Tony Blair: Prophet of Peace

'9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arab revolutions, Iran, Syria, Egypt, the spread of terror based on religious extremism – surely we can begin to see common threads in all of this..'

Writing in The Observer,  Tony Blair is interested, as he always was, in 'framing' the issues in order to look as though he were a skilled diplomat or 'expert' on Middle Eastern affairs. He was not as Prime Minister of Britain and he is clearly is not now. He is only updating his 'analysis' so as to better stay in the global media spotlight.

As such, when Blair writes on the Middle East, he has always one eye on maintaining his 'credibility' as regards the 'difficult decisions' he took when he was in office. After all, if Blair had not been Prime Minister of Britain he would not be Special Envoy for the Middle East Quartet

In many ways Blair is still trying to redraft History and his part in it. The paragraph below shows how he tries to seamlessly integrate his decision to join the US invasion of Iraq as a measure that only facilitated a change that was historically inevitable anyhow in the decade between 2003 to the present.

'It is now clear that the status quo in the region will not hold. The idea of the "strong man" government that keeps order, and that the rest of the world likes to deal with because it is predictable, has gone. It doesn't matter whether the "strong man" is of the psychopathic variety, such as Saddam, or the moderate variety, such as Hosni Mubarak, who kept peace in the region. This is the 21st century and the people want to shape their nation's politics. The choice is between evolution and revolution. It is equally clear: evolution is definitely preferable if it is attainable. Frankly, it would have been better in Syria.'

Blair is able to smooth over his role in backing Mubarak and praising him fulsomely before he was deposed as part of his 'realism' in dealing with dictators on the basis of whether they could preserve 'stability'. The contrast being set up here is with Saddam who was a pyschopath and who did not promote peace and stability.

Blair is attempting here to suggest that subsequent world leaders who see hope in the transition from dictatorship to democracy ( though there shall be, no doubt, a rocky "road map" ahead ) are essentially in continuity with Blair's earlier attempt to push that inexorable historical process forwards.

Blair's line over Iraq a decade on is that he knew there was a will amongst the Iraqi people to progress towards democracy. Even if people did not agree with Blair's decision on Iraq, his position, as set out in Tony Blair : A Journey, is that he could only act as he believed was right in the circumstances.

Indeed, his autobiography is interesting in that he requests that people consider that the jury is out with regards whether the invasion was right or wrong according to its consequences. That is why Blair, when faced with fresh evidence of rising sectarian violence, grasps at any evidence that there are 'hopes' for peace

'...even here, there was recently a seminal statement from Najaf by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al–Sistani, the most influential Shia cleric in Iraq, proclaiming the need for a civil, not religious state, in which all people had equal freedom to participate and disagreeing with those close to Iran who want Shia to go to Syria to fight for Assad alongside Hezbollah'.

Bizarrely, Blair seems to be rather like those true believers in communism in the 1930s who could not accept that the revolutionary project they had given their lives to had failed and caused massive bloodshed. Indeed, Blair is on the record as admiring Isaac Deutscher's 'Prophet' biographies of Leon Trotsky.

But this is less strange than it seems. Blair's 'liberal interventionism' was closely connected to the ideas buzzing around in the late 1990s and early 2000s about 'left wing cases' for using military force to rid the world of evil totalitarian dictatorships left over after the end of the Cold War.

That moment has now passed into history. Blair is desperately trying to prove his relevance to a 'peace process' in the Middle East and that the invasion of Iraq did not seriously retard that. He knows full well that the crisis in Syria is all the worse because the Iraq War let the sectarian genie out of the bottle.

The Iraq War also allowed Al Qaida to gain a foothold in the heart of the Middle East. It led to the creation of thousands of battle hardened jihadists, many of whom are now in Libya and many who have migrated to Syria. It made a bad situation worse and, ultimately, could now destabilise the entire Arab world.

No matter how Blair tries to even spin his role in history, his malign place in it both in Britain and the Middle East was assured by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All Blair's attempts to fit the history of Iraq into a narrative of continuity in line with the subsequent history of the Arab Spring after 2011 is futile retrospin.

Ten years ago, it was the renowned historian of World War II, Richard Overy, who recognised Blair's illegal war for what it was at the time and who provided a real first draft of history against Blair's deranged vision that he and the Bush administration in Washington could remake it to order. This is the history that will stand.

History will damn them The Guardian, Saturday 20 March 2004

'War was planned long in advance against a soft Arab target that nobody much liked. The intelligence services knew that they were being asked to endorse fairy tales. The attorney general has come clean on how he was forced to turn an illegal war into a lawful war of defence against the Iraqi threat. The duplicity was systematic, and remains so. Blair has no regrets. He bays defiant nonsense about the terrible menace that has been removed, and the greater terrorist menace still at large. Not once has he expressed regret for what a dozen years of sanctions and war inflicted on the Iraqi people. Enough that his cause is just.

