Paul Routledge has an excellent opinion piece in today’s Daily Mirror. (Things have come to a pretty pass when the Daily Mirror is a more reliable source than the New York Times.) The question: why is Tony Blair so consistent in shooting himself in the foot?
Just when it had become possible to be optimistic after the terrible events of 7/7, the Prime Minister… picked a needless argument, not just with his own security services, but with the British people – claiming that the London bombings have nothing to do with Iraq. This attitude is so manifestly absurd that it was immediately repudiated by two thirds of voters in an opinion poll. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre also gave the lie, reporting: ‘Events in Iraq are continuing to act as a motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.’ These are Blair’s own spooks, whose findings presumably go across his desk in Number Ten….
Nobody, certainly not me, says that the war in Iraq is the sole, direct and immediate cause of 7/7. It wasn’t. Nor is it any form of justification. But it is pointless to pretend that this conflict has not helped to create a climate in which it is easier for hard-line Muslim clerics to corrupt young minds and for terrorist godfathers to recruit suicide bombers.
So why does Blair do this, squandering good-will and stirring up trouble for himself? Routledge argues that the cause is his “naive, all-consuming self-belief”, and cites the damning verdict of Lord Roy Hattersley, the former deputy Labour leader
‘The ultimate justification for the war in Iraq – when it was no longer possible to pretend that weapons of mass destruction were only 45 minutes away – was that Blair’s conscience allowed no other course of action.”
(Driving in to work this morning, I heard John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister repeating Blair’s absurd “nothing to do with Iraq” claims. Maybe it’s a virus – Howard is visiting Blair, and had just visited Bush.)