Blair rewrites history of Iraq invasion

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Tony Blair asserts that he and US president George Bush chose values over security in their response to 9/11. In so doing, he is re-writing history to fit the fallout from Iraq: security has not been improved, but further threatened. According to Blair's latest version, Iraq wasn't about security, it was about Western values. 

Mr Blair is now massaging history as vigorously as he did intelligence before the war. The argument for war in late-2002 and early-2003 was clear: the invasion of Iraq was a necessary measure to remove a military threat and an ugly regime. The bells that Blair and Bush rang were those of WMD and 45-minute strikes on Britain. Little was said about values at the time.

The prime minister's hands are full of straw after demolishing supposed detractors who claim we have “terrorism today because of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq”. He continues, “They seem to forget entirely that 9/11 pre-dated both.” In reality, few say otherwise.

I cannot help feeling that in his heart Blair now recognises that Iraq was a badly misguided adventure that has turned into a catastrophe. There is a shade of self-doubt about his argument. In it, he is struggling with his own conscience as much as with the great issues of our time. It's a pity that Mr Blair's inner conflict contaminates his analysis of Islamist terror, because his thesis on the difficulty of the Muslim world in dealing with modernity is well argued. Perhaps we now have the right message, but the wrong messenger.

Ciarán Mac Aonghusa
Churchtown, Dublin 14