Tony Blair’s Evidence

Well it has happened and it will now be followed by cover to cover media analysis. This blog has a good deal to say, too. Rather than deal with it all in one go I intend to spread it over a day or two. Now I am going to begin at the beginning. The beginning is 9/11. Blair is on the wrong track from that very beginning.

9/11 was, as I have said before, a trap. Al Qaeda had limited resources but wanted to de-stabilise the U.S and goad it into action which would lead to a kind of international Viet Nam where they were drawn into conflicts which could not be won, but which could be lost, which would go on and on through Generals and Presidents, all the time sapping American life and materiel, while at the same time creating more and more enemies. This would have the effect of turning more and more, especially of Islamic faith, against the Americans and the West.

On the phone to one of my sons, as the Towers were falling before our eyes, we agreed this was a seminal moment. This was the moment when America had to grow up and show that it could rescue the trapped, tend the injured, comfort the bereaved, stand together, but and this was the but, get on with its day. Just as we had done during the IRA bombings which some Americans had helped to fund. All the world was on America’s side.

But Bin Laden is probably the greatest strategic brain operating in the world today and he knew that the the U.S had the most imbecile President in all its history, surrounded by zealots and fanatics itching for war. So into the trap they plunged with gleeful cries of triumphalism and nasty jibes at their dissenting allies, whom they famously dismissed as ‘old Europe’.

Our Prime Minister, who up till then had seemed such a sensible young man and who made a wise and measured speech to his Labour conference not long after the terrible drama in New York, which came very close to understanding what had actually happened and what the real dangers were, suddenly fell under the spell of the neo-con lobby with all its over simplicity and naivity, and the story unfolded as we all know.

Here we are in 2010 fighting two wars which are not being won, having destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens either directly or consequently, with Pakistan on the edge, Iran desperate to get a nuclear weapon, North Korea already nuclear armed, the Middle East more dangerous than it has ever been, personal liberty and freedom drastically curtailed, security higher than during the second world war and no end in sight to any of it. Such a farce has it become that the official strategy in Afghanistan has been reduced to bribing the enemy.

The former Prime Minister’s inability to see any of this is deeply disturbing. His self justification for what the whole world can now see was a terrible mistake is deeply shocking. His desire to prove his point by  frightening us into a new war with Iran is quite literally insane.