Res Publica Simon Carr
You might have thought Tony Blair had apologised for Iraq, but he hasn’t. In a typical form of Blair-speak, he denied all responsibility, says SIMON CARR
IT WOULD have sounded very like an apology when broadcast, such is the magic of Tony Blair’s manner. It’s very important not to listen to Mr Blair – you can get quite the wrong idea about what he’s saying.
Headlines blazed I’M SORRY! but in the cold light of print, it transpires he didn’t apologise at all.
It was an apotheosis of the political apology, a subset of apologies first observed (by your correspondent, at least) in the early years of New Labour’s new dawn. Stephen Byers had been on television, saying with a frankness he came to regret that he wanted a certain situation resolved by sacking a civil servant. There was an outcry and he apologised in the Commons by saying, ‘If anyone formed the view that I had an opinion on the matter, that is obviously something I regret.’
The blame was not shouldered personally but passed off onto others. Onto us, rather brilliantly, silly critics who had formed an erroneous view. The suffering minister was actually regretting this error of ours, as he regretted all forms of human folly and willful misunderstanding by people of inattentive mind.
Blair wanted to apologise to the world, but never having done anything wrong, he struggled for subject matter. He settled on things he couldn’t be blamed for as he really wasn’t responsible. The Irish potato famine was one, I remember. And that whole wretched business about slavery. That really was appalling. He spoke for us all.
This latest apology on Iraq took the form of saying he was sorry that the intelligence they relied on was wrong. In Blairese he was saying, as he has so often said, that he was totally responsible for everything but nothing was his fault. In this case, MI6 fed them faulty product and lured them into chaos and carnage.
There may be further steps in this process as age wears on. He might confess that it was actually his fault but he isn’t actually to blame. Or that he is to blame but only insofar as society is to blame and he is a member, as we all are, of society. That he might be guilty but if he is, then who isn’t?
It is inconceivable that Tony Blair will apologise for Iraq in that way we are told God likes. It can be said without, I think, being presumptuous, that there is no ‘sorrow in the soul’ detectable. Far from feeling remorse, contrition, far from repenting, he’d do it again.
Why did he sign that blood-pact with George Bush? We now know George was determined to pin 9/11 on Saddam and set about getting him long before any justification could be dreamt up.
One possibility was given to me by a Leftist lobby journalist who knew the UK principals pretty well. It was an idea so deeply cynical that I – even I – had trouble processing it. He said Blair had got as close as possible to the White House so that the Tories couldn’t get in there first. He hadn’t spent so much time and energy modernising the Labour party as to allow the Tories to reclaim the Special Relationship. Set fire to the Middle East? If that was the price of keeping Iain Duncan Smith away from the White House, then so be it.
Let it fly in the face of everything the West really wanted. Take out one of the few secular leaders in the region. One who had been keeping Iran occupied in a futile war. One who hated and persecuted al-qaida. One who was – in hindsight, if you insist – hardly going to launch a missile at Britain and invite immediate annihilation... But let’s not rehearse all that.
Having watched him off and on for fifteen years, I suggest the one thing Tony Blair finds hardest to do is to say, or perhaps even to think, ‘I was wrong to have done that. I did a wrong thing.’
In ordinary life, that refusal to admit error great or small leads to quite dangerous personal, psychological outcomes.
If you’re always in the right, you have to reconfigure all bad outcomes as being someone else’s fault. You have to remake the world at your every step, even as you are passing through it, and remake it in such a way that nothing is your fault.
It is a sort of madness, making up your immediate past through an act of will. But perhaps it is quite common at the highest level of politics.