In essence, Blair’s
claim, which has astonished many (to put it mildly) is that the latest events
in Iraq are in no way a consequence of the war which on which he and Bush so
enthusiastically embarked, and that the situation would have been even worse
had they not taken the action which they took.
He’s also calling for more resolute action now (a curious position for a
‘peace envoy’ to take, but let’s leave that to one side).
I suspect that
history will ultimately judge Blair to have been wrong, even over the long
term, but in truth, none of us can know for certain. The point is that we can never run history
twice to see what would have happened if different decisions had been
taken. If the latest events demonstrate
anything, it is surely that the whole situation is far more complicated than
most of us realise, and it’s extremely difficult to decide who are the good
guys deserving of support and who are the bad guys needing to be dealt
with. Indeed, it’s increasingly the case
that yesterday’s bad guys are becoming today’s good guys (or perhaps ‘not-so-bad
guys’), and alliances are shifting, largely on the basis that our enemy’s
enemies are now our friends, whatever we may have said about them yesterday.
What I do know
is that it was always less than honest to try and present a very complex
situation as a simple case of good vs evil, in the way that Blair and Bush
did. And what concerns me even more is
the possibility that they might have genuinely believed that to be the
case. There’s something more than a
little dangerous about any politician who has such unshakeable faith in his own
rightness that he cannot even conceive of the possibility of being wrong.
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