Blair's Speech and the New Great Game.

Tony Blair's speech, as with everything this man utters, is a carefully calibrated public diplomacy missive better called a propaganda offensive. The timing is instructive; Blair is upgrading his profile in the Middle East because the crisis in Ukraine is set to lead to EU states searching for alternative energy sources.

It was interesting that Blair claimed the Ukraine Crisis would distract attention away from the Middle East. And why his fellow strategist and sinister operative John McTernan is 'on message' to explain just what Blair meant to those who could regard him as an important critic of Western foreign policy.

As is standard with propaganda, words and meaning must be prized apart from their conventional uses

'Libya and Syria are at the heart of Blair's argument: action started by this government but left incomplete. The passage on Syria is a direct attack on Cameron and Nick Clegg, and their inaction'.

Firstly, the Coalition government were not 'inactive' over Syria. They continually called for Assad 'to go'. Sarkozy set up the Friends of Syria group in Istanbul in 2012 to create a unified opposition with the intention of ousting Assad and installing a client state.

Secondly, Britain and France in particular were highly active in agitating for a missile strike on Syria, far more so even than a more energy independent 'post shale revolution 'USA. Their main client in the Middle East is Qatar which is in rivalry to build a pipeline from the South Pars gasfield which it shares with Iran.

Britain and France have increasingly sought to diversify the gas supply away from dependence upon Russia. One reason why Qatar's copious production of liquefied natural gas is a lucrative opportunity whereby its petrodollars from selling it get invested in the London and Paris property market and arms.

'Not a defence of liberal intervention, but a scrupulous account of the costs of doing nothing – particularly where the coalition has called for regime change. And, typically, looking at the bigger picture. The Middle East matters.. It matters because of oil and gas and our economic dependence on them'.

That statement matters. Essentially, with Russia and the US in a dangerous stand off over Ukraine, like Syria another pipeline transit route between east and west, Blair is trying to revive the idea that democratising the Middle East could provide EU states with better energy security.

Yet 'liberal intervention' was what was on offer when NATO facilitated the victory over the Gaddafi regime in Libya and what was on offer with the West's humanitarian concern over the East Ghouta gas attack in Syria. The reason no action was taken in Syria was increased concern over Al Qaida's presence.

The Libyan intervention made a bad situation worse. It enabled Gadaffi to be removed only for immediate ( and highly predictable ) squabbles over Libya's oil production capacity to divide the rebels ensuring another failed attempt at regime change backfired.

Now jihadists from Libya are known to have gone to Syria. The danger is, should Egypt fall into increased chaos, that the entire Maghreb could become a zone of carnage and bloodshed. Al Qaida affiliates are already operating in the Sinai Peninsula and fighting the Egyptian military.

As in Syria, the reality in Egypt was that the US and US tacitly accepted a military coup, even if the Muslim Brotherhood's bungling policies and attempts at institutional takeover has divided Egypt and led it even further towards economic and political collapse.

The Western Powers need to stop pretending that they can control events in the Middle East. Energy security has to be attained by decisive policies to move away from the great car economy and to find alternatives to oil and gas as well as dealing cautiously with Russia over Ukraine.

Blair's understanding on the Middle East is both simplistic and deranged. But his siren calls for radical and decisive action and drawing up of cosmic battle lines between Good and Evil remain potentially lethal if politicians and the media hail it as delivering a solution to an a looming energy security crisis.

Tony Blair: Fictions and Contradictions.

'Tony Blair's speech this week at Bloomberg in London reveals a growing support for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. A decade ago, Blair was justifying wars in the Middle East on the grounds that they would launch a democratic revolution and sweep away Arab despots'.The hypocrisy of Tony Blair's Middle East vision Arun Kundnari, Guardian 24 April 2014)

To point to Blair's hypocrisy is to state the obvious. The question few journalists ever bother dealing with is why western politicians have held to such double standards. With Blair, the criticism even in 2003 was about why remove Saddam in Iraq but then back Saudi Arabia's despotic theocratic state.

The reason is western energy security, that is access to oil and gas reserves in a world of rapidly industrialising Great Power rivals to both the US and EU states, not least that of China, India, and, partly, Russia. With supplies of oil struggling to keep pace with global demand a resource race is on.

The Second Iraq War in 2003 was launched with reasons that had nothing to do with the cosmic battle between 'extremist Islamism' and the forces for secular democracy. By getting rid of Saddam Hussein, Blair seems to have believed it would trigger off a domino effect with neighbouring states.

The plan was for a sucessful model democracy to act as a force for democratisation across the Middle East. If Blair could be criticised for that, and what went catastrophically wrong, then it is hardly surpising he has now had to go back on that and pose as a wise realist in 2014.

The shift in Blair's 'thinking' is, as always, explained by his need to reposition himself and to rationalise to himself and the media classes why the Iraq War was 'the right thing to do' and that it was 'extremist Islamism' and a violent jihadist death cult that unexpectedly wrecked his plans for Iraq.

