Tony Blair doesn’t need to apologise for the Iraq war

I was against the Iraq War. And I’ve been against Tony Blair ever since I first clapped eyes on his moisturised, illiberal countenance, all teeth and no soul. (In 1996 I was standing on street corners selling a magazine that said ‘Tony Blearghh!’ on its cover, while every other lefty was hailing him a messiah come to save us from Toryism.) Yet I don’t like the obsession with making Blair repent and weep and whip himself for what happened in Iraq. It’s ugly, and even worse it’s wrong: Blair doesn’t bear sole responsibility for that war.

The disappointment with Blair’s half-arsed apology during his CNN interview, when he said the Iraq war might have helped give rise to Isis, confirms Blair-bashers won’t be happy until he makes a Stalinist-style self-condemnation, preferably on live TV, before exiling himself to an island with nothing but Cherie to keep him company for the rest of his miserable, murdering life. Blair’s sort-of contrition is ‘too little too late’, says one Labour MP, adding: ‘He should apologise for everything.’ Everything? Do these people want blood? Yes, they do. The media is mauling Blair for engaging in a ‘spin operation’ ahead of the publication of the Chilcot report, which will apparently be ‘damning’. His ‘apology of sorts’ is apparently just a stab to ‘defend his reputation’ once Chilcot issues his God-like thundercrack. But why should Blair apologise at all? He thinks the war was right, and therefore he has nothing to apologise for. We have every right to criticise the war, but Blair has no duty to say sorry. When we cajole people to apologise for things they believe to be true, to denounce themselves and their ideas even though they still believe those ideas are right, then we get dangerously close to Soviet territory. Like Stalin’s henchmen, people are demanding a public performance of penitence from someone who isn’t penitent. The lust for extracting an apology from Blair — or ‘Bliar’, to give him the infantile moniker dreamt up by the sixth-form-stuck left — suggests this isn’t a serious debate about militarism but rather a creepy moral showtrial. The weird hatred for Blair, whose name is spat out with venom in dinner-party circles, is not a rational response to events in Iraq or anywhere else — it’s a sad case of projectionism, with people, especially Labour people, projecting their disappointment with politics and life in general on to one toothy bogeyman. Blair has become the all-purpose whipping boy of disgruntled lefties and every other clown who thought Labour’s coming to power in 1997 would transform Britain into a glistening utopia and are really gutted that it didn’t. Just as people in the Middle Ages thought sticking a crazy old lady on a stake would solve all their problems — from crop failures to the early deaths of their children — so Blair-bashers believe that subjecting Blair to the metaphorical flames of media condemnation might make Labour and Britain great again. The Blair-bashers openly talk about sacrificing Blair to cleanse politics, especially Labour politics. As a Guardian columnist once said, we must ‘lance the boil’ and ‘let Blair pay the price for Iraq’, to give a ‘fresh impetus’ to the left. But it’s a myth that Blair is responsible for Iraq. The Blair-burning project of the miffed middle-classes wrenches Iraq from its historical context. Some of the very same media people now calling for the lancing of the Blair boil were complicit in Labour’s cultivation of a dangerous new foreign policy. They cheered Robin Cook’s interventionist ‘ethical foreign policy’. The Guardian was a slavish cheerleader of Blair’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The attack on Afghanistan in 2002 was largely uncontroversial. Iraq was only the culmination of all that stuff, the latest salvo in the self-flattering, world-saving foreign policy of the New Labour and media elite. What moral cowardice these people display when they demand that Blair ‘pay the price’ for a politics they helped create. The main thing I’ll never forgive the Blair-bashers for is that they’ve made me almost admire Blair. To stand by your beliefs when the entire chattering class is denouncing you as a mad, murdering bastard takes guts. And it’s rare in these politically flimsy times. Blair might have been wrong about Iraq, but at least he has some moral conviction, which is more than can be said for the blame-dodging cynics who want to cleanse their own souls and lives by burning Blair on the media stake.