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January 28, 2007

Tony Blair, Iraq and responsibility

I've just watched Tony Blair give a fairly extensive interview to The Politics Show. Ugh - 'toe-curling' is the first word that springs to mind. There's no sense of regret, no sense that things could have been done better or that the 'reconstruction' was bodged - Blair just blames insurgent groups for preventing Iraq (and Afghanistan) from becoming democracies.

There's also a real sense of amnesia - Blair states that "I don't think anyone erm, really predicted accurately what would happen in Iraq". I guess it depends what you mean by 'predicted acurately', but many of opponents of the war did predict that the war would be a bloody mess, and Gordon and Trainor's book Cobra II shows that many in the US military also doubted that the resources available to them in and after Operation Iraqi Freedom would allow them to stabilise Iraq after regime change. Bush and Blair were warned that Operation Iraqi Freedom would not end well, and the warnings have been proved to be relatively accurate.

You can almost sense, with every word, it being made harder and harder for Labour to win the forthcoming Scottish elections. To see Blair punished at the ballot box isn't nearly enough - but it will be a start, I guess.

Posted by jon_mendel at January 28, 2007 12:31 PM

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