It's difficult to understand why Arun Kundnani is so surprised that Blair has 'embraced Arab despots whose regimes, he says, are necessary bulwarks against Islamism'. In Egypt, Blair regards the coup as a military takeover, a transitional stage in a longer term democratic process.

To a certain extent, Blair is embarrassing the Western powers by using his international public position as Special Envoy to the Quartet to be so forthright in his support for the Egyptian coup. The position is largely meant to be a useless and token one for Blair to occupy. and he's largely detested by both sides.

Elsewhere, Blair has not, in fact, embraced the Syrian government as a defence against Islamism. On the contrary, Blair states not that 'Assad must go' but that he 'should go' after an agreement has been made between the two sides. However,

'Should even this not be acceptable to him, we should consider active measures to help the Opposition and force him to the negotiating table, including no fly zones whilst making it clear that the extremist groups should receive no support from any of the surrounding nations'.

Blair has not 'embraced' Assad but is emitting vague and obliquely menacing messages about 'the Opposition' having 'fissures and problems around elements within', meaning, in ordinary language, that the insurgents contain violent jihadists affiliated to Al Qaida and other Islamists.

Naturally, Blair cannot use the term 'extremist Islamists' to a significant part of the Free Syrian Army because that would mean admitting the West has backed the very 'extremists' Blair has condemned elsewhere in Egypt, most obviously the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

'Islamist extremism' is a conveniently flexible propaganda term. 'Extreme' means against Western strategy, in particular the oil and gas interests Britain has in Egypt and in the Syrian Civil War where it backs Qatar and Turkey who, in turn, fund and support the Muslim Brotherhood.

In order to get around that obvious fact, Blair uses the term 'extremist groups' to insinuate that he could mean those being backed by Saudi Arabia in their proxy war against regional  rival in Shia Iran. Only he could not mention it by name, so it could be taken to mean only Iran and its ally in Lebanon's Hizbollah.

These foreign policy contortions, the use of abstract language and a simplified worldview are a means by which Blair can make himself useful in 'framing the debate'. Whether it bears any connection to reality is not so important as 'shifting perceptions' in the west as regards the Muslim World.

Partly, Blair wants to rehabilitate his image by claiming what happened in Iraq would have happened anyway after the Arab Spring just as it has unfolded in Syria. To 'engage' and 'commit' to intervention earlier, as he was in Iraq, would have prevented massacre and carnage. He needs people to 'believe' this.

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Responses and Replies,

In part I think he is trying to "frame the debate" so as to move the focus before Chilcot reports. I think that he also realises that western policy has got itself into a dead end in the region as the contradictions have become too obvious (particularly in Syria). Blair seems to think that he has to help to resolve some of those contradictions, by hinting at the problem of jihadis in Syria and the amount of support they have received from Saudi Arabia. Western policy makers cannot go on pretending that these problems don't exist - they have become too obvious and it is an embarrassment that western pronouncements ignore them. Yet Blair has framed them in a way that doesn't shine too much light on them (and doesn't say much about what to do about them).

The contortions are obvious, but western policies in the region are full of contradictions. A few contortions are necessary to resolve some of those contradictions. Blair is unaccountable, so he doesn't have to admit that what he is saying now contradicts what he said 12 years ago.

Blair would have us believe that had the western powers took decisive military intervention from the outset of the Syrian conflict, by using air power as in Libya, then Assad could have been removed before Al Qaida had a chance to exploit the chaos caused by civil war.

The point Blair misses is that the western powers ( the US, France and UK ) were active and engaged in trying to get Assad to go by supporting Arab backers of 'the Opposition' through the Friends of Syria Group. They made it plain 'regime change' was the goal.

The mistake was not in refusing to use decisive military intervention. Blair only claims that to make his decision to join the US invasion of Iraq one of many decisions about the problem of action or inaction which both can have bad consequences in his view.

Had the western powers carried out a Libyan style air campaign against Assad, the result would have been similar-chaos.Ground troops, i.e a full scale invasion, would not have been on the cards as Syria has little oil and the Iraq invasion had discredited that option.

Blair's entire screed is based on a mixture of geopolitical fantasy and retrospective wish thinking, 'if only' this or that would have been done and attention and commitment paid to the Middle East it would not be in the mess it's in now.

'I'm surprised that Blair and others in the West haven't begun arguing more openly for the need to fight for resources (strategic interests) instead of camouflaging it with other agendas (fighting extremism, promoting democracy etc.). He did refer to this in this speech, but that has largely been ignored in the media'.

Blair did refer to it in passing and, at least, mentioned it as one very important factor why the Middle East matters. The media ignored it because it routinely screens out any mention of the role of natural resources in driving conflicts before the public.

