A Journey (65 page)

This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.

Today, humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can’t make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community can. ‘By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone.’ [A quotation from the new Clause IV]

For those people who lost their lives on September 11 and those who mourn them, now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial.

As with all visionary speeches, it attracted both plaudits and sneers. I had written it myself, virtually straight out. There was none of the usual agonising. The redrafts were minimal. I sat in Chequers in the study overlooking the Rose Garden, as the first autumn colours began to appear, and wrote. I remember picking up from the desk a silver-and-gold inkstand that had been a present to Chamberlain in 1937, with a Latin inscription that translates as ‘To stand on the ancient ways, to see which is the right and the good way, and in that to walk’. I felt we were on the eve of a mighty decision about the world’s future. I wrote easily because I wrote what I thought.

Looking back, it was extraordinarily idealistic; but it was also a strategy. And it rested on one very important but highly contestable decision.

In the Chicago speech of April 1999 I had already set out a doctrine that put intervention – if necessary, military intervention – at the heart of creating a more just international community of nations. I had enlarged the concept of national interest, arguing that in an interdependent world, our national interest was engaged whenever injustice or danger existed. So I came to this new challenge with what was already a highly developed instinct for the bold approach and for being prepared to intervene rather than let be.

In essence, there are two views of how foreign policy should be conducted. They are often presented as a choice between idealism and realism, but that is unfair to both schools of thought. The idealist believes that a foreign policy driven by principle is the only one that works, because it is the only one that changes and persuades. The realist believes that by realpolitik we save lives and money and conflict, and that is surely worth achieving. They are simply two different analyses of what is effective.

Because it was such a shocking and terrible act, September 11 threw the world’s pieces into the air. It was accepted totally as altering our view of the world fundamentally. At that moment, people were completely prepared to intervene radically so that the pieces settled in good order and harmony.

But as time passed, people wondered whether maybe its consequences hadn’t been exaggerated; perhaps it really was just a one-off, in which case, the argument developed, should we just try to manage this situation, maybe evolve it over time, but above all tranquillise it? As the mission became more painful and the will of the enemy to keep on fighting grew clearer, such an argument became increasingly attractive. Maybe this extremism could be cauterised. Maybe with a big push on Israel and Palestine, for example, we would evolve out of it. Maybe if we sought a lesser ambition and merely managed world affairs, recognising that different cultures have different ways, we could all get along better. So, they argued, it’s not really a ‘War on Terror’ – how unhelpful such intemperate language sounds. This isn’t really to do with Islam or indeed religion. The disputes that seemed to be connected are possibly not connected, but local. To bring democracy to these nations is to try to enforce Western ideas on non-Western peoples. It’s a form of cultural colonialism born of ignorance. So the argument went.

To which the response of people like myself was that we had been given a warning and we should heed it. You can’t categorise al-Qaeda as a simple offshoot of some weird fanatical ideology. In later time, as I studied the issue closer still, I saw the significance of the Iranian Revolution. While it was true that in 2001 Iran was hostile to the Taliban and Saddam, and therefore to al-Qaeda, the hostility was centred on the Shia/Sunni divide, not on the methods or world view of either. The battle was about who would lead a reactionary movement within Islam, not who could construct a progressive movement.

I looked at the storming of Mecca in late 1979 by Sunni extremists, anxious in case the Shia Muslims were stealing a march. It had been put down with total firmness, and the House of Saud had also learned its strength. From then on, there was an increasing disposition to allow religious forces to fashion Saudi society.

I also believed that the answer to one threat was not to conjure up another. I examined how in Afghanistan we had supported what became the Taliban in order to stop the Russians, precisely in the name of managing the situation; how we had armed Saddam to be a brake on Iran; and how in each case the consequence of such ‘realism’ had been simply to create a new, and potentially worse, source of instability.

Above all, though, I conceived of September 11 as making all previous analyses redundant, or at least duty-bound for re-examination. We could no longer presume that countries in which this virus persisted were none of our business. In the choice between a policy of management and a policy of revolution, I had become a revolutionary. No more did I think this situation could be managed safely. It had to be set on a path of fundamental change.

In January 2002, with the memory still present of a happy few days in the sun with the family and baby Leo in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, I visited Bagram airport in Afghanistan. I stepped off the C130 transporter to see that a red carpet had been rolled out. We were warned not to step off it since large parts of the airfield were still mined.

As I came down the steps to be greeted by Karzai, I looked at the assembled guard of honour. They had been hastily put together, their uniforms begged, borrowed or stolen from what appeared to be the armies of the world. The men were thin; the place was a mass of burnt buildings and craters.

As Karzai and I walked down the line inspecting the guard, photographers and cameramen were ahead of us trying to take pictures, clashing with the Afghanistan security detail, who would throw them off the carpet, which they then bounced back on to, like something out of a comedy sketch, the two of us having to react normally with cameras trained on us, as this St Vitus’s Dance was performed in front of us.

‘I want you to meet my Cabinet,’ Hamid said. We walked to a bombed-out building by the edge of the strip, went inside and sat on makeshift benches and plastic garden chairs. One man, introduced to me, I think, as the arts and culture minister, sat quite motionless. He had lost one eye, and the good eye stared at me, not leaving my face for an instant. It never blinked.

They spoke of their hopes and fears. Hamid knew exactly what to say and how to say it. His perfect English, his perfect poise and assurance, lifted my spirits. I came away inspired by their heroic expressions of determination, but daunted by what a few small glimpses of the country’s condition had told me.

