Tony Blair titles his political memoir A Journey and explains that the journey traversed by him in the book depicts the evolution of his character and personality during his 10-year prime ministership (1997-2007). However, this book is really a self-justification, attempting to influence the space between the negative media accounts of his leadership and the more thoughtful academic reviews that will come later.
Blair has every reason to be concerned. As the problems with his book launches show, he continues to be reviled by large sections of domestic opinion for taking the UK into the Afghan and Iraq wars, and generally functioning not as a British leader but as the “poodle” of US President George Bush. The fact that the latter enjoys little public esteem today only serves to heighten the pervasive negative views relating to Blair’s prime ministership.
When Blair led the Labour Party to victory in 1997, he had some remarkable assets. At 43 years, he was young, energetic and enthusiastic. Again, Labour had won an election after 18 years. Blair had abandoned the left wing moorings of his party, snatching from the Tories large portions of their philosophy and beliefs and repackaging them as “New Labour”. He went on to lead his party to victories in three general elections, an unprecedented achievement in Labour history.
Though Blair devotes considerable space to domestic matters and relations with his European partners, the core of the book is about the events of September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are presented within the larger framework of the special relationship with the US.
In order to justify the Iraq war, Blair is compelled to argue that, regardless of the failure to discover WMD and the large-scale death and destruction during and after the war, Iraq is much better off now than it was under Saddam Hussein, mainly on the basis of fewer Iraqi deaths after the allied invasion as compared to Saddam’s rule.
Having presented his case on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Blair attempts to place his thinking within a larger philosophical framework. Ironically, this master of spin locates this in the ideology of the American neocons. Thus, for Blair, the battle lines today are between Islamic fanaticism and the enlightened, secular West, with its commitment to liberty, equality and democracy.
The West, on its part, has invariably upheld the highest values. In regard to 9/11, Blair blandly asserts: “We (the West) had not provoked this outrage.” In Afghanistan, the western armies have not gone in to punish but to liberate. In Iraq, sectarianism has reared its ugly head, but this is primarily due to “outside influences”, i.e. Al Qaeda and Iran; no mention of the presence of the US forces. Finally, in the “Postscript”, he mourns that the western way of life is now “in shadow: Our confidence is low and our self-belief shaken… we feel weak, at points almost listless”. On the same page, he asserts, in neocon terms: “I believe we should be projecting strength and determination abroad, not weakness or uncertainty.”
In West Asia, according to Blair, the ruling elite have the right idea (they are pro-West!), while the popular movement has the wrong one (it is hostile to the West). He believes that Israel’s wanton violence and the “unreasonableness” of certain of its positions have little to do with the “root of the matter”, which is the wider struggle within Islam. In the best Bernard Lewis/Huntington tradition, Blair asserts that Islam is “urgently in need of modernisation”; the struggle finally is for “the mind, heart and soul of Islam”. In the aftermath of 9/11, when Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf advises him that the West should, above all, address the Palestine issue, Blair expresses surprise, but makes no comment and quickly drops the matter. In short, Blair’s self-justification is founded on the most discredited of American right-wing ideologies, which see “Islam” in essentialised monochrome terms, with its 1,400-year history and the aspirations and dilemmas of its billion adherents grossly oversimplified in a few brushes of the pen.
Blair rejects he was ever Bush’s “poodle”, asserting that even those who did not like him or did not agree with him (several in both categories, he notes), “still admired the fact I counted, (and) was a big player, was a world and not just a national leader”.
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Though the Atlantic relationship dominates the memoir, the book contains a number of pithy nuggets with a good turn of the phrase and political insight. Thus, Blair points out: “The first rule in politics is that there are no rules, at least not in the sense of inevitable defeats or inevitable victories.” Referring to public opinion, he says: “Politics today works by reference to paradigms of opinion that are formed, harden fast and then become virtually unchallengeable.”
However, such insights are few. The book is overlong and the part most important to Blair — Iraq — makes for tedious and unconvincing reading. Whatever Blair’s explanations, the conclusion is unavoidable that the neocons, who did so much damage to their own country and the rest of the world, also hurt their ally across the Atlantic, and all of them sank together, with their bogus ideology, into the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The reviewer is an Indian diplomat. The views expressed are personal
A Journey
Tony Blair
London: Hutchinson, 2010
718 pages, £25
