iraq
28 Nov 2008
Blair's Politics Of Conviction
Iraq was the pivot on which the Blair decade swung, writes Adam Boulton. In this extract from his new book, he recalls the former PM's final trip to Baghdad
Soon after the occupation of Iraq, the British and Americans took action to stimulate the local press, television and radio, judging a multifarious media to be one of the essential ingredients of a successful democracy.
Tony Ball, the former chief executive of BskyB, who had recently stepped down, spent some time pro bono in Iraq assessing what supplementary information sources should be provided from outside, such as a revived BBC Arabic service. This meant that there were now at least half a dozen local television crews waiting for the prime minister on his final trip to Iraq, as well as radio reporters providing live coverage. As a result, it had become impossible to keep Blair's presence or his movements a secret.
Therefore, as Prime Minister Blair travelled about Iraq for the last time he had become a serious target. There were mortar attacks coinciding with his presence at three locations. The first was at his initial stop on the itinerary — the former Baghdad school complex now used as the British embassy. As his convoy drew up there was a burning 4x4 in the car park outside the front door. Photographers in the party were banned from taking pictures.
However, two so-called "legacy teams", Dan Chung and Martin Amis of Guardian Weekend and Nick Danziger and Robert Crampton of the Sunday Times Magazine, were travelling with the prime minister at the time and confounded Downing Street's attempts to deny that an incident had taken place. An hour or so later the same teams reported that the military headquarters had come under attack several times while Blair was receiving a briefing from the US Commander, General David Petraeus.
Between these attacks Tony Blair held his last, chaotic and tetchy news conference in Iraq. The chosen venue was a small room, deeper into the main Iraqi Government building beyond the antechamber. It was so cramped that the ring of tripods and cameras at the front totally blocked out questioning reporters unless they clambered on top of furniture. Blair stood at one podium with Prime Minister al-Maliki and President Talabani alongside him.
Blair spoke of "difficulties and challenges": "Plainly the security situation remains very difficult but on the other hand there are real signs of change and progress also". He admitted, " ... there are more mortar attacks and terrorist attacks happening every day. That's the reality. The question is what are we going to do in the face of those attacks ... the answer is we don't give in to them ... The fact is even with all the difficulties it's not the only story about what is happening in Iraq. And let's not forget one part of the progress which is here we are in the middle of Baghdad with a press conference with a free press able to ask its questions — of me and also of the Iraqi prime minister, huh?"
Al-Maliki said little. The Iraqi President rather optimistically claimed that "the situation is improving" and that, while 10 to 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces used to be subject to violence, now it was only two or three. Even some parts of Baghdad were "totally liberated", he stressed.
During the brief question period that followed, Tony Blair lost his temper — the first time I had seen him do so at a news conference in the 13 years since he became Labor leader. One of the gifts which drove Blair to the top of politics was that he was "bomb-proof" under the fire of questions from journalists. But that day in Bagdhad, Blair's subjective account of the progress being made was confronted by the objective reality all around the heavily and haphazardly fortified Green Zone.
Reporters, both those from the travelling British party and those based in Iraq, cited the continuing violence and terrorism and wanted to know precisely what were "the improvements" in the situation that Blair was referring to. He talked of how Iraq had been "liberated from a terrible dictatorship" and was now facing "an attempt to repress it in a different way fuelled by external forces". But he became increasingly agitated when pressed to cite specific "improvements". He did not seem to be able to come up with any examples. Instead he kept exclaiming, "Don't ask me, ask them," gesticulating vigorously in the direction of his hosts. All diplomatic courtesies were set to one side and in the heat of that moment it seemed as though he had forgotten the names of the Iraqi politicians beside him. Neither al-Maliki nor Talabani rushed in to back up Blair.
The mood did not lift on the Hercules flight to Basra or at British Command headquarters there. The prime minister worked through the usual programme of briefings from the brass and chats with the troops. There was no mood of excitement on either side. Blair worked the room, listening sympathetically to stories of operational life in Iraq and views of what was needed. Then he spoke at the microphone for a few minutes. He seemed as concerned by how this performance was being seen as by what was actually happening. "This is my last chance to thank you for the work you've done here ... the impression is given that everything is completely negative ..." It all felt a bit bleak — a sense confirmed by Blair's answer to his embedded legacy reporter Robert Crampton's question, "How long will it take for it not to be a mess?": "I dunno. You can't tell. It will resolve itself, it just will. People will get sick of the killing."
