AS the war in Iraq totters on in no particular direction and therefore with no end in sight, it continues to exact a heavy toll. There are two dimensions to this. Four years after “mission accomplished”, dozens of deaths remain the daily norm in Iraq. On a somewhat different plane is the political fate of the politicians who led the charge.

 

Almost all of them have taken hits. The first victim was Spain‘s Jose Maria Aznar, who joined the military misadventure in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, and then, after Muslim terrorists wreaked havoc in Madrid in the run-up to a general election, made the cardinal mistake of attempting to blame the mayhem on Basque separatists. He was out on his posterior within days. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi was the next to go: he had much to answer for besides his unstinting moral support for the American aggression, but the “war on terror” angle certainly fed into his unpopularity.

 

Meanwhile, the prime “decider” behind the Iraq catastrophe, George W. Bush, has seen his level of popular approval plummet from the high 90s to the low 30s. He is, unfortunately, going to be around for another 20 months, given that the congressional Democrats have neither the numbers nor the inclination to impeach him. But his war wagon has lost crucial wheels, including Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and, not least, Paul Wolfowitz – whose failures at the Pentagon were rewarded with the coveted post of World Bank president, a prize that he is evidently about to forfeit.

 

Australia‘s John Howard has incurred remarkably little political damage as a consequence of blindly following the US into Iraq, partly because Australia‘s deployment is minuscule thus far more or less casualty-free. However, there is a reasonable chance that he won’t be re-elected when Australia goes to the polls towards the end of the year.

 

And then there’s Tony Blair. The British prime minister last week fixed a date for his departure from Downing Street. That auspicious day, June 27, is still six weeks away, and among the multitudes who feel that Blair ought to have quit much earlier, the majority attribute their attitude to his obsequious role as Bush’s cheerleader-in-chief. However, the primary cause of his undoing – as Professor Avi Shlaim put it in The Guardian this week, “He has the worst record on the Middle East of any British prime minister in the past century” –  isn’t the only reason why the end of Blair’s tenure is an unequivocally welcome prospect.

 

Apart from his impressive quantum of conservative and neoconservative fans, a number of liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have lately lamented the fact that the Iraq “mistake” will overshadow other aspects of Blair’s legacy, and quite a few  have sought to reinforce the impression that it was a case of the wrong decision being taken for entirely honourable reasons, notably a predisposition towards “humanitarian” interventions that had already been demonstrated in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. Of course, none of them bothered to point out that the worst Serbian atrocities against Kosovars came after NATO’s bombs began to fall.

 

In announcing his resignation last week, Blair told his constituents: “I decided we should stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally. I did so out of belief … I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That’s your call. But believe one thing if nothing else – I did what I thought was right for our country.” He went on, excruciatingly, to describe Britain as “the greatest nation on earth”.

 

As a considerably greater Englishman pointed out more than two centuries ago, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.  Blair obviously offered no apology for the plethora of half-truths and lies that he and his colleagues conjured up to make the case for war. But his mendacity appears not to have unduly alarmed his more determined liberal admirers. In The Observer this week, Will Hutton glibly glosses over “the Iraq mistake” to designate Blair “a good man” and “a great politician” who “left his country in better shape than when he found it and established a new political system”.

 

The latter is a reference to “liberal Labour”, but in fact Hutton is hailing a system in which it is increasingly difficult to make a distinction between between Labour ideals and Tory fantasies. He’s obviously at odds with Simon Jenkins, who pertinently pointed out in The Guardian last month: “Blairism does not exist and never has. It is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground … That is not to say that Britain under Blair and Gordon Brown has lacked a guiding light, but that light has been Thatcherism … Blair’s term in Downing Street has been the continuance of an ideological narrative that began in 1979, not 1997.”

 

Meanwhile, E.J. Dionne Jr, writing in The Washington Post, confessed to “a deep sadness that [Blair] tarnished a formidable legacy”. His reference was to the Third Way, a euphemism for ditching social democracy that Blair shared with Bill Clinton. It hasn’t had much of an airing since 2001.

 

And The Guardian editorialised: “Some progressives may celebrate his departure. But progressives who can win elections are rare. Labour, and Britain, can look back with some satisfaction on a decade when it was led by one of these. He was a winner. That is not unimportant.” Perhaps it wouldn’t be unimportant, were it indeed possible to construe Blair as a progressive. In fact, his advent as Labour leader accentuated a rightwards drift that dated back to the electoral debacle of 1983. Crucial elements in the party hierarchy pinned their hopes on it as the only realistic route to power.

 

However, just a few months after John Major led the Conservatives to an unexpected victory by a tiny margin in 1992, opinion polls suggested that Labour, regardless of who led it, would be heavily favoured in a rematch. By then, Neil Kinnock had made way for John Smith as party leader. Smith died two years later, and in the battle for succession that followed, Blair out manoeuvred Gordon Brown. The fresh-faced and remarkably young new leader of the Labour Party was semi-mockingly referred to as Bambi, before earning the sobriquet Tony Blur, which alluded to his malleability. Once his true intentions became clearer, a new nickname was coined: Tory Blair.

 

Crucially, he went into the 1997 elections armed with endorsements from Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Labour won by a landslide. The Conservative rout after 18 successive years in power offered a thrilling spectacle. Unfortunately, the alternative – and this shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise – offered more continuity than change.

 

Sections of the liberal commentariat have tended to take a kindly view of the Blair government’s initiatives in health and education, but parallel moves towards private investment, aimed at reducing state responsibility, have tended to restrict advances in these spheres. The emphasis on faith schools holds out the prospect of a decreasingly cohesive society. The privatisation of British Rail has promoted more chaos than efficiency. And early indications of a grubby tendency towards greed culminated nine years later in Blair becoming the first British prime minister to be interrogated by police as part of a criminal investigation: he was questioned twice in connection with the sordid affair whereby honours were allegedly conferred on rich individuals in return for their contributions to party coffers.

 

On the plus side, substantive moves towards peace in Ulster, launched in the Major years, have led eventually to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland; what’s more, Scotland and Wales now enjoy a measure of regional autonomy. It’s also worth recalling the detention of the late Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, while the courts debated an extradition request from a Spanish judge: it is all but impossible to envisage that memorable episode unfolding under a Tory administration. Eventually, however, the decrepit  mass murderer was allowed to get away.

 

Then came 9/11. And Iraq. The latter hasn’t overshadowed Blair’s achievements so much as it has eclipsed his other follies and failures. Ultimately, the vow to provide succour to Africans proved to be as vacuous as the declared project of bringing hope to Palestinians. Professor Shlaim describes Blair’s public endorsement of the pact between Bush and Ariel Sharon that confirmed the permanence of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, as “the most egregious British betrayal of Palestinians since the Balfour declaration of 1917”. 

 

The last straw for many Labour MPs and cabinet ministers came last year when the prime minister refused to call for a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, lest it be construed as a sign of disloyalty to the White House.

 

Blair now says he did what he thought was right. That suggests his ethical compass is seriously awry, which ought to have disqualified him from holding a senior political post in the first place. There are many things to which he can plead guilty, including a disturbing fundamentalist streak in the confessional sense, but sheer stupidity isn’t one of them. His inability to be forthright clearly remains intact. A therapeutic assignment could do wonders for his personality, apart from offering him a necessary reminder that wars have consequences. Gordon Brown would be well advised to appoint Blair as Her Majesty’s permanent representative in Baghdad‘s Green Zone. The beneficiaries of his rectitude would no doubt welcome their liberator with open arms.

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