The view that oil is some kind of Marxist red herring is widespread. But in this case there can be no other conclusion. Oil installations and oil lines were captured and guarded first; the oil ministry was protected while priceless art treasures were being ransacked. The second largest oil reserves are now safe once again for the wider world market and the global oil companies. Popular ignorance about the nature of oil politics has played into coalition hands, just as popular indifference to the use of major US companies in rebuilding what the US armed forces knocked down has deflected debate from issues that should shock international opinion.

The most familiar argument in favour of the war, repeated mantra-like in all circles, is that a much-hated dictator has been overthrown. This week's opinion poll purports to show how grateful the Iraqis now are for their liberation. No one would wish Saddam Hussein back. The problem is that the reason for going to war was quite different. If unseating tyrants was the priority, Saddam should have been unseated long ago. War in 2003 was about protecting British and American interests, not liberating Iraq, a posture of self-interest rather than magnanimity. This was the same motive for declaring war on Hitler in 1939. It was not dictators that the west could not stomach, but the threat to their interests and way of life (again). 

In this sense, the analogy drawn last year that Saddam had to be confronted like Hitler was truer than might have been supposed. Parliament was bamboozled into accepting that Saddam posed an immediate threat to Britain. There were honourable motives for declaring war on Hitler, as there are for unseating Saddam, but that is not what, a year ago, we were offered. Liberation was the means to dress war up as legitimate. So much so that there must be a large number in Britain and the US who think that unseating Saddam really was the reason that war began.

One more battery turns on the anti-war lobby: look at Madrid, look at the daily attacks in Iraq or Israel. Blair was right. Terrorism is the chief threat we face, and the war against terror must unite us all. This has little to do with Iraq. Attacks against the occupiers were provoked by war. Attacks in Israel are part of a different struggle for Palestinian liberation. The assault in Madrid is part of a longer confrontation between militant Islam and western cultural and economic imperialism. Lumping them all together as evidence that a war against terror is the primary object of our foreign policy is nonsense'

This comprehensively destroys anything that Blair has subsequently offered as an attempt to justify his 'role' in history as ultimately benign. The only pity is that Blair will, very likely, never go to an international court to stand trial for his crimes. History, though, will damn him.

Blair is already feeling and fearing the judgement of posterity. He is a haunted man. No amount of self exculpation or rationalisation for the premeditated and illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, no amount of trying to play a 'positive role' now as Special Envoy, is going to make up for the barbarity he unleashed.

Tony Blair: Failed Statesman

Tony Blair's role as a Special Envoy to the Middle East is bound to continue to grate with those for whom the duplicitous case for war that he spun in the run up to the invasion of Iraq discredited Britain; the war led to more deaths than would have otherwise happened and wasted billions of pounds unnecessarily.

Blair's attempt to offer a running diplomatic assessment of what is happening in the Middle East is about justifying his role. But it is also about using 'public diplomacy' to spin the line that his decision to 'intervene' in Iraq, no matter the controversies about whether it was 'right', has to be seen in a longer historical perspective.

There is no other interpretation that could explain what Blair means when he declares,

'...counter-intuitive though it is to say so, underneath all the turmoil, the fundamental problems of the region are finally being brought to the surface in a way that allows them to be confronted and overcome. For us, now is the time not for despair, but for active engagement'.

In fact, nowhere does Blair outline what sort of intervention he has in mind for Syria. Nor does he ( because he can't ) mention the obvious truth that the West is already intervening covertly in Syria by having the CIA funnel arms to the 'rebels' from the Balkans, Turkey and Jordan.

The only silver lining for Blair is that he can now present Syria as a sectarian war that would have happened in Iraq anyway whether the US and Britain had invaded or not. This grandstanding olympian 'master of the universe' is simply thinking only of his 'Legacy'.

The fact hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and 179 British troops died needless deaths for nothing is not even the main issue for Blair. He sees these deaths as the birth pangs of a new democratic order being born in the Middle East. Something he needs to believe in to assuage his bad conscience.

But that simply has not happened and cannot under conditions of civil warfare and seething sectarian hatreds that he helped unleash by backing an illegal war. There will be no positive consequences to his decision in 2003. He's was and is a decade on a complete failure as a statesman.

Blair still needs to face facts; the 'living nightmare' he describes in Syria is partly a consequence of Iraq disintegrating into sectarian warfare. It now has a majority Shia government that looks more favourable towards Iran and has interests in allowing Hizbollah and Iranian arms to flow into Syria to back Assad.

That, in turn, is due to the intensified rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran with regards their influence over Syria and potential oil and gas pipelines to the Mediterranean Sea from the Persian Gulf. Iran, Iraq and Syria form a potential Shia axis of powers to rival Sunni dominated states to the south.

