Tony Blair led the UK as Prime Minister for some ten years, but he’s been keeping himself to himself on the whole since bowing out to the incoming Gordon Brown. However, with a Conservative Liberal Democrat alliance government in place and a new record breaking book, A Journey, out to promote, he’s back on the media campaign trail and his interview with Andrew Marr is probably the defining moment of his return to the fore.
While Andrew Marr’s self righteous interview style grates significantly throughout the discussion, you can’t help but admire his dogged determination to ask tough questions and probe for genuine answers. However, Tony Blair has been in the higher echelons of politics since 1983, so he was rarely rocked; although the weird, sometimes stuttering edits and cuts could belie assertions of a free flowing conversation.
Of the many subjects touched upon throughout the interview, one of the points that was highlighted was the validity for military intervention against oppressive tyrants & regimes that came out of Tony Blair’s experiences with Kosovo and Sierra Leone. However, it sort of seemed as though he doesn’t get that surely it is not whether something should be done to topple oppressive tyrants (the answer to that must be yes), but more a question of what should be done to protect the people under the threat and rule of oppression.
Blair also went on to defend his stance on the decision to go to war with Iraq by claiming that the breach of UN agreements by Iraq regarding inspections for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) contributed significantly to the decision. The point for him was not whether they had WMD, but that they failed to comply with UN mandates. It’s just a shame that the UN doesn’t act as more of a policing force in situations like this, which would help to prevent wars of this nature; maybe even bringing the concept of war to an end in its entirety.
Another one of Blair’s main responses to Marr’s questions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that after 9/11 the opportunity to take risks or waste time in decision making was no longer available. He said that it was not viable to ignore car bombers and that there is no compromise with a society that would stone a couple to death for loving each other. To a large extent, it’s difficult to argue with this, although diplomatic avenues must always be pursued. Atrocities need to be policed, prevented and stopped, but again it’s not a case of whether to do something, but what should be done and the lack of an effective answer to terrorism & tyrannical regimes from the UN means that countries like the USA & UK are free to build a case for military action and war.
There is, in all probability, also a lot of truth in Blair’s statement that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. However, when he asserts that the carnage of war was offset by the end of the carnage under Saddam, he misses the most significant point, which is that carnage is carnage wherever it originates. There is carnage with tyrannical regimes and there is carnage in war, surely they are both as invalid as each other.
Andrew Marr also discussed the possibility of oil being one of the core factor in the war in the middle east. Blair obviously denied this stand point, however, our dependance on middle east oil, and in fact all unsustainable power sources, must be cut quickly to combat our dependance on politically charged fossil fuels.
All of the questions about Iraq and Afghanistan led to the topic of Iran and it is here that the discussion became very bleak as Blair highlighted the similarities between Iraq’s WMD and the issues regarding Iran and nuclear armament. Blair was adamant that if it were still his “watch” that there would be no chance of Iran developing nuclear weapons capabilities, citing that if we don’t do something now then we will face an even bigger struggle in the future from an irrevocable shift in the balance of power in the middle east. Again, most people would agree that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons, but national war-based intervention from the likes of the US & the UK would only lead to more bloodshed. Maybe instigating a high level UN policing deployment in Iran with multilateral support to monitor and prevent nuclear development would be more of a viable option.
Following on from the lengthy debate about the Bush Blair wars, Marr turned to the move towards the middle political ground that Tony Blair helped to forge with New Labour. However, his insistence of strong lines between Conservative right and Labour left were slightly cloying and more than a little dated, so didn’t gain much momentum.
The latter part of the interview centred around the labour party leadership race, but Blair was a little unwilling to overtly back any candidate, despite the implication from Marr that it was David Milliband considering his New Labour stance. Blair’s insistence that a refocus on New Labour policies would seem to support this implication.
Finally, when asked about his government’s legacy to the UK, Blair remarked that in time people would see what his New Labour achieved. History has a way of changing as time goes by, so it’s not impossible for the stigma of the Blair government to fade, especially under the media savvy glare of a resurgent Tony Blair. It looks like his sway over media airtime and coverage has not been dampened by his 3 year hide away.
