The absolutely unrepentant Blair

IT was Adolf Hitler’s propaganda supremo Josef Goebbels who once confided that the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated, the more likely it would be believed. He has no more dedicated student than Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who lied to parliament and the British people that there was strong intelligence that Saddam Hussain had armed stockpile of WMD ready to be used. The full extent of Blair’s deception has been laid bare this week in the 2.5 million-word report of the Chilcot enquiry into the truth behind the Iraq war and the subsequent debacle. Yet even in the light of this damning evidence, Blair yesterday went on the BBC to claim that the world would be “in a worse position” if he had not taken the decision to join with president George W. Bush, invade Iraq and topple Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship. The gall of the man is scarcely credible. For much of his career he had the extraordinary knack of sounding eminently plausible. He spoke in a tone which suggested that what he was saying was obviously correct. The pauses and parsing he used when speaking were adopted, consciously or otherwise, by Barack Obama. In this respect Blair demonstrated himself to be a consummate politician. But there is much else to politics than sounding convincing. There is also judgment, and there is also, when necessary humility. In the end Blair has shown that he has neither. The way in which he still seeks to brazen out his devious record is absolutely astonishing. Iraq has been plunged into 13 years of bloody chaos. Saddam never chose to back terrorists. Even before 9/11, he had thrown an Al-Qaeda emissary out of the the country. But once Blair and Bush, in defiance on the United Nations, had destroyed the regime, the terrorist menace sprang up in the vacuum created by the spectacular failure of Blair-Bush to formulate a plan for the rapid restoration of peace and stability in Iraq. The most egregious error of this duo after their military triumph, was to rip out the regime’s security forces and bureaucracy, in the fond belief that plenty of ordinary Iraqis would be willing and sufficiently competent to step up and take over. They also tried to impose self-serving exiled Iraqi politicians who fabricated the extent of their support in the country and enthusiastically endorsed the WMD falsehood. The exposure of his deceptions, when no WMD were found and when Iraq descended into chaos made Blair a toxic politician. Yet largely at America’s insistence, he was made special envoy for the Middle East Quartet, a job he held with a singular lack of success for eight years until May 2015. And perhaps the greatest indictment of this man is that he is entirely lacking in humility. As direct result of what he and Bush did, tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives and hundreds of thousands have been made refugees. The anarchy of Iraq allowed Daesh (the self-proclaimed ISlamic state) to overflow into Syria, adding to the hundreds of thousands who have died and the millions who have had to flee their home. And yet he protests that if he had not pressed the 2003 Iraq invasion, the world would be in a worse position. How much worse could that possibly be?