The year was 2002. Former President George Bush had already vowed to "win the war against terrorism" following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and with British backing the U.S. had already began what would prove to be a deadly and costly war in Afghanistan. Iraq would be next. “I will be with you, whatever,” former Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bush in July of 2002 in a six-page memo Daily Kos reported on at the time. Ousting Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader the U.S. was considering going to war over at the time, was "the right thing to do," Blair wrote, saying Hussein's "departure would free up the region."
“Fourteen years later, Mr. Blair’s pledge was revealed publicly on Wednesday as part of a voluminous, seven-year official investigation into how and why Britain went to war in Iraq,” New York Times writers Steven Erlanger and David Sanger wrote on July 6, 2016. “The main conclusions in the report, by the independent Iraq Inquiry Committee, were familiar: that Britain, like the United States, used flawed intelligence to justify the invasion, that Iraq posed no immediate national security threat, that the allies acted militarily before all diplomatic options had been exhausted and that there was a lack of planning for what would happen once Mr. Hussein was removed." Blair admitted to his error in judgement then, but some five years later he focused mainly on blaming President Joe Biden for ending a war Blair more than supported. This New York Times headline encapsulates the hypocrisy nearly perfectly: “Tony Blair, who led the U.K. into Afghanistan, criticizes the pullout.”
There is no denying the ghastly effects of the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Viral video showed Afghan civilians desperately clinging to departing U.S. aircraft and reports surfaced on Sunday of people, including a toddler, trampled to death trying to escape the country. “Conditions on the ground remain extremely challenging,” said the British Defense Ministry, which the New York Times reported has troops at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon put into action a "rarely used" program calling on commercial airlines to respond in cases of national emergency and enlisted 18 aircrafts to help Afghans depart from the Middle East and Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. More than 25,000 people have already been airlifted out of Afghanistan since efforts began on Aug. 14, and the U.S. has evacuated almost 8,000 people in 24 hours, wrote the Journal.
“The threat is real. It is acute. It is persistent," White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN. "And it is something we are focused on with every tool in our arsenal. We are taking it absolutely deadly seriously.”
I question how the blame game Blair didn’t hesitate to join in on assists in those efforts. “The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics,” he wrote on the website of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where serves as executive chairman. “We didn't need to do it. We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’, as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even ten years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.”
He called “the abandonment of Afghanistan and its people” a “tragic, dangerous, unnecessary,” fate “not in their interests and not in ours.”
“In the aftermath of the decision to return Afghanistan to the same group from which the carnage of 9/11 arose, and in a manner that seems almost designed to parade our humiliation, the question posed by allies and enemies alike is: has the West lost its strategic will?” Blair asked.
The real question for those interested in grappling with reality should be whether the U.S. and Britain moved with “strategic will” when they decided to enter war in Afghanistan and Iraq. That question went unanswered directly in Blair’s statement, but the implications of his regrets certainly lead in the direction of no.
He wrote:
Journalist Josh Marshall tweeted in response to Blair's words: “If I'm not mistaken Tony Blair, most associated in the foreign policy realm with two of the most catastrophic decisions in decades is lecturing the US about 'grand strategy'. Got it.”
Sen. Chris Murphy added to the conversation erupting on Twitter over the weekend:
“Fourteen years later, Mr. Blair’s pledge was revealed publicly on Wednesday as part of a voluminous, seven-year official investigation into how and why Britain went to war in Iraq,” New York Times writers Steven Erlanger and David Sanger wrote on July 6, 2016. “The main conclusions in the report, by the independent Iraq Inquiry Committee, were familiar: that Britain, like the United States, used flawed intelligence to justify the invasion, that Iraq posed no immediate national security threat, that the allies acted militarily before all diplomatic options had been exhausted and that there was a lack of planning for what would happen once Mr. Hussein was removed." Blair admitted to his error in judgement then, but some five years later he focused mainly on blaming President Joe Biden for ending a war Blair more than supported. This New York Times headline encapsulates the hypocrisy nearly perfectly: “Tony Blair, who led the U.K. into Afghanistan, criticizes the pullout.”
There is no denying the ghastly effects of the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Viral video showed Afghan civilians desperately clinging to departing U.S. aircraft and reports surfaced on Sunday of people, including a toddler, trampled to death trying to escape the country. “Conditions on the ground remain extremely challenging,” said the British Defense Ministry, which the New York Times reported has troops at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon put into action a "rarely used" program calling on commercial airlines to respond in cases of national emergency and enlisted 18 aircrafts to help Afghans depart from the Middle East and Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. More than 25,000 people have already been airlifted out of Afghanistan since efforts began on Aug. 14, and the U.S. has evacuated almost 8,000 people in 24 hours, wrote the Journal.
“The threat is real. It is acute. It is persistent," White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN. "And it is something we are focused on with every tool in our arsenal. We are taking it absolutely deadly seriously.”
I question how the blame game Blair didn’t hesitate to join in on assists in those efforts. “The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics,” he wrote on the website of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where serves as executive chairman. “We didn't need to do it. We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’, as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even ten years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.”
He called “the abandonment of Afghanistan and its people” a “tragic, dangerous, unnecessary,” fate “not in their interests and not in ours.”
“In the aftermath of the decision to return Afghanistan to the same group from which the carnage of 9/11 arose, and in a manner that seems almost designed to parade our humiliation, the question posed by allies and enemies alike is: has the West lost its strategic will?” Blair asked.
The real question for those interested in grappling with reality should be whether the U.S. and Britain moved with “strategic will” when they decided to enter war in Afghanistan and Iraq. That question went unanswered directly in Blair’s statement, but the implications of his regrets certainly lead in the direction of no.
He wrote:
Journalist Josh Marshall tweeted in response to Blair's words: “If I'm not mistaken Tony Blair, most associated in the foreign policy realm with two of the most catastrophic decisions in decades is lecturing the US about 'grand strategy'. Got it.”
Sen. Chris Murphy added to the conversation erupting on Twitter over the weekend: