Tony Blair told the Progress event that one of his government’s achievements was to help depose brutal dictators, and he maintained support for liberal interventionism in the right circumstances.
I noticed that my neighbour, who had enthusiastically applauded the rest of the speech, sat these bits out and I guess that some others in the audience and certainly others in the labour movement remain hostile.
It highlighted a massive paradox which has become very apparent to me after eight fact-finding trips to Iraq, mostly to Kurdistan but two to Baghdad in the last few years.
The paradox is that Blair is undoubtedly respected, even lionised in Iraq, especially in but not exclusively the Kurdistan region, while remaining largely vilified here.
There’s little point in making a priority of trying to persuade people to think again. There is also, as Blair argued, a fatigue with interventions after Iraq.
I despaired that most of the reviews of Tony Blair’s book, A Journey, and the chapters on Iraq failed to engage with the case he makes for his actions and the point he repeated at the Progress event that inaction would have had its own consequences. This may well have included the continued grip of Saddam’s dictatorship over Iraq and its poisonous and destabilising role in the region.
However, the most important issue is to understand that the continuing and profound divide in the UK over Iraq stands in the way of people sinking their differences and doing what Iraqis always ask for, which is that the UK engage with the new Iraq.
The great hidden secret of Iraq is that it there is a deep popular respect for the UK’s political, legal and education traditions and systems as well as our goods and services.
They positively need British companies to trade with and invest in Iraq as they seek to catch up on their many lost decades when they were brutalised by Saddam and isolated from the modern world.
The desire for myriad connections is reflected in many meetings with ministers, business people, trade unionists, educationalists, and others in these reports on the Kurdistan region which I drafted and which apply in principle to the rest of Iraq as it reaches the commendable levels of security and stability which prevail in the Kurdistan region.
It is not that the openness of Iraqis to the UK validates or vindicates the views of people like me. It’s possible to have opposed the intervention but to do much more to support the new Iraq.
What sticks in the craw is that we are missing opportunities to help consolidate Iraq, starting with the Kurdistan region. We are doing too little to help the Iraqi trade unions to be free and to help reverse recent efforts by hardliners to marginalise them. It matters that we remain aloof while political leaders seek to deepen democracy and revive their economy and public services in the interest of the masses.
We are missing a golden opportunity to help the Iraqis change their own fate and that of the wider Middle East.
My own case for liberal interventionism in the new pamphlet, Pragmatic Radicalism, can be found here