This would take time. But how long, and how hard it would be, I did not know.

THIRTEEN

IRAQ: COUNTDOWN TO WAR

A
s I thought on how to answer the question put to me at the end of my evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War in January 2010, I felt sick, a mixture of anger and anguish. ‘Do you have any regrets?’ This wasn’t a question being asked or answered in the quiet reflections of the soul; not something that could be weighed, considered and explained with profundity and penetrating clarity or even an easy honesty.

It was a headline question. It had to have a headline answer. Answer ‘yes’ and I knew the outcome: ‘
BLAIR APOLOGISES FOR WAR’, ‘AT LAST HE SAYS SORRY
’. Choose a variant. The impact would be the same. Those who had opposed the war would rejoice; those who had supported it would be dismayed, imagining their support and in some cases their sacrifice had been in vain. Answer ‘no’ and you seem like some callous brute, indifferent to the suffering or perhaps worse, stubbornly resistant, not because of strength but because you know nothing else to do.

So I said I took responsibility, accepting the decision had been mine and avoiding the headline that would have betrayed. However, it was an answer that was incomplete.

The anger was at being put in a position in an inquiry that was supposed to be about lessons learned, but had inevitably turned into a trial of judgement, and even good faith; and in front of some of the families of the fallen, to whom I wanted to reach out, but knew if I did so, the embrace would be immediately misused and misconstrued. But the anger was selfish, trivial – comparatively at any rate – and transient.

The anguish remains. The principal part of that is not selfish. Some of it is, to be sure. Do they really suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died? And not just British soldiers but those of other nations, most of all of course the Americans, but also the Japanese and Dutch and Danes and Estonians and Spanish and Italians and all the others of our coalition. And the Iraqis themselves, and not just those who were the casualties of our forces in war, but those who died at the hands of others, whose deaths we failed to prevent. The diplomats, like the wonderful Sergio Vieira de Mello, who gave their lives in a cause they never advocated. The random casualties of the vagaries of war, like Ken Bigley, and the private security guards taken hostage with Peter Moore.

To be indifferent to that would be inhuman, emotionally warped. But it is not that accusation that causes the anguish.

The anguish arises from a sense of sadness that goes beyond conventional description or the stab of compassion you feel on hearing tragic news. Tears, though there have been many, do not encompass it. I feel desperately sorry for them, sorry for the lives cut short, sorry for the families whose bereavement is made worse by the controversy over why their loved ones died, sorry for the utterly unfair selection that the loss should be theirs. Why did it have to be their child, their husband, their family, at that time, in that place, on that journey or mission or appointment?

The reason fate could make that choice derived from my decision. But then there were the myriad chance factors that conspired to bring about the circumstance of each life lost.

The anguish arises from an urgency to act, to commit, not to feel, but to do.

I am now beyond the mere expression of compassion. I feel words of condolence and sympathy to be entirely inadequate. They have died and I, the decision-maker in the circumstances that led to their deaths, still live.

I used the word ‘responsibility’, incomplete though it is, with deliberation.

I can’t regret the decision to go to war for the reason I will give. I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded, and that too is part of the responsibility. But the notion of ‘responsibility’ indicates not a burden discharged but a burden that continues. Regret can seem bound to the past. Responsibility has its present and future tense.

Even out of office, playing now a wholly different role, I am still engaged in the same struggle that gave rise to the events I shall describe. When I say I think about Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences and their victims every day of my life, it is true; but more than that, I use that reflection to recommit to a sense of purpose in the bigger affair, a business as yet unfinished. I cannot, by any expression of regret, bring to life those who died; but I can dedicate a large part of the life left to me to that wider struggle, to try to charge it with meaning, purpose and resolution, and keep my responsibility intact and functioning, in however small or large a way. I can’t say sorry in words; I can only hope to redeem something from the tragedy of death, in the actions of a life, my life, that continues still.

One other thing before I start: many who read this will have disagreed with the decision, maybe strongly; maybe you just can’t bring yourself even to debate it now. I am sorry about that too. But for the moment let each of us go back to the beginning and I will try to explain what was going on in my mind.

The trouble with debating Iraq is that, by and large, people have stopped listening to each other. There are probably more ‘uncommitteds’ among the public than generally thought. In my experience, ‘the people’ – as opposed to others, the players, the commentators, the hangers-on, the aficionados in the narrowly obsessive beltway of politics – have an innate appreciation of the complexity of decision-making. They come to a view instinctively. They are prepared to shift it from time to time. They understand leadership is a hard business. And they have a different process of reasoning from politicians, at once both startlingly superficial and at points more profound. Nowadays they won’t think of Iraq much. But if they did, they would remain reasonably open to persuasion.

Not so those who feel strongly and have taken a keen interest. Their minds are made up, and the conventional wisdom – certainly among progressives – has hardened pretty much to granite; and is negative: it was a mistake. It is also, of all the decisions I took, the one that even closest friends disagreed with; indeed, not so much simply disagreed with, but found hard to comprehend. My oldest political friend Geoff Gallop used to say not that he took a different view from me, but: ‘Just can’t understand why you did that, Tony.’ Many supporters will acknowledge I did it for the correct motives, but still regard it as ‘the stain’ on an otherwise impressive record. And of course those who aren’t supporters regard it as final proof of villainy.