There is a sort of taboo on mentioning minerals, oil and gas. Partly so as not to 'rock the boat' and also because an advanced consumer society could not function without access to the relatively cheap oil and gas that fuels the economy and high octane lifestyle western nations are accustomed to.

That basic reality has to be denied because, humans can only bear so much reality' and so a sort of geopolitical wish thinking takes over and predatory struggles over resources have to be seen as secondary to ennobling causes such as 'democracy promotion' and 'our values'.

This does not mean western politicians such as Blair do not mean that they believe western military intervention is not about spreading democracy, the rule of law and human rights. It is just that when energy security is threatened, these get sacrificed.

Tony Blair; The "Great Persuader"

The thing that interests me about Blair's career since stepping down as British PM is whether his obsessive activism is not just all about his egotism and vanity only, as well as his attempt to safeguard a 'legacy' for himself in history but also about a man disturbed by the calamitous decision to invade Iraq.

Some say Blair is just a 'sociopath', 'warmonger', 'evil' etc . It seems to me that he really does have some sort of a bad conscience. His pose now ( as set out in his Tony Blair : A Journey ) is to take on the 'burden of his agony' for that decision in 2003 and ask others to see it from his perspective.

Blair was always sinister, in that sense, from the outset. He cultivated the idea he was an 'ordinary sort of guy' who had to learn on the job, someone determined to do his duty as PM but somehow slightly lonely and having to make hard decisions such as Iraq he never really wanted to.

Blair is still asking people to collude in the reality as he saw and sees it which is strange. Why does it matter to him so much now that he is no longer in power ? He still has his various projects referred to under the title The Office of Tony Blair., a ghostly remnant of a faded power that won't give itself up.

Under the section 'biography' on his website, he not only lists his current missions but also '50 acheivements' that New Labour had under Blair's time as PM. The mission is always ongoing, going onwards from the domestic stage and always upwards into a broader global one.

Iraq has been downgraded as something he claims no longer feels the need to justify. The facts are mostly established. After two public enquiries, he has nothing left to answer for and so history will judge him. But , if so, he seems to use every opportunity to use his 'office' to put a retrospective gloss on Iraq.

I think J G Ballard grasped an important truth about Blair when he wrote in May 2005,

'I like Blair but I think he is dangerous, with his actor's sincerity that hides a hysterical personality and a talent for drawing everyone into his make-believe world. The Iraq war was only one of a series of huge self-deceptions in which we have willingly colluded, in the way that a bored and restless congregation incites an evangelical preacher.

I'm uneasy with the Downing Street apparatus that has assembled itself around him, a public relations firm pretending to be a brainier, British White House. Blair is our president, but he has little real power. The inertial forces that lock Britain into its past are too great for him, and all the levers in his hands have snapped.

I'm sure Blair took us into Iraq because he was flattered to be summoned from the lower school and invited into the senior prefect's study. Bush and the neo-cons are driven by emotion, and this appeals to Blair. The emotions are the one language that he understands, and reality is defined by what he feels he ought to believe. He commands no battle groups, and Britain's per capita income is one of the lowest in western Europe. Without the largely foreign-owned City of London the whole country would be a suburb of Longbridge, retraining as an offshore call-centre servicing the Chinese super-economy.'

Part of it is that Britain is in an anachronistic position as a permanent UN security council member, a role it has because of its status in 1945 and one that persists in completely different world. Blair embodied British delusions of power and influence to an extreme degree. .

But why are people still buying into them ? Who really is backing Blair exactly? Why are his banal injunctions even heeded or listened to ? Is he really taken seriously by anyone ? If not why is he still around ? Here are some recent pearls of wisdom that illuminate the challenges of leadership we face as the 21st century unfolds...

They were made at the 5th Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem,

"The person running to be leader has to be the Great Persuader"

"Leaders have to communicate; but the final judgement on their leadership is not about what they say, but what they do."

"Leaders are decision makers and takers" 

"Leadership is always about taking responsibility when others would shrink from it; about stepping out and not stepping back."

"Everywhere you look there is uncertainty, unpredictability and instability."

"it’s a lot easier to give the advice than take the decision!". 

"Stick with what you believe. Lead from a point of principle. Because the conventional wisdom of today may be the disposable folly of tomorrow.". 

"Democracy is a way of deciding who are the decision makers; it can’t substitute for the decisions....It means religion in its proper place with a voice but not a veto".

"The good news is that the lesson of what works in government is clear. The hard part is applying it.".

"..we should understand: the window of opportunity will be open for only a short space of time. We must go through it together. If not the window will close again and could even close forever. Time is not our friend. This is urgent. This is now. And it is a time for statesmen not politicians."

It's the same mantra he was banging out back in 1997. Blair used to like the phrase 'it's time to move on' when he wanted to distract attention away from some problematic or controversial issue. But it seems there will never be a time for him to move on from Iraq any more until the day he dies.

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.

Tony Blair and Egypt.

