Author: geoff

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.)

Juan Cole has a piece in Salon entitled The Iraq war is over, and the winner is… Iran, in which he discusses the implications of this week’s love-in between Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (accompanied by eight cabinet ministers) and the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. I wonder how the neocons felt about al-Jaafari laying a wreath on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, not to mention all of the elaborate plans for joint oil projects, food shipments, electricity supply, and so forth. And how would the American voters feel about the fact that Iran will be providing a billion dollars in foreign aid to Iraq, to go along with the gazillions that the US taxpayer is contributing. (Of course the Iranian aid is unlikely to be recycled through American contractors.)

Money quote:

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq’s neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.