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Encore Theatre Magazine
::Front Page::

:: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 ::

Billington's Blair

Michael Billington's put up a more than usually will-this-do?-ish piece on the Guardian's theatre blog. Titled, for no very good reason, 'How do you solve a problem like Blair?' he uses the announcements of two 'Tony Blair on Trial' plays, one on C4 and one at the Tricycle, to observe that Blair so far 'has been seen on stage largely as a buffoon'. Instead, Michael longs for a play that 'takes Blair seriously'.

Well, there is something to be said for this point. The kind of lampooning you get in The Madness of George Dubya or Follow My Leader makes those of us who opposed the Iraq occupation feel good but it doesn't add to our understanding. Nor, one might add, were they really meant to.

But what does Billington mean by taking Blair seriously? He offers two definitions: one 'that examines Blair in all his psychological complexity' or 'one that even portrays him as a tragic figure'. What does this mean? Here Billington pads the article out with some very meandering thoughts but he seems to believe that Blair's tragedy is that he did the wrong thing for the right reasons, at least in his own eyes. By 'the wrong thing' he means enter into this murderous war (is that what he means by the reference to 'the accumulating corpses'? It was a war, Michael...). But it's utterly mysterious what he could mean by 'the right reasons'.

Why did we go to war? Blair is fond now of claiming that he did so in order to depose the tyrant, Saddam Hussein. But this is a rereading of history. Blair took us into war on the basis of the WMD Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed and was seeking to develop. There is much l;ess talk about his oppression of his own people. If you look at the two main dossiers of information released to the press and public, the February ('dodgy') dossier and the September dossier, the great preponderance and primary focus of both is on the WMD intelligence. In the February dossier, only three pages directly refer to the oppression of the Iraqi people; the long second section outlining the structure of the internal security apparatus seems largely informative and as much talking about, say, the role of the Republican Guard in defeating the weapons inspectors as in discussing the security's role in repressing dissidence. In the September dossier, the one directly made available to the public, Blair's introduction comprises 29 sentences, 15 of which relate directly to the threat posed by the WMD. In contrast, there is one reference to Saddam Hussein's 'dictatorial' behaviour. It is clear that it was the imminent threat to Britain posed by Saddam Hussein, not that of his own people, that was Blair's central argument in support of military action.



This makes a difference because the kinds of questions you ask someone claiming self-defence (even anticipatory self-defence) are quite different from those claiming humanitarian intervention. If Iraq had posed a direct threat to the West, we would have been quite right to intervene militarily - once diplomatic routes had broken down. Few other questions would have been asked. If we had claimed it was a humanitarian intervention, other questions come into the picture: why now? (the September dossier lists human rights abuses going back twenty years) and why Iraq? (rather than, say, Zimbabwe, or North Korea, or any one of several oppressive regimes). By claiming the first ground, he avoids the second set of questions, and so he cannot change position now. It is a central plank of any 'just war' that you declare, beforehand, why you are embarking upon it. This Blair did not do.



So if Billington means that for the right reasons (deposing Saddam Hussein) Blair did the wrong thing (went to war), he's seriously misled. And in any case, why would this be illuminated by presenting a rounded pictrure of Blair in all his psychological complexity? Answer: it wouldn't. It would be a distraction from the real forces that are at work here, and these are not psychological. They are an embedded Foreign Office doctrine that will not let us break with America, in a mistaken belief that we hold a balance of forces between the US, Europe and the Commonwealth. They are an ideological programme called Project for the New American Century. It's our addiction to air travel, America's addiction to fuck-off cars, the emerging economies of China and India, and the need to stabilise the diminishing oil supply because the US presidency is bought by the oil companies.

Yes, I think there is some kind of tragic story here. Blair over-reached himself in believing that he could persuade the UN to get behind military action in Iraq. But he couldn't, because they didn't believe he had them, didn't really think he was obstructing the weapons inspectors, and saw the American aggression for what it was. Naked self-interest, a neo-neo strategy, the revival of Kissingerism, and that was never going to be good for the world. But to claim that his story is the one we need to see is to buy into Blair's own self-importance and a UK foreign office view of the world.


