During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Tony Blair, who was then the British prime minister, was a leading voice of the liberal interventionists. Now, with Iraq on the brink of a sectarian civil war, he has reëntered the fray, publishing a long essay calling for military strikes targeted at the jihadis in northern Iraq as part of a broader campaign against the forces of militant Islam. “This does not mean Western troops as in Iraq,” Blair writes. “There are masses of responses we can make short of that. But they need to know that, wherever they’re engaged in terror, we will be hitting them.”
What Blair appears to have in mind are large-scale air strikes carried out by western countries and ground operations carried out by Iraqi forces, but with western backing. In Britain, where the aftermath of the war tarnished Blair’s reputation in much the same way that it harmed George W. Bush on this side of the Atlantic, the response to his essay has been predictably hostile. Clare Short, a former Labour Party politician who in May 2003 resigned from Blair’s government to protest against an invasion she had initially supported, accused her former boss of behaving like an American neoconservative, claiming that he had been “wrong, wrong, wrong about Iraq.” Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, who had himself supported the war, said Blair should “put a sock in it.”
There is little prospect of that happening. These days, Blair plays little role in British politics, but he still views himself as a significant player on the international stage, where he is the official Middle East representative of the Quartet: the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia. And, as his essay makes clear, he remains convinced that he is right—not just about the need for military action against the organization known as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham but also about the existential threat that militant Islam represents and, indeed, about the initial decision to topple Saddam. I and others have made the case that many of Iraq’s current troubles date back to the invasion itself; Blair confronts this argument head on. “We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this. We haven’t,” he writes, adding that “the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.”
Whatever one thinks of the merits of Blair’s argument, he does, I suppose, deserve some credit for speaking plainly and clearly. In an era when the publics on both sides of the Atlantic are deeply skeptical of any military action overseas, he has issued what amounts to a deeply unfashionable call to arms. “The starting point is to identify the nature of the battle,” he writes, and continues:
In arguing for strikes against ISIS, Blair didn’t pretend that such an operation would solve the problem as he defines it, or that it would mark an end to western military involvement. To the contrary: “This is a generation long struggle,” he wrote. “It is not a ‘war’ which you win or lose in some clear and clean-cut way. There is no easy or painless solution. Intervention is hard. Partial intervention is hard. Non-intervention is hard.” He went on: “There is no sensible policy for the West based on indifference. This is, in part, our struggle, whether we like it or not.”
Blair’s argument should be read in full. Ultimately, however, it is unlikely to have much of an impact. That’s partly because of who delivered it and partly because it fails to confront the lesson of the past decade, which is that western military interventions, far from solving the problems of the Middle East, often exacerbate them.
Where Blair falls particularly short is in explaining how the open-ended military intervention he recommends would turn out better than previous attempts. All at once, he is advocating providing more military support to the predominantly Shiite government in Baghdad and more arms for the Sunni opposition in Syria, some of which would inevitably end up with the rebel factions that are, in turn, fighting the Iraqi government. How can this make sense?
A decade ago, Blair was a confidante of the President of the United States, a darling of Congress, and a widely admired figure. Today, he is a ghost from the past, capable of summoning up nightmarish scenarios of what might happen if his advice is neglected, but not much more than that. In reportedly taking on as consulting clients the government of Kuwait and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi—autocratic kingdoms that have been centers for the financing of the Syrian rebels—Blair has undermined his position as an honest broker in the region. In refusing to acknowledge that the Iraq war was a terrible mistake that turned out disastrously, he has undermined the perception that he retains a firm grip on reality.
Had Saddam been left in power, Blair argued in his essay, the Iraqi dictator would by now have developed chemical weapons. That is debatable, but at least it is straightforward. But Blair didn’t leave things there. Instead, he engaged in a bit of counterfactual history, imagining what would have happened if Saddam had remained in power when the Arab Spring began:
If you find this argument a bit bizarre, given the mayhem that followed the invasion and the tenuousness of historical what-ifs of this kind, and more than a bit self-serving, you aren’t the only one. Boris Johnson suggested that Blair had become “unhinged.” Sir Christopher Meyer, who was Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. from 1997 to 2003, said, “We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule.” Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said it was a “pointless academic exercise” to “pretend” that the war didn’t contribute to the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq today.
That, I’m afraid, about sums it up.
Photograph by Dario Pignatelli/Bloomberg via Getty.