It was his Middle East policy that brought about the end of Tony Blair’s ten-year premiership. While Iraq was his greatest blunder, it was his refusal last summer to condemn Israel’s assault on the Lebanon which triggered his downfall. Labour party MPs had had enough of their now deeply unpopular and untrusted leader and his slavish support for US interests. Whatever Israel’s excuse for the attack, no civilized nation could sit back while its warplanes laid waste a neighboring country and scattered deadly cluster bombs across southern Lebanon. They demanded that Blair set a date for his departure. To his later regret, in September he promised publicly to be gone within the year. Yesterday he honored that commitment. By the end of June, his party will have elected his successor, almost certainly Finance Minister Gordon Brown.
History will deal kindly with Blair’s domestic achievements. He pushed through partial self-government for Scotland and Wales and last week finally saw the restart of Northern Ireland Assembly with powers once more devolved from London to local politicians. Indeed, the patient steering of the Northern Ireland peace process in the once violence-torn UK province may turn out to be Blair’s major political achievement. Elsewhere, his domestic record is patchy. Education, the key plank of his early policies has been a disaster despite massive funding. Too many government targets have demoralized teachers and too many British kids continue to leave school with minimal levels of literacy and numeracy that would shame a Third World country. Despite billions thrown at the British health sector, service remains poor with too much money going onto burgeoning bureaucracy.
Blair might, however, still have been around to try and tackle these problems had it not been for the cardinal error of following an ignorant President Bush in the Iraq invasion. The lies that both men used to justify attacking Saddam carried on into their own wishful thinking about how Iraq would respond once the dictator was ousted. Whatever anxieties expressed by his Foreign Office Arabists that Blair may have passed on to Bush in private, publicly he backed the president consistently. The Blair memoirs, which will earn him a multimillion dollar advance may, if they are candid, throw a sharp light on the addled thinking in the Bush administration. And yesterday in his resignation speech Blair did begin to show some candor.
He came as close as he ever has to apologizing for the failures of Iraq. This was not of course an apology to the Iraqi people. He was simply trying out the idea of being nobly, perhaps even heroically, wrong in the eyes of British electorate. He also said he regretted “the blowback” in Iraq. He probably didn’t mean the “blowback” of terrorist bombs that slaughter and maim hundreds of Iraqis each and every week. More likely this master of spin was referring to the damage that his catastrophic misjudgment had inflicted on his personal political reputation.