But all Blair offers as 'analysis' is the this,,

'..there was recently a seminal statement from Najaf by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al–Sistani, the most influential Shia cleric in Iraq, proclaiming the need for a civil, not religious state, in which all people had equal freedom to participate and disagreeing with those close to Iran who want Shia to go to Syria to fight for Assad alongside Hezbollah'.

The way Blair treats the Middle East and 'his role' is as though he were dealing with Britain and Northern Ireland in 1997. The Middle East is not a region that can have its problems 'solved' by him being some sort of 'good will ambassador' nor offering soundbites that 'frame' what he sees as 'the issues'. Take this,

'Neither do closed economies fit with open societies. The need for economic reform to provide jobs is absolute. A functioning private sector and an education system educating the large young population for a world which today is more inter-connected than ever before are pre-conditional to progress.'

That could have been uttered at any New Labour conference podium in the 1990s. It is Blair that has not learnt that it is 'time to move on'. At least Antony Eden resigned after the Suez fiasco in 1956 and quietly retired to the countryside until his death two decades later.

Blair is driven by an obsessive need to be active and 'do good' ( as well as make lots of money ) because he sees it as a sign of his continued success and providential mission. The best thing he could do is to get out of public life. He is a curious relic of the age of delusion in the 1990s.

Thoughts on the Danger History as History as Propaganda.

Novelist AK Kennedy has written in relation to government plans to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War that she does not believe it will be free from being used to bolster current government policies,

One of the world's major arms exporters would find it tricky, for example, to really discuss the implications of basing one's economy on equipment that requires war. Meanwhile,the dead become Glorious, the Cenotaph a clean and noble monument. This happens with any war: initially those who can remember may not wish to, witnesses slowly die, politicians love to appropriate the bravery of others. I also know our political classes now take pride in being faith – and not reality-based. In the absence of those who served, they can appropriate a historical event during which (among many other things) under-educated public schoolboys led the suitably enthused masses into harm's way and rebrand it, at public expense, into a degrading force multiplier for armed forces still used as political and economic pawns.

....I have no reason to believe that my current leaders will not do the same next year. It's too late to give the veterans the £10m and they didn't get their land fit for heroes – something approaching that was finally won by the generation who came through the second world war. The last of that inheritance is being sold at bargain rates and citizens are increasingly being offered simplistic spectacle in the place of good governance and public service.

This is what disturbs those who fear this commemoration will become a way of creating some seamless continuity between World War One and Afghanistan with subliminal propaganda messages ( the heroism, dedication of "our boys", etc ) in the very year Britain stages a faked "withdrawal" from Afghanistan.

The fact is that in 2014, Britain is not withdrawing from Afghanistan. The new Orwellian cant term is "drawdown" used by Defence Minister Hammond and others 'on message'. The fact that this is going to be a government sponsored cultural event is also slightly sinister.

"Liberal interventionists" have a history of calling some wars , as World War Two 'the Good War' and comparing that to the Afghanistan War after 2001, at least before such voices advocating it suddenly fell peculiarly silent as the war has dragged on.

In so far as World War Two finished off Hitler it had to be good. Yet history-as-propaganda in an age of continued Blair-like spin and mendacity is something that all British citizens will need to be aware of as Cameron's regime is essentially the same as Blair's and Brown's regime.

The phrase the 'Good War' for World War Two came from A J P Taylor who distinguished it in that sense from the futility of the what was until the Second World War, termed , quite obviously, The Great War. This war could be repackaged to suggest that Afghanistan is in a great tradition of wars we won.

The Conservative columnist Peter Hitchens has already, correctly in my view spoken of the 'religion of World War Two' in British history as it is continually invoked by politicians who know that calling Saddam Hussein a "new Hitler" will resonate with those as a heroic battle of 'us' , that is the always Good, versus the forces of Evil.

Britain is taking from the USA all those aspects of it's imperial history that have been strongly spun into simplistic narratives ( this is one of the few parts of Noam Chomsky's thought that does have credence in regards to the USA and "noble causes", like Vietnam, and it is an important one that should be heeded ).

The rise of public relations and oily spin has now polluted every aspect of Britain's public life. Where once there were real debates over foreign policy in Parliament, Britain has three political parties with virtually no dissent on foreign policy within it's ranks.

A J P Taylor wrote of The Troublemakers who dissented on Britain's foreign policy. The British political system has virtually no dissent now either in Parliament, apart from those who cannot be taken that seriously such as George Galloway who trades on the fact he is not like them and so hardly bothers going in to Parliament.

Groups outside Parliament ( such as the so-called 'Stop The War Coalition' ) who dissent are often dominated by apologists for totalitarian systems and Jihadi Islamism. This means that many in the British public , especially the young, are getting not history lessons-or training in the ability to think independently-but propaganda.

It is a thouroughly depressing situation when events that we are not allowed to talk about this week may have something to do with the fact so many, including politicians in the New Establishment do not care for history or think that it's valuable in schools, are merely pumping out propaganda instead of objective information on wars past and present.