Blair at Iraq Inquiry: "Responsibility, but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein"

The 21st-century national security worldview

In that sense, there was one aspect of the defense put forth by Blair that stood out to me as I read the press accounts and watched video excerpts of his testimony: The admission that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, convinced him that it was necessary to overthrow Saddam Hussein, no matter what the justifications or consequences.

"If those people inspired by this religious fanaticism could have killed 30,000, they would have. From that moment Iran, Libya, North Korea, Iraq ... all of this had to be brought to an end," Blair said. "The primary consideration for me was to send an absolutely powerful, clear and unremitting message that after Sept. 11 if you were a regime engaged in [weapons of mass destruction], you had to stop."

Some of the prominent reporting on Blair's testimony -- the New York Times' Lede Blog, the UK Guardian's roundtable commentary -- has been searching for a "Frost/Nixon moment," an admission from Blair that he made a mistake. But that's tangential to what really matters here. We don't need a Frost/Nixon moment; the really important epiphany, at least for me, is the revelation of Blair's global security mindset.

It's right there in Blair's own words: After September 11, the Western world needed to send a "message." We've seen variations on this argument before: Robin Wright has explained it in terms of realpolitik, Tom Friedman has said it's about telling the Middle East to "suck on this."

Blair, a lawyer by profession, doesn't want to be so blunt, despite his talk of needing to send a message. But one doesn't need to spend hours parsing his testimony to understand that when Blair signed up for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein after September 11 -- many say he pledged his support during a visit to Bush's Crawford, Tex., ranch in 2002 -- he wasn't basing his decision on a United Nations report on Hussein's chemical weapons stockpiles, or on intelligence regarding the connections (or lack thereof) between Hussein and non-state terrorists. Blair and Bush simply wanted Hussein gone.

Blair actually admitted as much in an interview with BBC One's Fern Britton that taped in November and aired this past December. From the Guardian's report on the interview:

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".

Significantly, Blair added: "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."

He continued: "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it's incredibly difficult. That's why I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision."

The Inquiry panel asked Blair to explain the Britton interview today, and despite Blair's effort at evasion, he never retracted any of the substantive things he said. Wearing a smirk, he said that even "with all my experience dealing in interviews, it still indicates that I've got something to learn about it."

Blair continued:

I did not use the words regime change in that interview and I did not in any sense mean to change the basis. Obviously, all I was saying was that you couldn't describe the nature of the threat in the same way if you knew then what you know now, because some of the intelligence about WMDs was shown to be wrong. It was in no sense a change of the position, and I just simply say to you now, the position was that it was the breach of the United Nations' resolutions on WMD. That was the cause; it was then and it remains.

Like a lawyer, Blair is restating himself, using different words to describe the same thing. "You couldn't describe the nature of the threat in the same way," Blair said. It's not that the threat turned out to be different, it's that he would've needed to make a different pitch to the British people.

"The nature of the threat" is the lacuna here. We all know that weapons of mass destruction, and Hussein's alleged possession of them, were the (flawed and incorrect) pretext for the invasion of Iraq. But what Blair is saying is that he -- and presumably Bush -- would've tried to take Hussein out even if they had known the such weapons stockpiles didn't exist. Frankly, though I believe there's still much investigation to be done over whether American and British government officials intentionally misled the public about the faulty WMD intelligence, I'd like to see Blair and Bush's views of global security probed more. What is the "nature of the threat"? Why did we need to overthrow Saddam Hussein after Sept. 11? Was it as simple as sending a "message"?

The Times' Lede Blog flags a speech Blair gave in Chicago in 1999, two years after he became prime minister, which elucidates Blair's thinking on the globaliaed, 21st-century world and the need for military intervention against repressive regimes:

We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other counties if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure. On the eve of a new millennium we are now in a new world. We need new rules for international co-operation and new ways of organizing our international institutions.

Globalization as a force multiplier for terrorists

Hussein proved that he was a threat to the people of his own country; he used chemical weapons on his own citizens and oversaw a brutal security apparatus. He also proved that he was a volatile regional actor by pursuing a war against Iran in the 1980s. In today's hearing, Blair latched onto Hussein's violent regional history for justification, but he also made it clear that he believed Hussein's risk to the Western world had become amplified:

This was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind. The threat to the region. Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there, I thought and actually still think, it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way.

Blair added later:

"I think he was a monster, I believe he threatened not just the region but the world ... and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer."

In a globalized world, with fluid communication and transportation between countries, a half-crippled but oil- and weapons-rich country in the Middle East, with a leader who might one day decide to hand a dirty bomb to Islamist terrorists, posed an untenable threat to the people of Britain. That seems to be Blair's argument.

To me, this is the most interesting part of the debate, especially since I think that the Bush administration and even current American officials share Blair's view of national security in the 21st century. Non-state terrorist groups can find safe harbor these days; recognized national governments directly and indirectly aid such groups, even when they're operating hundreds or thousands of miles away. This isn't necessarily a recent development. After all, the Central Intelligence Agency and its counterparts have been funding guerrillas and resistance movements around the world for decades. The difference now is that the enemy, as we define it, has increased its capabilities and dedication. Bearded Islamists hiding in caves in Pakistan have found it useful and/or necessary to attack Western targets and have found the capability to do so, in part because of help they have received from foreign governments.

The size of the threat to America, the United Kingdom and other Western countries is debatable. Islamist groups such as Hamas, Hizballah and even the Taliban probably do not see a need to attack the West on its own territory; their goals seem primarily defensive and even nationalistic. Al-Qaeda is relatively small, and its power has been greatly reduced since September 11. But the lure of the radical Islamist ideology continues to pull in recruits. Does that justify upending an entire society, to send a "message" to nearby regimes that even the slight possibility of their empowering a non-state terrorist group will necessitate an invasion?

This isn't a dry debate. During his testimony today, Blair began beating the drums against Iran, and let's not forget that he is still the official envoy to the Middle East for the Quartet -- a negotiating group composed of the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia. "I think we live in completely new security environment today," Blair said. "I thought that then, I think that now; it's why I've said this to you a number of times today: I take a very hard, tough line on Iran today, and many of the same arguments apply."