To understand what has happened in Iraq, we must resist Blair: The Tragedy.

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Comments:
By the sound of it, from Front Row at least, the C4 play is along the lines of the tragic approach to Blair that you urge us to ‘resist’.

I for one am glad. It’s a great narrative, one I don’t feel necessitates me buying into ‘a UK foreign office view of the world’ to appreciate. Here is a fantastically able politician and a devout, decent man who has made a massive mistake. The really important thing is that the ramifications of that mistake, the thousands of deaths and the millions of people who think less of this country internationally, cannot be skirted over. They must take centre-stage.

I can’t speak for Billington, (you do spend a lot of time on his back, has he slagged you off in the past?) but could the ‘wrong deed’ be taking us into a war on the basis of false information, for the ‘in his eyes, right reason’ of humanitarian intervention? This is the case as made by the ‘Liberal Neo-con’ journalists who are thought to share Blair’s thinking on this – guys like Hitchens, Aaronovitch and Hari, a representative of whom found their way into ‘Stuff Happens’.

As TB’s tenure has come to an end there’s inevitably a lot of talk about his legacy and his achievements. What stands out is how, were it not for this war, he might’ve been thought of as one of the two or three great post war Prime Ministers.

I can’t help thinking how ripe that is for the tragedy treatment.
 
And if you have read all the Iraq books that it sounds like you have, then you’ll know the governments and major industries of both Russia and France had millions of dollars invested in Iraq and thus their own good reasons not to invade. Ascribing perspicacity and noble motives to all the UN in this matter is silly. Sillier than Billington is in his piece.
 
Here's a question: Has there ever been a dramatically rounded and convincing portrayal of a prime minister in a play? I can think of plenty of tremendously engaging and moving kings, but that's not the same thing! Churchill in Hochhuth's 'Soldiers' is the most convincing as a man and as a bearer of enormous power that I can think of - off the top of my head - with the Prime Minister in Granville Barker's 'Waste' being the most interesting ficticious one.
 
Interesting point, Brace, but why does what you say amount to saying that Blair's story has the form of a 'tragedy'. Yeah maybe in the loose everyday use of the term (where every child's death is a tragedy) but that's not what Billington meant is it?
 
I expect he meant it in the ancient Greek sense: a great man who is the progenitor of his own downfall, which is how I meant it too.
 
Representing what happened as a tragedy individualises the issue as if it's all about his mental fight and his loss of reputation, which frankly doesn't seem all that significant compared to the Iraqi civilian death toll so far.

Isn't Encore's point that you get a better understanding of what's happened by not making Blair at the centre of it. Which is quite literalist of them of course, and did you guys like Stuff Happens? That certainly put Tony Blair way off-centre.
 
Interestingly (and this relates to a point Paul Miller has made on his blog) Encore were rather positive about Stuff Happens when it first came out but were scathing about it in the recent piece on Amy's View.
 
That may be because we don't always agree between ourselves, which is relatively healthy. Some of us thought Stuff Happens was a very dull way of talking about politics (40 blokes in identical grey suits). Some thought it was a very exciting event and - let's face it - those audience were among the largest gatherings of those (largely) opposed to the invasion of Iraq since the march of 15 February 2003.

I agree with Steve's point above. Why individualise this story so much? How genuinely illuminating is it to treat Blair's escapade as the downfall of a great man, or his undoing by some tragic flaw. Do we need catharsis in this situation? The tragedy is not in Blair's likely drubbing at the hands of history, it is ongoing right across the Middle East.

It's interesting to reflect on Simon's question about representations of Prime Ministers. Hollywood produced the movie Air Force One in which terrorists hijack the President's plane and, through a mixture of skill, cunning, and a physical prowess he defeats them. It's pretty well impossible to imagine pitching the same film about a British prime minister. Is this because they're comfortable about heroism in a way that we're not? They have The West Wing which is broadly heroic and we have The Thick of It. They have The American President, we have Love, Actually. This may underlie Billington's question about the buffoonery that characterises all representations of Blair. What very positive representations of Prime Ministers have there been since the war? Ian Curteis's The Falklands Play was risible wasn't it? ('Those poor sailors...')
 
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