Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has not offered a new “apology”, if he’s offered one at all. Yet, the timing of his interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN assumes significance — on the eve of the announcement of a timeline for the publication of the Chilcot inquiry report into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair didn’t say sorry for the armed intervention and the war itself, and defended the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.
What he did apologise for were wrong intelligence, mistakes in planning and the failure to foresee the aftermath of Saddam’s fall. We’ve heard Blair’s mea culpa before. But where he did break new ground was in admitting the merit of the argument that the Iraq war led, in some way, to the rise of the Islamic State. While admitting there were “elements of truth” in this charge, Blair also claimed that the EU and UK’s current inaction in Syria was wrong.
Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry, opened six years ago, has reportedly taken longer than it should have and Blair’s critics appear to firmly believe his interview was an attempt to soften the blow of the criticism the report is likely to lay at his door — something Blair would be well aware of, given the Maxwellisation principle that necessitates that participants be provided and allowed to respond beforehand to criticism about to be published against them. It’s undeniable that the 2003 invasion of Iraq led to consequences that have left the Middle East much more volatile and perpetually at war with itself. Blair is right that, in 2009, with the US Surge on the ground and a broad-based Iraqi government, things seemed to have stabilised. Yet, it soon fell apart.
History at the moment isn’t very kind to Blair. And a Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to leadership of the Labour Party only shows how deeply New Labour, along with Blair’s otherwise positive legacy, has been buried. When he looks back, the somewhat tragic ex-PM cannot deny the centrality of Iraq to the erasure of the Blairites.