An hour or so remained for fraternisation, but as the prime minister continued his tour, the air-raid sirens sounded. The order came to take cover and don helmets and flak jackets. All duly scurried to the command, except for Blair who wore neither. Inside the building you could hear the loud "crump" of a mortar landing and exploding not so far way.
According to later reports, the missile struck the tarmac close to the Hercules transport plane that carried the prime minister back to Kuwait shortly afterwards. There the party transferred immediately during the darkness of early evening in the desert on to the private jet back to London. On this occasion British Airways had been unable to provide an aircraft. For this journey to the Middle East, Number 10 had hired a plane from Royal Jet, a service owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family.
The cabin crew were used to deferring to hierarchy. Blair and his aides were ensconced in luxurious first class. The legacy profile journalists were in the next section, in large leather-upholstered lean-back seats. The regular UK reporters were crammed into cattle class economy seats at the back. Tired, fed up and parched, the hacks exchanged angry words with the cabin crew, who ignored their needs — instead shuttling past them from the galley at the rear with endless trays of canapés and champagne for the front of the plane. Eventually the reporters raided the galley, liberating food and drink for themselves.
As had become Blair's habit during his latter years in office, there was no exchange of pleasantries with the accompanying journalists on the journey home; we did not see him again once he boarded at the front of the plane. If he chose to take it, the flight back to Britain would have provided him with ample time to ponder alone quite how the tragedy of Iraq had enveloped his premiership. The journalists in the stern debated rather less grimly how the invasion had precipitated the story they were now covering: the end of Blair.
Iraq was the pivot on which the Blair decade swung. His foreign policy in the four years prior to 2001 seemed almost a preparation for the excited, engaged "liberal interventionism" which characterised his hyperactivity through 2002 and until the Iraq invasion in 2003. Blair's slow decline began almost as soon as Baghdad was liberated.
The taint of failure came from connected but separate factors which hit him over a long period, in two successive waves. Peculiar to Blair, given the case he had made for going to war, were the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the presumed suicide of the British weapons inspector David Kelly and the argument over the government's use of intelligence. These became major issues first, almost simultaneously with the invasion.
Subsequently, both Blair and Bush were assailed by greater issues of more general concern — the inability to stabilise Iraq and the ensuing sectarian and terrorist chaos inflicted on its people; and the American failure to live up to their own human rights standards in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, especially in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, established at the time of the Afghan invasion of 2001.
This meant that unlike George Bush Tony Blair underwent continuous political pressure, confronting major dissent over Iraq, both from within his own party and from the wider public. This held from 2002, when the first intimations of an attack on Saddam were crystallised by Bush's "axis of evil" State of the Union Address, right up until the time Blair left office.
In the first half of 2004, a crisis of confidence meant Tony Blair seriously considered quitting; while at the same time in the United States, George Bush was cruising to re-election and a consolidation of his mandate thanks to "Security Moms" and their ilk.
Blair overcame his internal doubts and soldiered on until 2007, but he was able to do so only by paying a significant price. Most obviously, he made the political concession not to "go on and on", and because of his political weakness gave up any hope of moving against Brown.
Much more significantly, the intractable issues thrown up by Iraq when the facts didn't match what Blair would have liked them to be, transformed his approach to politics. He fell to the politics of assertion, no longer interested in making arguments and fencing with the media. He became a "conviction politician" who insisted he was right even if he couldn't prove it.
As he put it to me himself during an extended interview on Iraq on 15 March 2007: "You know, I'm not [pause] I've long since ceased in all this to pander to anyone's opinion on it. I mean I do not regret either the strength of our alliance with the United States or standing by the US president and the American people in the aftermath of 11 September and I'm never going to do that."
This is an edited extract from Tony's Ten Years by Adam Boulton (Simon & Schuster).
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"You know, I’m not [pause] I’ve long since ceased in all this to pander to anyone’s opinion on it."
That’s right. Forget democracy, forget what the British public wants - by the end of his tenure as PM he was just another dictator. What Blair said was what happened, nevermind the HoC, or the public.
