Blair's Wars

"This is a great book. It came out just after the Iraq invasion. At the time John Kampfner was the editor of the New Statesman and his key question was: why did Tony Blair support George Bush and the use of force in Iraq? Well, to answer this question he goes right back to the beginning of Blair’s premiership and he makes the point that Tony Blair took Britain into five different conflicts. He goes right from the very beginning – he starts off with air strikes in Iraq, the Kosovo war, the dispatch of British troops to Sierra Leone in 2000, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He tries to pick apart a very human, psychological thing that was going on behind the policy decisions and talks about what happened in the shift, particularly in Tony Blair’s mind. Early on there was an emphasis on humanitarian intervention, but by the end of his premiership he was involved in the illegal occupation of Iraq with George Bush. Kampfner talks around these issues and about the style of government that led to some of these disastrous foreign policy decisions. He talks about the failure of government decision-making and focuses on the fact that the style of decision-making was very presidential and involved a very small group of political appointees and civil servants. Cabinet and parliament were given a marginal role and Blair firmly believed that he was doing the right thing. He really did believe that Saddam Hussein was an evil man and that he was right. No, it’s not, but when you start sending armed forces into another country based on purely moral, gut-reaction feelings of good and evil, we start to fall into a very dangerous policy-making process. And where do you stop? Saddam Hussein is not the only dictator who has repressed his people and done awful things. Also, there has been a lot of work done on humanitarian intervention, where the military has to be used to create a space for the aid to go in, and that wasn’t the case in Iraq and it wasn’t the point. All the excuses they used – WMD, terrorism, humanitarian need – they were talked about after the decision had been made and I think the decision was a very personal moral decision. It wasn’t a case of there being a hidden agenda – it was that simple. He believed it was the right thing to do and the more people tried to sway him the firmer he became in his belief, which is again a very human trait. To whoever tried to dissuade him, he just said: ‘Saddam Hussein is an evil man.’"