Even in the thick of a historical tragedy, Tony Blair never seemed like a Shakespearean character.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s too rabbity brisk, too doggedly modern. The most proficient spinner since Rumpelstiltskin lacks introspection. The self-described \u201cmanipulator\u201d is still in denial about being manipulated.<\/p>\n
The Economist\u2019s review of \u201cA Journey,\u201d the new autobiography of the former British prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and more like \u201cthe memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet in the section on Iraq, Blair loses his C.E.O. fluency and engages in tortured arguments, including one on how many people really died in the war, and does a Shylock lament.<\/p>\n
He says he does not regret serving as the voice for W.\u2019s gut when the inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for \u201cthe nightmare that unfolded\u201d \u2014 giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib promises \u2014 Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo they really suppose I don\u2019t care, don\u2019t feel, don\u2019t regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?\u201d he asks of his critics.<\/p>\n
In Iraq, marking the transition to the \u201cpost-combat mission\u201d for American troops, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was eloquent with an economy of words.<\/p>\n
Asked by a reporter if Iraq would have to be a democratic state for the war to benefit U.S. national security, Gates cut to core: \u201cThe problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid \u2014 that is, Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.\u201d He added, candidly: \u201cIt will always be clouded by how it began.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iraq will be \u201ca work in progress for a long time,\u201d Gates said, and, \u201chow it all weighs in the balance over time, I think remains to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blair writes that he thought he was right and that he and W. rid the world of a tyrant. But he winds up with a bitter anecdote: \u201cI still keep in my desk a letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began. She told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced having fallen foul of Saddam\u2019s son. She begged me to act. After the fall of Saddam she returned to Iraq. She was murdered by sectarians a few months later. What would she say to me now?\u201d<\/p>\n
There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.<\/p>\n
He concedes that the invasion of Iraq was more about symbols than immediate security, about sending \u201ca message of total clarity to the world,\u201d after 9\/11, that defying the will of the international community would no longer be tolerated.<\/p>\n
In other words, Osama bin Laden had emasculated America, and America had to hit back, and did so against a country that had nothing to do with him or 9\/11.<\/p>\n
Blair did not want to be W.\u2019s peripheral poodle. He wanted to \u201cstand tall internationally\u201d with Britain\u2019s main ally and not \u201cwet our knickers,\u201d to use a Blair phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).<\/p>\n
Blair fantasized that Saddam might someday give W.M.D. to terrorists. This, even though the dictator didn\u2019t like terrorists because they were impossible to control, and even though, as Blair admits, (the secular) Saddam and (the fundamentalist) Osama were on opposite sides. (When Saudi Arabia felt threatened by Saddam\u2019s invasion of Kuwait, Osama offered to fight the Iraqi dictator.)<\/p>\n
It is criminally na\u00efve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W. muffed the postwar planning because they never perceived what Blair now acknowledges as \u201cthe true threat\u201d: outside interference by Al Qaeda and Iran. So the reasoning of the man known in England as Phony Tony or Bliar amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq because Saddam could hypothetically hook up with Al Qaeda. But they didn\u2019t properly prepare for the insurgency because they knew that Saddam had no link to Al Qaeda.<\/p>\n
He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience for \u201cnamby-pamby peacenikery.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran,\u201d as well as \u201cHezbollah, Hamas, etc.,\u201d Blair writes of Cheney, adding: \u201cHe was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We\u2019re coming after you, so change or be changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The religious Blair fancied himself a conviction politician who had intervened for good in Kosovo and Sierra Leone and would do so again in Iraq. So he did not, as he said others did, \u201creach for the garlic and crucifixes\u201d when Dick hatched his sulfurous schemes.<\/p>\n
If he had challenged W. and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might have stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a weaker Iraq that is no longer a counterweight to Iran \u2014 which actually is a nuclear threat \u2014 and that seems doomed to be run one day by another brutal strongman.<\/p>\n
Maybe Blair should have realized the destructive Oedipal path W. was on. At their first meeting at Camp David, W. screened \u201cMeet the Parents.\u201d<\/p>\n