Still he travels with that ‘sense of conviction’ as western journalists put it (for non-western allies the same personality is labelled ‘fiery dictator’), making mountains of money at the expense of poor and war-torn nations. And still no sign that the ICC will be bringing him to account for his ‘convictions’ anytime soon.
Derek
Derek: Don’t forget, shortly after relinquishing the top job, Blair converted to Catholicism. Which, in itself is neither here nor there. However, this sort of person—obsessive, lacking in humour, driven, unutterably pious-is the man (usually it is a man) who thinks he has discerned the divine in himself, and he takes a dim view of being exposed as being a human being. (Think of nineteenth century leaders like Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, or the unspeakable General John Nicholson, the butcher of Delhi) Notice, Blair felt let down by the Americans showing no respect for human rights at Abu Ghraib, and later at Guantánamo Bay. Then there was the weapons inspector who had the bad form to kill himself. To round out the mess Saddam Hussein was so much of a cad he didn’t even have weapons of mass destruction he’d boasted of. But to him, Tony Blair is pure. None of this was Blair’s doing.
Although his going along with George Bush may seem to be just dictatorial, to me his evil comes across as ‘the Driven By Christ’ brigade of the nineteenth century. High-minded, ie. he acted with the same awful conviction and certitude of ‘the driven by Christers’. Vain, humourless and obsessed. Quite different to the show-pony image that most people thought of him as being. Which I suspect Adam Boulton meant when he describes him as being ‘A Man of Conviction.’
PS: JWH was but a bloodstained pimple on the a-se-end of twenty-first century history. (Little roofing-nail manikin.)
It’s interesting to me that Boulton has all these quotes and facts at his disposal, yet draws none of the conclusions which flow so easily from them.
This extract says a lot about the British press.
@ scottmichell: You’re right, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing…I kind of like being left to draw my own conclusions in this age of dummy journalism.
All the same, "people will get sick of the killing," and "I do not regret either the strength of our alliance with the United States or standing by the US president," are killer quotes!
Hi Venise,
Yes, I can see your point, but, having been here for a good part of his tenure to experience it firsthand (and to watch the cloud of british journalism through which it was filtered, and then passed on to the rest of the world), I’d say Blair had no convictions of a religious nature, at least not for the majority of his time as PM. If anything, the catholic conversion may have been a last ditch effort for some sort of salvation through which he could recover lost sleep (with perhaps a million Iraqis and unknown numbers of Afghans’, not to mention Lebanese deaths on his conscience). Perhaps now it *has* become such a religiously driven (though certainly not by christ - wasn’t he a peacemaker?) conviction, but only in the latter days of his PM-ship did the new ‘religious Blair’ image come to the fore. I remember the stories of his early days as PM, going to the whitehouse to meet the president. Apparently he was gushing about how cool it was, how much like a dream, and the rock star feel of travelling in such an entourage. I would say its very likely that Blair began like all tyrants - with the unmistakeable thrill, and overdose of power. Only as the impact of his power cemented itself - not least with the total rejection by the British public (I honestly think that has come as more of a blow to him than the deaths of so many Iraqis), and the baying for his blood in the ICC, did his religious convictions - miraculously - grow.
But nevertheless, conviction implies something good, or honourable, or strong, or at worst, misguided and therefore pitiable (even if it doesn’t state it explicitly), and Blair was, and is, none of those things. If you look at the heart of the decisions he made and who and how they benefited, and the lies he told, it is obvious that there was no religious sentiment or conviction behind those decisions (misguided or otherwise), but only power and empire. The logical assumption from that is that his ‘convictions’ (where they were used to justify the British imperial motive) were just another of his many lies.
cheers,
Derek
Venise, catholicism is indeed the point. Blair is a deluded nutter like all religionists. The problem is that once you leave logic behind, anything is possible. Twin Toweres, the Bali bombing and reaching back to the Crusades shows that religionists are not harmless.
As Richard Dawkins says "Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. … if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, … because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!"
Faith is the misinterpretation as divine of experience easily explained by simple psychological, emotional and physiological processes.