Tony Blair's ideas on Syria and Egypt and the Middle East generally are interesting in that they have tended to be largely about maintaining his position as a 'great statesman' and to fit in with his attempt to safeguard his 'legacy' over the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

Given the scale of the catastrophe in Iraq and the recent resurgence of sectarian conflict there, Blair has continually sought to frame events in Syria and now Egypt through the lens of an 'extremism' versus 'stability' paradigm in which both are defined according purely to propaganda need.

As Blair opines today in The Observer,

'The events that led to the Egyptian army's removal of President Mohamed Morsi confronted the military with a simple choice: intervention or chaos. Seventeen million people on the streets are not the same as an election. But it as an awesome manifestation of power'.

Blair's 'thinking' usually boils down to a series of binary choices in which the alternative is 'unthinkable'. This was quite clear in his approach to the decision to invade Iraq where he kept repeating the line that 'inaction is an option' and, therefore, his decision to act was 'right'.

Actually, in Egypt the military takeover was not a 'simple choice' because it could force the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood to give up the ballot box in favour of armed struggle. There is no room in Blair's worldview for subtlety. Nor are his pronouncements, supporting what many see as a coup, at all diplomatic.

The idea that to overthrow an elected president with 51% of the vote by force was 'a simple choice' is curiously contradicted later when Blair offers another timeless gem of political wisdom-"We have to take decisions for the long term because short term there are no simple solutions". 

Given that Blair is manifestly supporting a coup, given that he thinks the Egyptian army should retain control until it decides the economy is sufficiently strong for the army to decide to tolerate democracy again. that acts as a ringing endorsement for authoritarianism.

After all, Blair has quite obviously hinted that the military takeover is a decision for the 'long term' . As a Special Envoy for the Middle East Quartet, Blair could prove an embarrassment for the US and UK governments. They have said as little as possible about the army's action through fear of being seen to back a coup

Indeed, the US funds the Egyptian army to a tune of $1.5bn, something that is technically illegal, and does not want to be seen as meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state to suppress democracy should events spiral out of control as Muslim Brotherhood supporters get more irate about their president being toppled.

For Blair interventions that are deemed to uphold 'stability' ( as his too from Afghanistan to Iraq were ceaselessly presented ) are the opposite of those interventions by chaotic 'extremists'. That is useful if the blame for the carnage in Iraq is to be shifted away from the decision to invade that unleashed it.

That is why Blair writes,

'...when we contemplate the worst that can happen, we realise that it is unacceptable.We could end up with effective partition of the country, with a poor Sunni state to the east, shut out from the sea and the nation's wealth, and run by extremists.Lebanon would be totally destabilised; Iraq further destabilise'.

Just as the progress to democracy in Iraq was hindered by 'extremists', Blair is trying portray the intervention by Hizbollah and Iran in Syria in the same oversimplified light while failing to mention that Sunni Islamist insurgents fighting against Assad include the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood !

So Blair's call for more 'intervention' in Syria to support the anti-Assad Sunni insurgents is obviously contradicted by him having just supported what many would see as a coup to get rid of the the Muslim Brotherhood, the erstwhile allies of those he's demanded be backed in Syria.

Moreover, the stupidity of the supposed advocacy of tough minded 'realpolitik' now is quite obvious when it is considered that one reason Iran is able to aid the Shia is because Maliki's Shia regime in Baghdad sympathetic to Tehran and allowing Iraqi airspace to be used for arms to be shipped to prop up Assad.

And this geopolitical fact is one longer term consequence of the invasion of Iraq in empowering Iran and the Shia majority via their Islamist parties, something to be swept aside by Blair by the selective deployment of the word 'extremism', a rhetorical trick used also by the current Foreign Minister William Hague.

As "analysis" Blair's is next to useless. As a supposed diplomat, Blair's intervention here is even rather damaging because a Special Envoy for the West he is almost explicitly suggesting he'd rather there was military rule to preserve order until such a time as the economy improved as democracy can be allowed again.

After all, Blair does not seem to be impressed even by the secular opposition to the dictator Mubarak

'I remember an early conversation with some young Egyptians shortly after President Mubarak's downfall. They believed that, with democracy, problems would be solved. When I probed on the right economic policy for Egypt, they simply said that it would all be fine because now they had democracy it was well to the old left of anything that had a chance of working'.

Blair is officially titled a Special Envoy but he comes across as more of a Special Pleader for Western interests first and foremost over that of a considerable number of people of the Middle East. As with Britain itself 'the people' are to be listened to only when their aspirations coincide with what he decides is 'right'.

 'I am a strong supporter of democracy. But democratic government doesn't on its own mean effective government. Today, efficacy is the challenge'.

If that means a coup by the Egyptian military, so be it. It may well be what Blair wants and many, including the Egyptian protesters, were right about the incompetence and creeping Islamisation agenda of the Morsi government. Yet Blair is supposed to be a diplomat brining a 'peace process' to the Middle East.

