Back to Blair's warriors

Readers of this blog might like to read this piece from today's Times magazine.

For four years I've kept thirty cardboard files.

Each contains words for every sight and sound I witnessed around Tony Blair in thirty days before and during the Iraq War of 2003.

About 10,000 words of 'fly-on-the-wall' diaries were published in The Times magazine immediately .

Then 80,000 words in a book a month or so later - wholly without comment, or as much without comment as I could manage to achieve.

Avoiding comment was not easy. But a 'fly-on-a-wall' is supposed to be only an eye.

Since then I've often wondered if I should go back again to the story of what I saw.

And decided against.

Then came the National Portrait Gallery.

At  the end of this month there is to be an NPG exhibition of the photographs that my partner, Nick Danziger, took during those days.

The Times magazine has sent me back over the past few weeks to see some of the subjects. Four years ago I listened and watched but asked no questions. Now I have returned to the more normal journalistic balance.

A strange experience.

The result in the paper today concerns just two pictures, the coffee-session before the first War Cabinet (above) and Blair's meeting two weeks later with a Shia woman (below) who told him even then truths that he did not want to hear.

The last words?

Maybe.

I'm not sure.

It is quite tempting to continue this journey.

.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

It would be useful if Sir Peter Stothard examined the Blair exit interview in "Newsweek" for the Feb. 26 issue, with photography by Nick Danziger. This Stryker McGuire interview, based on 2 months access, complements Peter Stothard's book and his post in that the focus is on a reputation "shredded by Iraq." The "Newsweek" article posits that Blair instigated the current brushback-pushback, and we hope not "blowback," in relation to Iran. It would be especially interesting if Sir Peter burrowed into the suggestions in the Stryker piece that Blair can rely on the understanding of Bono, Melinda and Bill Gates, Wolfowitz, the Kennedy-Shrivers, and--no doubt most importantly--Rupert Murdoch, although, curiously, this statement is in "Newsweek" even though the last Peter Stothard access as reported in "The Times" must have done the job. Meanwhile, in Canada, plastering over the past Blair-style is not working well in relation to our mistaken decisions about Afghanistan, for which we have Blair to thank, because he is the "truer believer," according to the Stryker account, if the article is without irony. Curious: a three-page web article as the result of 2 months access. Not much to report, apparently. Except some more spin.

[Andrew Kenneally]

I admit to not having read your book, and obviously can only guess at how accurate the Amazon review is regarding Blair's ideological basis for the attack on Iraq. Just to take a look at the decision to invade Iraq in terms of the following:
a) The enormous cost of embarking on a foreign war
b)the limited resources available to a government and what best use they make of these resources.
I see the cost of the war seemingly at runaway levels of enormity, whereas, by contrast, a new report released by UNICEF ranks the U.S. 20th and Britain 21st out of 21 industrialized countries in what they term "children's well-being," which they claim to be based on matters such as health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization.

Given the assumption that our men in power aren't totally without relevant insight into possible permutations of certain actions, I find it almost beyond belief that we are expected to believe that this decision to go to war was the result of the deep-seated ideological conviction that this was the best path down which to bring the countries. Of course when governments attack other countries for ideological reasons, the real nature of the ideology tends to be far from pure. With this in mind, we should perhaps take a closer look at the ubermenschen strains of the writings of the father of the neo-con movement, Leo Strauss.
To end with a quote from Aldous Huxley, "Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."