Home | Blog | Blair & Iraq: Taking One for the Team

Blair & Iraq: Taking One for the Team

Judah Grunstein | Bio | 01 Feb 2010

One of the subjects of the France 24 week-in-review panel discussion program I took part in on Friday -- link to follow, hopefully, because it was a great group -- was Tony Blair's appearance before the U.K.'s Iraq War inquiry commission. Blair, it seems, suggested that among the reasons he had supported the invasion of Iraq was because he didn't want the U.S. to be "alone." This reflected, as one of the other panelists put it, how the Iraq War was a war in search of a cause, to which I responded that it seems to me that Blair had put his finger on a much better justification than the search for non-existent WMD threats.

I was a bit startled to hear myself express the thought, which had crystallized pretty much on the spot. I was a staunch opponent of the invasion, and still consider it a monumental error of judgment. The only person it isolated more than George W. Bush was Saddam Hussein. And though things turned out much worse for Hussein, that in no way kept them from finishing terribly for Bush as well.

But in thinking it through and developing the argument over the weekend, I believe that Blair really did make a defensible decision, as compared to Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, who were both obviously "right" in their assessment of the war itself, but in a way that illustrates a good friend mine's observation that being right is overrated. Here's what I mean by that.

In thinking back to the run-up to the war, my most lasting memory is the growing sense of incredulity as it became obvious that an invasion was inevitable. What Blair seemed to grasp more clearly than his European counterparts was that 9/11 had changed everything -- not for the world, but for George W. Bush. Specifically, Blair harbored no illusions about the new rule set that 9/11 had put in place: Crossing the United States was in and of itself cause for war. Whereas Chirac and Schroeder seemed to believe that "being right" might somehow forestall a U.S. invasion, Blair correctly understood that the U.S. was prepared to act unilaterally.

Consider how frighteningly unfamiliar the global order suddenly became on the day that U.S. ground forces finally crossed the border into Iraq. That, more than the attacks of 9/11, had changed everything for a world that had come to take U.S. restraint for granted in the post-Cold War era.

Now consider how much more frighteningly unfamiliar that global order would have become had Britain not been part of the coalition that invaded Iraq alongside the U.S.

The actual Iraq War, with all its disastrous fallout, would probably not have been much affected. But the same might not be true for other hot spots that depended on multilateral initiatives to avoid war (the Six Party talks on North Korea, the P5+1 approach to Iran) or even bilateral events in which restraint took precedence over unilateralism (such as India's response to the Mumbai attacks).

It's safe to say that things would have turned out much better in Iraq had Bush heeded Chirac and Schroeder's concerns and not invaded Iraq when he did. (There's no telling what the international community might have decided had Saddam Hussein flouted another round of inspections.) But since we know now that was not even a possibility, it's safe to say, too, that things turned out much worse because Chirac and Shcroeder decided to not provide cover, and that they could have turned out even worse still had Blair joined them.

Blair's reputation and historical legacy will forever suffer from his decision. But it was certainly defensible from the perspective of the greater good.