OPINION:Emboldened by initial achievements, Tony Blair came to place increasing faith in his own judgment – with fateful consequences, writes TONY KINSELLA
THE JANUARY rain falling on London late last week offered a perfect setting for tragedy and hubris. The somewhat desperate attempt to find a half-decent Afghan exit strategy offered the tragedy, while Tony Blair’s appearance before the genteelly ruthless Chilcot inquiry gave us the hubris. The ultimate responsibility of governments is to assure the security of their people, and Blair defended his actions on the basis that Saddam – or his sons – would have posed a greater threat today than they did eight years ago.
It would all have been so much neater if a Conservative government had taken Britain to war against the wishes of an animated Labour opposition. Although the government needed the support of 146 Conservative MPs to carry the vote in March 2002, Iraq and Afghanistan are most assuredly Labour’s wars. It is now actually quite hard to recall the enthusiasm which accompanied the landslide victory of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. Here was an engaging modern leader for an optimistic era of stable growth and development.
The new government appeared refreshingly free of the intellectual blinkers that had long circumscribed UK governments. Economic success facilitated major, even transformational, initiatives in education, health and social policies. Successful interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone strengthened arguments in favour of an international right of humanitarian intervention. Troops would be quickly dispatched and rapidly victorious. A grateful population would then shower them with kisses and flowers. The UK had become a power that would act rather than wring its hands. These early successes fed what would become Tony Blair’s hubris.
A leader must make decisions. The more those decisions prove to have been correct, the more a leader comes to believe in their own judgment abilities. This invites situations where the leader makes a tragic mistake. Blair’s error, the one that seems destined to occlude his many achievements, was to join the Bush administration’s ill-conceived and illegal invasion of Iraq. Talleyrand’s words on the 1804 execution of the Duke of Enghien, which would alienate Europe’s monarchies from the emerging Napoleonic regime, seem hauntingly appropriate: “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”
A central pillar of the New Labour approach, that of avoiding their party’s traditional outbursts of gratuitous anti-American and anti-military posturing, also played a role in the stumble towards war.
The standard Whitehall belief was that the UK’s status in the world was defined by its close proximity to Washington. It was a belief which allowed no room for consideration of either the bizarre incompetence of the Bush administration, nor the relative decline in US power.
In theory governments decide defence policy objectives. The military then defines the necessary resources. The practice is often less clear cut, with military chiefs making strong cases for their preferred shopping lists, while political leaders weigh requirements against industrial and employment benefits.
In the 1998 defence review Labour acceded to most of the military’s demands. In the context of a growing economy this was relatively painless, and allowed the government to demonstrate that Britain’s defence was in safe hands with Labour.
The UK decided to remain one of the world’s five nuclear powers with an intercontinental capacity by replacing its Trident missile submarine force at a cost of around €25 billion. The RAF was promised over 200 Typhoon Eurofighters, for upwards of another €20 billion. The Royal Navy was, after a 20-year gap, to get two full-sized aircraft carriers which together with their F-35 aircraft and support vessels will cost nigh on €15 billion.
The army, despite being the least capital-cherished of the services, then found itself obliged to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Operational costs which had in the past been funded from government contingency funds, must now be found within the defence budget. Financial pressures have led to public spats between different service chiefs.
Governments often sanction more than they had originally intended, and major programmes frequently cost more than originally indicated. Such additional costs are usually absorbed by purchasing fewer items over longer periods of time, while paring down less obvious training and maintenance expenditures.
European defence expenditures, although frequently criticised from the right for denying troops essential equipment, and from the left for wasting resources which could be spent on more useful things, tend to reflect a democratic compromise. Governments, parties and voters accept a level of expenditure which reflects their analysis of security realities. In that context many European states are beginning to recognise that they no longer need, and can therefore no longer afford to maintain, armies, navies and air forces.
The first experiments in multinational naval and air units have just begun. Technology is also changing the rules; in 2009 the US air force for the first time trained more drone operators than pilots. The missile-launching submarines of Europe’s two nuclear powers are now more status symbols than operational weapons. Neither France nor the UK can afford fully to maintain three armed services and an intercontinental nuclear deterrent. The wear and tear on Britain’s defence material in Iraq and Afghanistan makes its situation more acute.
Max Hastings recently criticised UK defence policy as a “jumble of political expedients rather than a coherent strategy”. While David Cameron publicly regrets UK defence institutions “haven’t changed since the end of the Cold War,” his party has yet to define its overall defence approach or budget priorities.
At a conservative estimate, between 250,000 and 300,000 troops and civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past eight years. Blair argues this slaughter, and the billions it has cost, has made us all more secure. I disagree.