FriYAY wrote on Apr 9
th, 2013 at 10:28am:
Have you seen the Blair speech?
It is interesting to see him talk about being a new PM, and having all these ideas/ideals for his country and then…..people start flying planes into buildings in the US.
Saddam had and used WMD on the Kurds, why does everyone brush over that little fact?
Tony Blair was the PM of Britain. A few Saudi and British nationals fly planes into the US in 2001, and Bush and Blair want to invade Iraq because Saddam used gas on the Kurds in 1980?
It is always interesting to hear Blair talk, but his judgement on Iraq was wrong. He spent all his political capital encouraging his party to support the invasion of Iraq, and used up his popularity with the British people, who came to see him as a neo-con stooge, not a strong, idealistic leader. He then wasted his good standing with Europe and the UN, and for what?
Blair's failings in Iraq now define his legacy. His vision for a strong, multilateral security force to defeat tyrants was destroyed by his alliance with the US in a pointless, imperialistic war. This is Blair's real failing - not so much the failure of Iraq, but the failure of his vision, which could have been historic.
Just think - the League of Nations and the UN both failed to establish a security force that could establish peace around the world, enforce demilitarization, and prevent world war. After Serbia, and then Rwanda, there was a window of opportunity and political will. This is what drove Blair, and many in the US and UN at the end of the cold war.
If Blair had listened to his own party, his own people, and the UN, he may well have made some progress on this vision. Instead, he followed the agenda of naked US aggression and self-interest. In the end, of course, it wasn't the politics that did him in, but the military failure.
For Blair, Iraq was meant to be the start of a new international "coalition of the willing". This is an age-old European project, going back to the end of the Napoleonic wars and, following WWI, the establishment of the League of Nations. The League failed to get the US to join, and it failed to establish an international security force. Ultimately, it failed to prevent the rise of the Nazis. With the establishment of the EU, the end of the Cold War, the success of the new international court in Brussels, and Clinton's eventual willingness to engage in Serbia, the signs were right.
But then Blair went and joined Bush. He believed, of course, that this favour would be quid-pro-quo, but he was used in the US's own game. When Iraq turned nasty, everyone realized how futile such a project of international peacekeeping through war could really get - and how long. Twelve years on and we're still in Afghanistan.
Blair had a noble objective, but history - and the world - was against him. He should have listened.
Now, Europe is floundering, and the world is on an isolationist path again. Blair - and the world - missed the opportunity of creating a viable international peacekeeping force.
And this is the real failure of Iraq.