Called to account?
Symon Hill is unimpressed with the former prime minister’s bravado performance
I have never seen Tony Blair looking so nervous. He appeared flustered and scared as I sat in the media room at the Iraq Inquiry, watching his interrogation on screens placed on the walls for the assembled journalists. The former prime minister had snuck in by a side door at 7.30am, avoiding the demonstration timed to begin at 8.00. It seems a far cry from 1997, when he walked through the London streets, shaking hands with cheering members of the public. The protests, which were occasionally audible even on the second floor, focused on the accusation that Tony Blair is a war criminal. ‘What do we want?’ called a young Muslim woman through a loudhailer. ‘Blair on trial!’ shouted the crowd.
Tony Blair’s nervousness went up and down throughout the day. At times, he became so confused that the transcript on the screen displayed an incomprehensible jumble of words. At other times, he was back to his old self, so confident that it took a while to realise that he was repeatedly contradicting himself.
Roderick Lyne – who has acquired a justified reputation as the most effective member of the panel – challenged Blair about the legal advice he received from Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general, who said that the war would be illegal, before changing his mind at the last moment.
This seems to have been a habit with Peter Goldsmith. When I worked for the Campaign Against Arms Trade, we took the government to court when they cut short a criminal investigation into BAE Systems’ Saudi arms deals. Documents released in the case revealed that Peter Goldsmith had expressed legal doubts about the intervention – before falling into line and agreeing with Tony Blair. Given the similarity of these incidents, I remain unconvinced by Tony Blair’s repeated assertions about Peter Goldsmith’s ‘extraordinary integrity’.
Whatever the subject, Blair was always making one thing clear: that he was right. He insisted that he was right to invade Iraq, right to follow George Bush, right to think that it was legal. Not only does he not regret the war, he does not regret any aspect of it. The most he could manage was an occasional grudging acknowledgement that one or two things could perhaps have been done slightly better.
Far from mellowing since leaving office, Tony Blair has become more belligerent than ever.
This attitude was at its most frightening in Tony Blair’s remarks about Iran. He kept mentioning the Iranian ‘threat’, comparing it the danger that he still believes Iraq posed in 2003. There were repeated references to 9/11, which Tony Blair said had changed everything. He then admitted that 9/11 had not changed the threat from Iraq, but had altered his ‘perception’ of it.
In short, Tony Blair was reviving the dangerously crude philosophy of the ‘war on terror’. In Tony Blair’s world, there are two sides. There are ‘us’ (he described 9/11 as ‘an attack on us’). And there are terrorists, rogue states and anyone else who is not part of ‘us’. It is an analysis no more sophisticated or accurate than that of the fanatics he denounces.
John Chilcot had begun the day by saying ‘This is not a trial’. As I watched the entirely unrepentant Tony Blair, I realised that he is likely to spend the rest of his life afraid of the world getting its act together and putting him on trial for war crimes. It is a charge on which the court of public opinion has already returned a verdict of ‘guilty’.
Comments
Thank you for being a witness of this.
By Susan B on 4th February 2010 - 13:40
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