United Kingdom: Blair stands by his Iraq war decision

Tony Blair is still “Teflon Tony,” said the Glasgow Daily Record in an editorial. Testifying last week in front of an independent government inquiry into the Iraq war, the former prime minister shrugged off the howls of “Liar!” and “Murderer!” from a gallery packed with observers who consider him to be a war criminal. He offered “no apologies,” nor did he even express any doubts about whether he was right to back George W. Bush in the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. Blair insisted that he honestly believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the world. He firmly denied lying to the British people or making any secret deal with Bush. “Eloquent and elegant, his answers were measured, and his inquisitors didn’t really lay a glove on him.”

That’s because his performance was downright surreal, said the London Guardian. On the “strange planet” where Blair lives, “the invasion of Iraq was not a disaster but a necessary and even heroic act.” Portraying himself as a “decider” just like Bush, Blair said: “This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision.” He would, he claimed, make the same choice again to start a war that turned into a major fiasco and that left 179 British soldiers dead. In fact, he upped the ante, saying the West should consider invading Iran, too, unless it curbs its nuclear ambitions. Such “terrifying self-belief” allows “no room for subtlety, or detail, or even facts.”

Blair’s belief has a religious fervor because he is, in fact, something of a religious fanatic, said Matthew Parris in the London Times. Once you recognize that Blair “really does do God,” his support for a cause that is also championed by America’s religious Right starts to make a lot more sense. Blair apparently harbors a simplistic, if pious, conviction “that the universe is best understood as an eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil, in contention for dominance.” For him, the phrase “axis of evil” was “not just a Bushite sound bite—it was a profound philosophical insight.”

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That’s why Blair still can’t bring himself to apologize to the nation, said David Rose in the London Mail on Sunday. I, too, supported the Iraq invasion, and I wrote editorials arguing for it. Eventually, though, as it became clear that the war was, at best, a tragic miscalculation, I became “nauseated, angry, and ashamed” over my poor judgment. My sorrow cannot, of course, bring back any dead soldiers, or repair the “millions of Iraqi lives shattered by bloodshed or exile,” and I must live with that. For Blair, who bears personal responsibility for dragging our country into this catastrophe, the cost of confronting this reality is simply too great. “It wouldn’t just be his legacy in jeopardy but his sanity.”