to a large degree) and it is a shame the Chilcot panel didn’t press him harder on those matters where he was weakest (eg: the illegality of the war; why Lord Goldsmith changed his mind; what role the Israelis played in it all; Saddam’s non-existent WMD and ignoring the UN inquiry into them).
how do you explain that Saddam was good fellow when he was fighting IRAN,we (the West)more than likely supplied the gas,and bringing Isreal into this given the attempted mass murder of Palestinians by the State,and the Settler movement is a bit silly.
We might like like Saddam but we liked him enough to arm him,theres a lot in the Mid East who should be fronting War crimes tribunals but I bet they wont Blair Howard Bush and the heads of a couple of Mid East states.
It would have been a very sensible move to rid Iraq of Saddam if there was a better than 50/50 chance his replacement would have been significantly better. The problem is that the middle east is not a region renowned for benevolent dictatorships let alone benevelont democracies. For every man like Saddam there are a thousand replacements equally bad. All the invasion of Iraq did was to kill thousands of innocents, provide ample demonstation to Iraq that they needed to “tool up” and to demonstrate once again to the Arab World that the US, Britain and the other coalition of the willing members think the Arabs are second or is it third class citizens. Well done Tony! Well done George.
You can understand George doing something so silly, but Blair? So much for an Oxford Education.
Robert Fisk in his book ‘The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East’ makes an interesting point about this morally bankrupt duo.
…..The coalescence of Bush’s born-again Christianity with Blair’s High Church pronouncements-and the unique combination of Blair’s own self-righteousness and legal casuistry-was to produce one of the strangest alliances of our times’.
He then goes on to say the joint declaration ‘can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage’.
John Howard does not rate a mention in this massive book. Yet legion are the Australians who believe our fifth-rate little PM did the right thing in joining us to this squalid pact.
There is no God and there is no justice.
Well said, Venise! The blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and thousands of military personnel rests squarely on the heads of Bush and Blair. Blair is simply a sanctimonious warmonger.
As others have said, riddled with typos and spelling errors, but the worst was near the start. The placards did NOT say “Blair” with a blood spot where the “a” is, but Bliar. Did your sub assume this was a misspelling? I can’t imagine Guy getting it wrong.
I cannot understand why Chilcot (apart from being on first name/will ye have another glass terms) allowed BLiar to continue lying, dissembling, obfuscating &, did i mention, LYING?
“..after 9/11 it was clear we couldn’t allow dictators to have WMD..” ..errr.. such as domestic airliners?
“..we could not allow dictators to give WMD (see above) to terrorists..”
So on both major ‘defences’ the swine was shown to be delusional at best, deceptive in the commonly understood meaning, and a mendacious, obfuscating, dissembling dirtbag to anyone with doubkle digit IQ.
And still we vote for them. Hiya Krudd, care to give us YOUR defence?
At his trial, Saddam Hussein was also defiant and unapologetic. I don’t see any difference between Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein. They both killed thousands and believed they were right in doing so. What is disappointing for me was that so many so called leaders, including our own, John Howard, supported Tony Blair and George W Bush in their illegal invasion of Iraq. Don’t expect Kevin Rudd to call any inquiry, if he were leader of the Opposition then, he would have supported the invasion too.
@Frank
I think you’re being a bit too simplistic about Blair - although I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Mad rushes into foolish wars are sadly not a rarity in history so overdoing the psychoanalysis of the individuals involved perhaps doesn’t serve much purpose.
Still I especially liked the “the simple emptiness that attends him, and will take him in the darkness” lines - melodramatic perhaps but sadly also painted an accurate picture that could be applied to lots of other people besides Mr Blair; not all of who had the chance to help start a war, but probably would have if they could have.
Having said that, I’d be interested in seeing a source for the quote attributed to Lloyd George about sacking Churchill because he was continually “getting out his maps.” I hadn’t seen that before and attempts at Googling a range of variations didn’t get me anywhere - not that Google is the sole avenue for accessing humanity’s full repository of knowledge, but I’d be interested to see a clear source/context.
Andrew: yes I wondered about LG sacking Churchill too-given that Churchill was Sec State for War after WWI and then the colonies, losing his seat in 1922. Churchill was all for “strangling the Bolsheviks in the cradle”of course, which pissed off LG and the country. I did see one ref to “getting out his maps” on some semi-literate website, in relation to Russia.
As for “overdoing the psychoanalysis”, normally psychologistic determinism is a cop- out, but in this case Blair’s personality is crucial. In Britain around the time he was elected, I couldn’t believe my old Labor friends (many ex-Trots) were so enamoured of him. OK, after the Kinnock debacle, Thatcher etc, they craved change and Tone was young and affable. I saw a devious fox-faced rat, a natural Tory with no Conservative prospects. Add the voracious lawyer-wife, insufficient means and there’s a recipe for ruthless, unprincipled ambition. Remember the flats in Bristol, the huge mortgage in town.. Now the conversion to Catholicism, conveniently delayed while in office…Bush and the Pope. Blair’s dependence was on ultimate sources of power.
Forget Rundle’s excruciating poseprose, portraying Blair as a late Victorian imperialist intent on farting around with tribal fiefdoms etc is simply ridiculous. He answered his master’s voice, that’s all. Without 9/11, no Churchillian adventures. Everyone knows, not least Blair himself, that without Iraq he’d be remembered as a tolerable if icky PM, not the war criminal he is. Out, damned spot!
STEPHEN WONG: How dare you be so utterly right/correct.
FranC - that’s “..flats in BATH.” helpfully negotitated by our very own fraudster Peter Forster. I also recall BLiar’s ascendancy, after the sudden death of the then Opposition Leadedr John Smith (a bland, seat warmer, like JohnPaul I - barely made 33 days).
Having never heard of him myself, I was guided by the Beeb’s commentariat that, like Klinton, he was an utterly amoral, smarmy, unprincipled, glib speechifier (with ne’er a verb to be heard) but, at that sad time, to rescue Britain from the wreckage of Mrs T and John Minor, Beelzebub would have been welcomed. Which is who they got.
Funniest was listening to those same commentators turn Blairite, almost overnight, then watch that delusion gradually drop away when their better natures finally overcame pragmatism.
God you’re right AR, I’d forgotten…as if the Bliars would buy flats in gritty Bristol. Genteel Bath it was. And Peter Forster, yes! Cherie’s preference for astrological nutters also comes to mind….
“Deeply unpleasant” is Guy Rundle’s summary of his encounter with the Balir appearance. I’d use the same phrase for Guy’s article. He repeats the big Lie of the Left - Blair’s “Saddam was a monster because he killed thousands of civilians” whereas the Coalition’s killing of similar or greater numbers was “doing what had to be done.” If you compare the numbers, I think Saddam was way ahead and those killed post-invasion were not by Coalition slaughter but by various insurgent groups. The Left perpetuates a myth that post-invasion slaughter was done by us - a dreadful Lie. Breaching Iraq’s sovereignty got rid of a dreadful dictator - a good thing.
@John: Are you saying Saddam *didn’t* kill thousands of civilians?
Great article Mr Rundle, the truth of the invasion as ever concealed, congealed and now going utterly unpunished.
“Exterminate the brutes.”