The Middle East is a complicated region. Blair is not intelligent or knowledgeable enough to understand it or play a constructive part in its affairs. It is far more complicated that Northern Ireland. Blair should be dropped as Special Envoy where he can only do more harm and inflame opinion.

Everything Blair does and everything he writes seems to be more about Him and His Role in History. The man is quite clearly haunted by his role in the catastrophe in Iraq and needs to keep rationalising the decision to invade both to himself and before others.

Even on the grounds of Blair's supposed expertise in 'public diplomacy',his interventions are unhelpful and foolish, an attempt to present himself as 'decisive' as opposed to both current incumbents in the White House and Downing Street. Blair still seems to be deluded that he has some sort of power to shape events.

Iraq and Blair Ten Years On

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair is still trying to justify his decision to join George W Bush in what proved to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in recent British history.

More concerned with his place in History than the Blair's spurious grasp of events merely seems to be a concocted series of 'what ifs' and prely hypothetical conjecture. He stated on Iraq,

“If we hadn’t removed Saddam from power just think, for example, what would be happening if these Arab revolutions were continuing now and Saddam, who’s probably 20 times as bad as Assad in Syria, was trying to suppress an uprising in Iraq. Think of the consequences of leaving that regime in power".

It's amazing how Blair has a clairvoyant talent to know what "would have" happened if he "hadn't" invaded. It may help him to sleep a bit better at night but it is not persuasive as an argument to anyone who isn't Blair or a fanatic acolyte of this deranged creature.

Not least if you lie to yourself about the sum total of dead being 100,000 as opposed to the real figure which is about 600,000 or even over 1 million dead according to the peer reviewed Lancet Report. And then ignore real statistical facts by conjuring up one about Saddam being '20 times' worse than Assad.

'I’ve long since given up in trying to persuade people it was the right decision. In a sense what I try to persuade people of now is to understand how complex and difficult a decision it was...Because I think if we don’t understand that, we won’t take the right decision about what I think will be a series of these types of problems that will arise over the next few years....You’ve got one in Syria right now, you’ve got one in Iran to come. The issue is how do you make the world a safer place?"

How can Blair claim it was a "complex decision" when it was quite clear from the evidence he had already made up his mind to join the US invasion of Iraq as far back as 2002 when he met Bush at Crawford and looked at maps of Iraq's oil wealth  ? ( see Strachan's The Last Oil Shock )

Blair kept repeating he invaded because "it was the right thing to do" when quite clearly the decision has led to more deaths than otherwise would have happened. So he has had to give up justifying the war and shifted to an attempt to justify being in the position of having to make a decision.

Instead of being asked to look at evidence and facts, the public, even presuming many even bother listening to this has-been, are being asked to empathise with his anxiety over the war, even if one "disagrees" with it, an attempt to accrue to himself a form of integrity he never had at any time in his wretched failed career.  

Blairs words are not the words of a leader with a grasp of complexity nor even any substantial knowledge of the history of Iraq and the sectarian and ethnic tensions that were always likely to emerge on getting rid of this dictator and, as it turned out, having no coherent plan for a post-Saddam Iraq.

If the decision was so "complex" you would have though he'd have taken consideration of that. Yet, as with everything Blair says, the point is all about how he would be able to put the point across because he would be bound to be misunderstood.

Yet Blair, who now in 2013 wants to portray the decision as agonising and complex, presented the decision back in 2003 to invade Iraq as a stark binary choice: "either" we get rid of Saddam Hussein "or" he poses a real threat to us and his peopl ( hence the misinformation about WMD's, the 45 minute warning ).

Blair's career is entirely one of bad acting and wish thinking. His political line tends to shift and change according to the message he wishes to convey. A decade on, and he has learnt nothing. As is clear from the threat to Iran embedded in the line it is a 'problem' that is to 'come'.

Blair's entire "career" since he left office has been one long post ex-facto rationalisation for his role in unleashing carnage in Iraq. His hyperactive fidgety inability to clear off the global stage is possibly due to his colossal vanity.

The interesting question is whether Blair has a conscience over Iraq or whether he's even faking that in order to preserve his public image as a 'statesman'. From the contrived speech after Princess Diana's death in 1997 and his use of 'the people', from the outset Blair was a dangerous fraud.

The Case Against Tony Blair.

Evidently, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was one of controlling Iraqi oil and removing the over dependence of the USA and UK on a Saudi regime that was looking more unstable. The foreign policy of the USA has increasingly been based on diversifying supplies of oil as documented in Michael T Klare's seminal Blood and Oil.

The continual shifting between moral and legal precepts to rationalise the invasion are relevant only in trying to absolve Blair from the notion of intentionality as regards the crime of aggression. The fact that insurgents murdered and killed in Iraq after the invasion hardly absolves Blair from his part in initiating it.

