Damn You, Tony Blair

Mark Almond writes:

For 12 years until his carefully choreographed interview with CNN, reported in today’s Mail on Sunday, Mr Blair had presented himself as the innocent victim of bad intelligence who at least made the world a safer place by toppling Saddam Hussein.

Nor until now has he ever admitted his policies have put people in Britain at risk.

In the undeniably cosy chat on CNN, when the subject of the most brutal terrorist threat yet in post-Saddam Iraq came up, he let slip the following: ‘Of course, you can’t say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.’ 

That double-negative is the nearest Blair has ever come to admitting he helped fuel the flames now licking at Britain’s doorstep.

What is now clear – not least from another report in today’s Mail on Sunday – is that Islamic State is not only an immediate threat to millions in Iraq and Syria, but that jihadi terrorists are burrowing away inside Britain.

The terrifying blowback from Blair’s blithe commitment to President Bush to go into Iraq whatever the circumstances is gathering pace – its bloody tentacles spreading from the Middle East across North Africa to Western Europe and beyond.

Saying sorry is hardly going to stop that momentum. ‘Better late than never’ will be the kindest response that Blair will get from the widows and orphans created by his fecklessness.

But the Semtex in his interview is his admission that the spreading cancer of Middle Eastern terrorism is the result.

For even with Blair in permatanned retirement, his poisonous legacy still threatens us here at home and abroad because too many policymakers can’t shake themselves free from him as their role model.

Even a full Blair apology for past errors will be a dead-letter if the Government clings to the same approach. David Cameron and his peers belong to that Cold War generation that knew only peace.

Blair casually launched Britain into a succession of hot wars.

Kosovo worked out bloodlessly for us in 1999, but it seduced Blair into thinking any casualties would always be theirs, not ours.

Sadly, despite our forces’ heavy toll in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where nothing has been achieved worth the blood of a British grenadier, Blair’s deadly legacy to his successors in power today is a knee-jerk reliance on military force to grab today’s headlines even if no planning for tomorrow’s consequences has been made.

And for all the talk about terrorism, no responsibility is taken for policies that help to promote it.

Remember how Cameron casually sent the RAF to bomb Libya in 2011 without a thought for the morrow, despite the experience of Iraq since 2003.

The Blairite default position – bomb now and improvise if things go wrong – compares badly with leaders from the past.

Previous Prime Ministers were voracious readers of history. Think of Churchill living a soldier’s life on the North-West Frontier and reading by candlelight as much as he could.

That kind of self-education taught past Prime Ministers how to avoid old mistakes – even if they couldn’t avoid new ones.

Both Blair and Cameron give the strong impression that their lives were shaped by a Harry Potter version of Britain.

Even if chaos had been avoided, why should anyone have expected thanks from Iraqis or Afghans for our intervention.

Stendhal, who was a soldier in France’s revolutionary armies, noted with a novelist’s eye how bitterly humiliating Italians felt being liberated by foreigners.

An apology from Blair won’t unmake the mistakes. Worse still, it may act as an alibi for carrying on with the same policies, only without him at the helm.

As the sinister hand of IS spreads into suburban Britain, Parliament needs to think more about defending us at home rather than hoping that fresh intervention abroad will produce a better result.

It is not only the PM of the day who should examine his conscience and try to learn lessons. A lot of MPs need to think before they vote to bomb. Even a good cause needs more than a knee-jerk reaction.

From Afghanistan in 2001 via Iraq and Libya, our rulers have failed to ask what comes next – and then feign innocent surprise when it’s chaos.

One truth that Blair likes to repeat is how interconnected the world has become. 

But by creating conditions for the growth of global jihadi terrorism, his legacy has left us at home and the world at large in a daily more dangerous place.

Damn you, Tony Blair.