Billington's BlairMichael Billington's put up a more than usually will-this-do?-ish piece on the Guardian's theatre blog.
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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.