The actual consequences of the Iraq war were not, of course intended. But pursuing the war, ignoring the due procedure of international law and doing so as part of a plan to take the resources of another nation, even if under the control of a criminal dictator, was intentional and was the aim.

The war was an intentional act of geopolitical strategy. Any effects that could have been posited as "moral" would have been a spin off from a successful invasion and only had Saddam Hussein really offered a threat so serious that no military action would have been more harmful to life than invading.

This was the case put before the electorate.And that view was discredited by the manipulated "intelligence" and fraudulent claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The war was not about a "moral case" even if a moral case could be offered.
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Nor about non-existent WMD, the acronym itself being a euphemism, one that downgraded a sensationalistic term implying the imminent threat of being blown to bits by a rogue state to a sort of bureaucratic process when that form of spin was required to downgrade the original implications.
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Weapons of Mass Destruction could destroy us in 45 minutes. WMD was the preferred term for an administrative procedure based on a supposed objective detachment based on a discussion of fact and evidence. That would be a matter for debate. And one that could be spun out.
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That Saddam had the intention to use Weapons of Mass Destruction was supposedly obvious. Yet it was hardly less obvious than the intention of the USA to invade Iraq no matter what the evidence really was. And that was made quite clear from much of what leading neoconservatives had said in the run up to war.
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Weapons of Mass destruction was a pretext that turned out to be a ruse to invade, though the real question is whether Blair knew that there were no WMD or whether he simply believed any facts were "essentially true" just to be able to justify an action he had already decided on.

No matter the level of self delusion, the rationale for the invasion was to grab Iraq's resources. That was decided upon by Bush and Blair at Crawford when they looked at geological maps of the oil wealth ( as documented by David Strahan in his The Last Oil Shock ).
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All else was a form of logic chopping apologetics. Blair must be put into a War Crimes Tribunal, his motives and actions questioned forensically and all the factors looked at and subjected to assessment. This is not only something vital to uphold principles of justice. It is essential to preserve democracy and accountability.

Given that resource wars are the norm today-as is Afghanistan, a war to construct the TAPI Pipeline and to secure geopolitical advantages in Central Asia-it is unlikely that any Western government will consent to Blair being arrested and put on trial as he should be. They could never embark on such a war again.

So unless Power is to trump the Rule of Law and expedient falsehood win over truth and justice, Blair must be tried. For the alternative assumption might be, however, that if other Powers without democracy can protect their access to resources without the annoyance of such things as public enquiries, rule of law etc, we might be "better off" without them.

Britain's "Ethical Foreign Policy" In Libya.

More information about the Britain's dealings with Gaddafi under Tony Blair has emerged into the public domain today.

'Secret files have been unearthed by The Independent in Tripoli that reveal the astonishingly close links that existed between British and American governments and Muammar Gaddafi.

The documents chart how prisoners were offered to the Libyans for brutal interrogation by the Tripoli regime under the highly controversial "rendition" programme, and also how details of exiled opponents of the Libyan dictator in the UK were passed on to the regime by MI6'.

So there it is. Britain's ethical foreign policy under Tony Blair-supporting dictatorship when it's strong enough to survive, colluding with CIA rendition and torture, oil deals for BP, giving information to Gaddafi about Libyan dissidents in Britain to enhance the oil interests.

Despite British Foreign Secretary William Hague's attempts to distance himself from the machinations of the New Labour government's involvement, even though the opposition then did not challenge this collusion with Gaddafi, the fact is that there is obvious continuity. As The Independent reports,

The revelations by The Independent will lead to questions about whether Mr Koussa, who has long been accused of human rights abuses, was allowed to escape because he held a 'smoking gun'. The official is known to have copied and taken away dozens of files with him when he left Libya.

When Koussa defected to Britain in April 2 2011, Hague made statements that he could be put on trial as demanded by the NTC. However, Koussa then left Britain soon after he had 'defected' again to Qatar by April 15.

Obviously, Koussa had no reason to return as he had been conveniently removed from a European Union sanctions list, This gave someone involved in torture free access to financial assets held in European banks. Not wanting him to reveal the truth of Britain and other states collusion with Gaddafi could have been part of that.

As the Independent article implies, the reason could have been to avoid bad "public diplomacy" about Britain's collusion with Gaddafi in the "war on terror".

The Tripoli regime was a highly useful partner in the 'rendition' process under which prisoners were sent by the US for 'enhanced interrogation', a euphemism, say human rights groups, for torture.

One US administration document, marked secret, says "Our service is in a position to deliver Shaykh Musa to your physical custody similar to what we have done with other senior LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group) members in the past. We respectfully request an expression of interest from your service regarding taking custody of Musa".
The British too were dealing with the Libyans about opposition activists, passing on information to the regime. This was taking place despite the fact that Colonel Gaddafi's agents had assassinated opponents in the campaign to eliminate so-called "stray dogs" abroad, including the streets of London. The murders had, at the time, led to protests and condemnation by the UK government.

