The Evidence of Witness 69: Blair has shown himself more a fool than a liar

The most revealing thing about the former PM's evidence was how little he understood about the situation on the ground

By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
Sunday, 31 January 2010

The case against Tony Blair has revolved too much around his good faith and too little around his competence. The placards held up by protesters on Friday as he gave evidence should have read "sucker" and "dope" rather than "Bliar".

Amateurs often have a fluency denied to professionals because they see no "ifs" and "buts" that would interrupt the flow of their argument. Books proving that Bacon wrote Shakespeare are often highly articulate and have great narrative pace because their authors see all facts pointing to the same inevitable conclusion.

It is this mixture of amateurism and evangelical conviction which made Mr Blair such a lethally inept leader before and during the war in Iraq. His greatest weakness was not so much that he adjusted facts to support his policies, but that he had so little grasp of the facts in the first place.

When the US and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, they unwittingly began a series of revolutionary changes which are still reverberating. The inevitable consequence of getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime was that the Shia Arabs would replace the Sunni as the predominant community in Iraq and Iran would greatly increase its influence in the country with the fall of its old enemy.

(Continued here.)