With PM Tony Blair on countdown until he leaves office there is ongoing discussion about the man - and his legacy, if any. There are, as might be expected, totally contrary and opposite views.
Johann Hari, writing in The Independent, adds his voice to the analysis. What emerges is a man seemingly bereft of real knowledge of the world and in many respects led by the nose by the Americans and naive.
"But Blair knew suprisingly little about American power and its purposes. In a conversation with John Snow, he revealed he had never heard of Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratic leader of Iran who was toppled by the CIA in 1953 because he wanted to control his own country's oil supplies. As recently as 2005, he had never even heard of the Project for a New American Century.
One friend of Blair's recently told me she was shocked in 1997 when she saw Blair welcoming Henry Kissinger into Downing Street and lauding him as a great statesman and friend of democracy. She challenged him over it, but discovered "he just doesn't know about this history - how the Americans toppled democratic governments in Latin America and the Middle East. He really didn't know anything about it. It was shocking."
Here is where Blair's beliefs about foreign policy intersect with the ideas he formed in domestic politics. Tony Blair's core belief is that politics is all about being at the heart of power. In the 1980s, he fought against the Bennite infestation of the Labour Party, and was appalled by followers of a man who proclaimed cheerfully that the Labour Party's 1983 general election catastrophe was "a great victory for socialism" because so many people voted for a "pure" socialist manifesto.
Confronted with people who preferred this impotent moral purity, Blair was determined to be the opposite. As he once put it, "opposition is a waste of time". Wherever there is power, use it. Never back away. So when he came close to US state power, every instinct he had formed in his political life told him to cut away any doubts and embrace the power. To retreat and offer a criticism was contrary to everything he had learned. But to hold together his twin beliefs in his own humanitarianism and in cleaving to power, Blair had to learn a selective blindness towards the actions of the US state. This ability had always been there, enabling him to support deadly sanctions on Iraq or arms deals to foul regimes, but now it became swollen.
He offered weasel words of denial about the US policies of using chemical weapons in Iraq, and would only condemn Guantanamo as "an anomaly". He refused to see how his Coalition of the Willing was really a Coalition of the Drilling, saying it was a "conspiracy theory" to talk about Iraq's oil. His early humanitarianism bled into an unthinking pro-Americanism, and he lost the ability to tell the difference.
And as Iraq descended, he clung to increasingly desperate soundbites to gloss over the tension. He declared that the disasters in Iraq were the work of al-Qa'ida and the Iranian regime, rather than a largely indigenous string of Shia and Sunni insurgencies descending into civil war after Bush-era brutalisation."
Johann Hari, writing in The Independent, adds his voice to the analysis. What emerges is a man seemingly bereft of real knowledge of the world and in many respects led by the nose by the Americans and naive.
"But Blair knew suprisingly little about American power and its purposes. In a conversation with John Snow, he revealed he had never heard of Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratic leader of Iran who was toppled by the CIA in 1953 because he wanted to control his own country's oil supplies. As recently as 2005, he had never even heard of the Project for a New American Century.
One friend of Blair's recently told me she was shocked in 1997 when she saw Blair welcoming Henry Kissinger into Downing Street and lauding him as a great statesman and friend of democracy. She challenged him over it, but discovered "he just doesn't know about this history - how the Americans toppled democratic governments in Latin America and the Middle East. He really didn't know anything about it. It was shocking."
Here is where Blair's beliefs about foreign policy intersect with the ideas he formed in domestic politics. Tony Blair's core belief is that politics is all about being at the heart of power. In the 1980s, he fought against the Bennite infestation of the Labour Party, and was appalled by followers of a man who proclaimed cheerfully that the Labour Party's 1983 general election catastrophe was "a great victory for socialism" because so many people voted for a "pure" socialist manifesto.
Confronted with people who preferred this impotent moral purity, Blair was determined to be the opposite. As he once put it, "opposition is a waste of time". Wherever there is power, use it. Never back away. So when he came close to US state power, every instinct he had formed in his political life told him to cut away any doubts and embrace the power. To retreat and offer a criticism was contrary to everything he had learned. But to hold together his twin beliefs in his own humanitarianism and in cleaving to power, Blair had to learn a selective blindness towards the actions of the US state. This ability had always been there, enabling him to support deadly sanctions on Iraq or arms deals to foul regimes, but now it became swollen.
He offered weasel words of denial about the US policies of using chemical weapons in Iraq, and would only condemn Guantanamo as "an anomaly". He refused to see how his Coalition of the Willing was really a Coalition of the Drilling, saying it was a "conspiracy theory" to talk about Iraq's oil. His early humanitarianism bled into an unthinking pro-Americanism, and he lost the ability to tell the difference.
And as Iraq descended, he clung to increasingly desperate soundbites to gloss over the tension. He declared that the disasters in Iraq were the work of al-Qa'ida and the Iranian regime, rather than a largely indigenous string of Shia and Sunni insurgencies descending into civil war after Bush-era brutalisation."
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