Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister (1997-2007) (Photo credit: Chatham House)
Tony Blair has the distinction of reaching dizzying heights as Labour’s most successful leader in history, yet falling from grace to be one of the most unpopular British Prime Ministers ever. Within a year of winning his first election, Blair had, against all odds, achieved the impossible task of securing the ground-breaking Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland
Yet, he soon turned into such a hawkish warmonger that by the time he left office, attempts were made to send him to the International Criminal Court to face crimes against humanity.
His rapid downfall caused Blair to effectively exit the international stage in disgrace and keep a low profile. After warm-up military excursions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, the former premier joined US President George W Bush in invading Afghanistan in 2001, followed by Iraq two years later, both on false premises.
The total number of fatalities exceeding over half a million earns him the hallmark of being the most ‘trigger-happy’ British leader since World War II.
During his career, Blair became notorious not only for his belligerence but also for his sanctimonious moralising. He converted to Catholicism, yet seems to show little tolerance towards Islam. It has made him an unrepentant Islamophobe at the centre of being so self-righteous about his dogmatic convictions.
The world he paints is one of good and evil and where he sermonises, claiming the high ground always and yet unable to accept the extent of innocent blood on his hands.
Following the failed evacuation of Afghanistan, the former Labour leader is at pains again in targeting Muslims, only with more venom. “Radical Islam believes not only in Islamism – the turning of the religion into a political doctrine – but also in the justification of struggle, if necessary armed struggle to achieve it,” he says while trying to persuade US President Biden not to lose faith in using military force.
For so-called Islamists, they do not even need to resort to violence. He further suggests he still supports the discredited clash of civilisation thesis, claiming “the ideology is in inevitable conflict with open, modern, culturally tolerant societies.”
This from a man who, in the wake of being found guilty of misleading Parliament and the public over the war by the Chilcott Inquiry, unashamedly argued he would invade Iraq again. In the name of counter terrorism, he also enacted draconian laws that target Muslims from cradle to grave.
His legacy is also in orchestrating the debunked Prevent programme. His latest scare tactic reaches into the realism of science fiction, inferring that the West could face a repeat of the September 11 attacks but using bio-terrorism. For a British leader derided like no other, Blair defiantly continues to resurface in the media.
A media which, incomprehensibly, continues to give a platform to a man found guilty of misleading a nation to promote his failed enforced regime change strategy and proposal of invading Iran next. Not content with wreaking death and destruction in the Middle East and South Asia, Blair has now set his sights on Muslims in the Sahel.
No longer does the world need his comparisons of “radical Islam” with Revolutionary Communism to justify the use of hard power in Muslim countries.
As incorrigible as ever, he is still seeking to not only defend his own suspicious values but zealously export them. His primary fear, though, is that the humiliating exit in Afghanistan marks another death knell in the failure of Western notions of liberal democracy that have failed to take root “except in the somewhat decadent terrain of Western society.”
