In his
new autobiography Tony Blair
tells
the story of a passenger jet that breached closed British airspace
in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A senior RAF commander was following
the plane which was out of contact and heading towards London. The
commander was awaiting instruction from Downing St to shoot it down. As
recounted in "A Journey" (published yesterday) Blair said he talked with
his advisors for several minutes “trying desperately to get an instinct
as to whether this was threat or mishap”. When the deadline came, Blair
decided to wait. “Moments later the plane regained contact. It had been
a technical error,” Blair wrote. “I needed to sit down and thank God
for that one.”
In this story, Blair’s desperation for a sign of
“instinct” is almost as telling a factor about his make-up as is his
gratitude to “God” for the way it eventually passed without incident.
Blair is ultimate proof of John Gray’s suggestion in
Black Mass modern
politics is merely a chapter in the history of religion. While Blair
initially recoiled with desperate horror against the possibility of
making a preemptive strike against someone who may or may not be a
threat, such decisions grew a lot easier for him in the years that
followed. 9/11 was a watershed moment for Blair, as much as it was for
the Bush administration as it marked a time when Gray said foreign
policy was shaped by Utopian thinking.
Blair always had a strong
dash of neo-liberalism to go with his strong powers of faith. He came
to the Labour leadership in 1994 when the party had been out of office
for 15 years. He inherited Margaret Thatcher’s total belief in the power
of the markets. John Gray said Thatcher’s aim of destroying socialism
in Britain assisted Blair in his political rise. By dismantling the
Labour settlement that had served Britain since the end of World War II,
she removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative
Party. Without an enemy, it lacked identity. Blair’s “New Labour” easily
stepped into its shoes and deprived them of relevance for a decade.
As
the
1997
British election proved, strategy and organisation were more
important than policy. Once he won that election, Blair carried on
Thatcher’s privatisation agenda moving it into the justice system and
prison service while also making the NHS and schools subject to market
forces. In his early international dealings he advocated a “doctrine of
international community” which reflected the “end of history” thesis
that infected much 1990s intellectual thought. It was destroyed with the
towers on 11 September 2001 and exposed Blair’s more naked belief in
the power of good intentions to triumph regardless of flaw in the
execution.
Like Bush, Blair saw his destiny as the unfolding of
providential
design. The neocons in the White House made it abundantly clear to
him on a Camp David visit in April 2002 the Afghan War would be a
sideshow and Iraq was the real target. The Foreign Office knew the case
for war was a thin one; Saddam was little threat and had no weapons to
speak of. Yet by the time of the
23 July Downing Street
Memo, he accepted the advice of MI6 war was inevitable and
“intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
He
cautioned Bush to seek UN support but in January 2003 Bush told him
plainly the US was invading with or without a resolution. Bush offered
Blair the opportunity to pull out given the strong anti-war rhetoric in
the UK but Blair pledged his support. Blair actively covered up any
intelligence that contradicted the official line Iraq was a major threat
that had to be stopped. The
March 2002 Iraq
Options paper produced by the Cabinet Office and the
February
2003 Defence Intelligence Staff document both said there was no
justification for invasion. All they succeeded in doing was to get Blair
to shift the case to arguments about WMD where as Grey said
“intelligence could be more easily manipulated”.
Blair wasn’t
interested in the facts. Armed with his dogged Utopian belief in the
ineluctable nature of progress, he screened out inconvenient data. Blair
was only interested in faith-based intelligence that supported his
moral imperative. As the disasters unfolded in the aftermath of invasion
such as Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, Blair kept silent.
Again Gray: “deception is justified if it advances human
progress...Blair’s untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic
glimpses of the future course of history and they carry the hazards of
all such revelations.”
Blair’s militant faith in human progress
brought him eventually to the political abyss. His was a true
enlightenment view of unending human progress. In his ten years as Prime
Minister his overriding concern was the shaping of public opinion to
support his beliefs and his lies became an integral feature of
government function. Despite winning three elections, he was remembered
only as a lackey of the Bush administration. Both practiced missionary
politics and saw their goal as the salvation of humankind.
The
difference was Bush could do faith better than Blair in a country with a
lot more millenarian tendencies than the UK. An American
Lt Col in
Fallujah could get away with saying the war was “battle against
Satan”; a British
General
in Basrah could not. But in the end both Britain and the US have
now left the country. Iraq turned out not to be a Utopian project after
all.
Posted by
Derek Barry
The feds in Baltimore on Wednesday indicted him for allegedly taking
more than $245,000 in bribes to use his office to help a grocery chain,
Shoppers Food and Pharmacy. Two former Shoppers Food officials were
also indicted. (read indictment)