Only a religionist condemns a kid to die rather than have a blood transfusion. Or prevents people getting an education. And only a loony tells a child god exists when there’s no evidence for it. C’mon, do we really want to protect these crimes? And no, religionists need sympathy rather than burning at the stake.
Hi kmcready,
I guess after your points we should condemn (and then feel sympathy for) the 4/5 of the world’s population so stupid and morally corrupt to have the audacity to be religious…
As I said earlier, from observation, Blair’s ‘conviction’ was no more religiously driven than Hitler’s. His arguments, and his lies had not even a base in a dodgy interpretation of his supposed religious ideals (wmd was the first lie - then regime change the illegal followup admission - neither remotely based on any religious precept - particularly considering the replacement regime was still muslim, not christian), but rather were driven from an imperial motive (one where foreigners are expendable pawns in the face of economic and social domination).
That is not a religious perspective, and it is (given the overwhelming majority of ‘believers’ over those of us less inclined to such ideas) important to make the distinction. What history tends to teach us is that religion (many kinds) has been commandeered by tyrants as a basis for conformity and submission, and the rallying for imperial wars. In the christian context, ‘Put down your sword’ is perhaps the strongest argument against imperialism as a religious perspective. History also teaches us that some of the most significant moments of realisation of various social movements (like the ‘abolition of slavery’ - that time when Britain decided to make the transport of *african* slaves illegal) have also come from the same quarters.
Logically, if we are to condemn ‘religionists’ for their negative impact on the world as a beast coming directly from their religion, we can’t then savour the real religious ‘convictions’ elsewhere (the ones which derive from a more tangibly religious base than pyschopathy and murder). You can disagree with religion, but you can’t blame it for human corruption driven by sociopaths (not without ignorance, at least).
In my mind, the only sensible approach is to accept that religion itself is not to blame, but tyrants, and centralised power, and particularly, the combination of the two. I would also say; stop trying to give Blair an excuse for his genocidal penchant for massacre. He is sane, and intelligent. From that basis, he deserves to stand trial for his actions.
cheers,
Derek
Derek Lane: Sorry to be so late getting back to you. I’ve had a busy day! Gee you make some good points. I assumed (I know, never assume.) that after co-habiting with the Mantilla-wearing, witch of a Catholic wife, together with the bewilderment of realizing the days of British power were as dead as the proverbial Dodo, he thought, or sought to deflect attention by converting to Catholicism. I know where you are coming from but I’ve always been of the opinion there was something obsessive about the man. Isn’t it interesting that two ‘yesterday’s men, Blair and the unspeakable John Howard were convinced the empire still existed? JWH believed in jumping into bed with George Bush whilst worshiping at the alter of an England, at the peak of her colonial power, during the nineteenth century, and of course simply adoring QE11. With Tony Blair I always had the opinion that if someone had come out with proof that he was a Russian mole, I would have believed it.
Cheers,
Venise
K McCready: Now there’s a coincidence! On Saturday I was browsing in a bookshop and I came across Richard Dawkins ‘The God Delusion’. I’ve just started reading it. Too early for me to say how I view it. But I know I will largely agree with him.
As an atheist, born of atheist parents and having died twice and had a v serious operation indeed; I can say, with total conviction, I have never felt the need to call out to God. Also, having died, I can tell anyone who is listening THERE IS NOTHING THERE. Not one tiny thing. What really pisses me off is when witless people attribute our moral behaviour to the magic of God. I know what is moral behaviour and don’t need some invented father-figure pis-ing over my shoulder.
I don’t know how people can get an education without observing how religion screws the world. Wars, Crusades, interference in politics, pata ti pata ta. Why are religious leaders obsessed with non-believers. Frankly, it’s none of their business. Perhaps they resent atheists because of their superior intellect. Atheists question things and use their brains to work out what is logical. Frankly the world would be a better place if the adherents took their beliefs and put ‘em up where the sun don’t shine.
I hated the John Howard regimé and voted Labor; I am less than impressed with Kevin Rudd’s God-bothering, his po-faced attitude towards naked children and all the censorship he is imposing on us. Sure he is doing it all for the benefit of the kiddies. He wouldn’t dream of interfering in other peoples’ lives would he? . And my name is Arthur Fortesque Jackson!!
Cheers
Venise