The supposed pragmatism in now trying to remove Gaddafi is more akin to the schizoid realpolitik of the sort Orwell lampooned in 1984.

Consistently until 2009 when Milliband opined that the 'war on terror' was a name to be dropped, Afghanistan was put forth as part of that. Long after 2004 when Gaddafi thought that he might be next for 'regime change' after Iraq and moved towards the West by cancelling a non-existent WMD programme.

The notion that the Arab Spring in Libya means that there is a possibility of a liberal democratic alternative to either secular dictatorship or Islamist dictatorship remains dubious.

Indeed, the Islamist Abdel-Hakim Belhaj who two years before in 2009 was the leader of the enemy, associated with Al Qaida, and who had been tortured by the CIA, as part of the 'war on terror 'now pops back up in 2011 as an important part of the NTC. So the SAS armed jihadists to finish of Gaddafi when two years before they were aiding him to combat them.

With the potential for breakdown of authority and a humanitarian crisis can it be seriously suggested that the Islamists will not try to stage a power grab ? Or that they won't turn against the West, as their ideology is similar to that of the Taliban ? The idea of a liberal secular democracy emerging to order is a fantasy.

The idea that governments can just change tack overnight almost and install pliant or friendly pro-Western governments is simply not realistic. There is no history of democracy in Libya. Outside a small circle of academics and city based liberals, it is the Islamists and nationalists who dominate.

If the NATO intervention was so pragmatic and founded on "enlightened self interest" how is it going to "pragmatically" extricate itself from a descent into further civil war and conflict if a stable government cannot be formed ? The cliched soundbite about "no boots on the ground" has already proved false, as evidenced by the presence of the SAS from the outset of the conflict.

The TonyBlairFaithFoundation

Private Eye once had a skit on Blair as the Vicar of St Albion. With Blair now still pontificating from the pulpit some people think that Blair is trying to atone for his sins in supporting Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It is ultimately impossible to mind read Blair. Looking at his website though certain things stand out.

His Tony Blair Faith Foundation ostensibly has laudable goals such as eradicating malaria and getting faith communities involved in distributing health resources to do so.

Blair's missionary impetus and calls to promote inter-faith dialogue and get them to co-operate in ridding the world of preventable deaths does seem like 'displacement therapy' on his part.

If over a million people have died as a result of the invasion of Iraq, because of the collapse of that state into inter-ethnic and sectarian conflict, then the aims of his Faith Foundation are to work against such a level of death elsewhere.

It is difficult not to think Blair's motives are still about self justification and that he has some form of messiah complex where through his agency he can show the power of the will to believe in 'getting things done'.

Unfortunately, it was that belief that led him to commit Britain to Iraq and his Faith Foundation contains propaganda about what he sees as the wholly reconciliable nature of world faiths such as Islam and US global hegemony.

Including this lecture which was organised by Clive Tuggle, Vice Chairman of Coca Cola.

The Mighty and the Almighty: American Foreign Policy and God, talk given by Madeline Albright at Yale Divinity School where Blair has been appointed.....

As the blurb goes,

Madeline Albright, the first woman Secretary of State and highest ranking woman in the history of the US government, draws upon her personal experiences to talk about how the borderless nature of religious faith often makes it easier for leaders to talk to one another, easier for nations to agree on common values, and easier for people from vastly different backgrounds to reach a consensus about moral standards.

There is a contradiction between Blair's belief that all faiths can work together for the greater good and the fact that this can be promoted through the kind of international politics where the US 'plays God'.

For it was Albright, previously US Secretary of state under Bill Clinton. Albright who imposed misery on Iraq through sanctions in pursuit of the goal of controlling it's oil resources.

There was not much evidence of Christian principles in 1996 when she was asked on the TV show 60 Minutes if she could justify the deaths of half of a million Iraqi children caused, according to Unicef, by an economic embargo that denied the country basic medicines.

"I think this is a very hard choice but the price – we think the price is worth it"

Naturally, such a morality of necessary sacrifice was not mentioned with regards the sanctions on Iraq

'In many developing countries religion is one of the most powerful sources of personal identity – for good and ill. Understanding these identities is critical to tackling conflict and understanding politics. Equally, the role of religion in forming attitudes and behaviour can be profoundly important in addressing the causes and effects of poverty.

The great London multi-faith march by religious leaders this year to promote the Millennium Development Goals was further evidence of the power wielded by faith communities when they work together.

We know they are effective advocates – that's not the key question in development.

The answer is providing help to enable faith communities to develop their capabilities. It doesn't make sense for them to do this separately. This is a core part of the vision of my Faith Foundation.When faith communities collaborate for justice and human development there is a double payoff: things get done and respect and understanding between them grows.

Faith communities given training, some funding and mobile phones, could provide governments with missing data about incidence of disease and the effectiveness of healthcare delivery in parts of their populations where government has negligible access.

