http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05dowd.html?th&emc=th
The Poodle Speaks
By MAUREEN DOWD
Even in the thick of a historical tragedy, Tony Blair never seemed like a Shakespearean character.
He’s too rabbity brisk, too doggedly modern. The most proficient spinner since Rumpelstiltskin lacks introspection. The self-described “manipulator” is still in denial about being manipulated.
The Economist’s review of “A Journey,” the new autobiography of the former British prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and more like “the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon.”
Yet in the section on Iraq, Blair loses his C.E.O. fluency and engages in tortured arguments, including one on how many people really died in the war, and does a Shylock lament.
He says he does not regret serving as the voice for W’s gut when the inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with
“Do they really suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?” he asks of his critics.
In
Asked by a reporter if Iraq would have to be a democratic state for the war to benefit U.S. national security, Gates cut to core: “The problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid — that is, Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.” He added, candidly: “It will always be clouded by how it began.”
Blair writes that he thought he was right and that he and W. rid the world of a tyrant. But he winds up with a bitter anecdote: “I still keep in my desk a letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began. She told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced having fallen foul of Saddam’s son. She begged me to act. After the fall of Saddam she returned to
There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.
He concedes that the invasion of
In other words, Osama bin Laden had emasculated
Blair did not want to be W.’s peripheral poodle. He wanted to “stand tall internationally” with
Blair fantasized that Saddam might someday give W.M.D. to terrorists. This, even though the dictator didn’t like terrorists because they were impossible to control, and even though, as Blair admits, (the secular) Saddam and (the fundamentalist) Osama were on opposite sides. (When
It is criminally naïve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W. muffed the postwar planning because they never perceived what Blair now acknowledges as “the true threat”: outside interference by Al Qaeda and
He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience for “namby-pamby peacenikery.”
“He would have worked through the whole lot,
The religious Blair fancied himself a conviction politician who had intervened for good in Kosovo and
If he had challenged W. and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might have stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a weaker Iraq that is no longer a counterweight to Iran — which actually is a nuclear threat — and that seems doomed to be run one day by another brutal strongman.
Maybe Blair should have realized the destructive Oedipal path W. was on. At their first meeting at
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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