Faith communities are not NGOs in the normal sense. They were not consciously created for service delivery, health care, advocacy, or education. They are a gathered people brought together by often ancient religious traditions carried through the generations by a community of faith. They are centred on worship, usually rooted in sacred texts and have a particular spirituality and set of symbols'

Tony Blair Engage with the Faith, The Guardian 7 September 2009

As with anything Tony Blair writes on religion it is the political objectives that have to be considered: in particular the utility of 'faith' in bringing together people from diverse backgrounds to support the creation of a universal civilisation.

The subtleties of traditional theology are less important to Blair than the miraculous power of 'faith' to bring about progressive change if only there is the will to do it, something better considered as 'belief' which is quite the contrary of faith.

The philosopher Alan Watts had it right when he argued that belief is a form of clinging to myths and dogmas that provide people with the bedrock of security in an insecure world, that screen out all that cannot be accepted.

The word faith derives from the Latin word fidere, which means to have trust whilst belief comes from an Old English word that refers to what a person values because it helps them to live and ought not to be questioned through fear.

In Blair's case those beliefs are Progress and US led Globalisation.

The belief that progress and globalisation harnessed to the project of advancing US power is a good thing. That the US and Britain as multicultural and multifaith societies are some microcosm for how the entire world could live and sing in perfect harmony.

Though Blair is ostensibly a Catholic, his creed derives more from the Positivism of Auguste Comte, the nineteenth century inventor of sociology and a great influence on Anthony Giddens, the man who created 'the Third Way'.

As John Gray writes in Al Qaida and What it Means to be Modern,

The Positivists did not aim merely to revolutionise society. Their aim was to found a new religion. [Count Henri de] Saint-Simon believed the ‘positive doctrine’ would become the basis for a new ‘church’ when all scientists united to form a permanent ‘clergy’.

The clergy of this new faith are the persuaders, the corporate sponsors and advertisers, the PR gurus and those who wish to channel the energies of the world's population into a placid and benign consumerism enlivened with a bit of faith in being nice.

Blair believes that all races and creeds will come together because the West can propagate and put into practice the new 'religion of humanity' where all nations are interdependent and work together for the good of all.

When the globe is united upon a shared common vision the metaphysical era in which progress represents the cumulative knowledge of the entire species and the "One Way" to truth and salvation which is, in Comte's scheme of things, the positivist era.

To hasten the coming advent of the positivist era it is sometimes necessary to 'set aside God in the name of religion' if that means the dead hand of dogma, as when Blair tried to convince the Pope why a War on Iraq was necessary.

Men themselves can become as Gods once despots, terrorists and nationalists are destroyed and removed from holding back Progress and dividing humanity from the recognition of its real true interests in co-operating in accordance with their comparative advantages.

Though these beliefs are a core part of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the search for global order through stressing common humanity of all people everywhere is partly a balm for those who have a disturbed conscience or who are worried about resource scarcity.

We live in a global community. The contest for scarce resources, water and oil, will be intense by mid-century. Our interdependence is manifest whether at the level of climate change or global financial markets.

We need the inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue that turns neighbours into friends able to work together to confront the threats to our common security.

The Iraq War was fought because Blair believed that by ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein the oil of Iraq could work for the benefit of the West and Iraqi's through Western investment and the tapping of new oil fields in the south.

This war was Utopian in that it tried to reconcile objectives that could not be, such as promoting Western democracy whilst at the same time expecting that this would not polarise ethnic and 'faith based communities' previously only separated from conflict by fear of Saddam.

Moreover, how Iraqi democracy could ever be reconciled with the need to control Iraqi oil primarily for the benefit of the West and our energy security was overlooked. With North Sea oil running out and Iraq's oilfield malfunctioning die to sanctions, Blair felt the UK had to invade.

With Iraq's population due to double within twenty years in spite of the war, oil prices would need to rise if Iraq's population were to benefit. the West needs falling oil prices to maintain it's lifestyle and the consumerism to which people are accustomed.

The belief in force as a midwife of a new global order presided over by the USA held by New Labour progressives was partly the legacy of Marxist ideas. Yet it also derived from standard liberal notions of a universal social order which would end conflicts-as in Europe after Kosovo.

Albert Camus remarked on the Soviet Communist's attempt to create a universal order through power, myth and force and how it drew on the legacy of Positivism that,

Utopia replaces God with the future. Then it proceeds to identify the future with ethics: the only values are those which serve this particular future. For that reason Utopias have almost always been coercive and authoritarian......

The demand for justice ends in injustice if it is not primarily based on an ethical justification of justice: without this, crime itself one day becomes a duty. When good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events, nothing any longer is either good or bad, but only premature or out of date.

Who will decide on the opportunity if not the opportunist? Later, say the disciples, you will judge. but the victims will not be there to judge. Messianism in order to exist must construct a defence against the victims...

Albert Camus The Rebel. State Terrorism and Rational Terror pages 163 & 177