Tony BlairMichael Temchine
If Tony Blair has not continued to agonize over the tough decisions of his prime ministership, he does a pretty good job of persuading otherwise in A Journey. Reading the former British leader's nearly 700-page memoir, you can almost feel his pain.
Unless, of course, you're among the legions (more so in Britain than on this side of the pond) who subscribe to the Phony Tony depiction of Blair. If so, the pain you feel reading this book will be entirely your own.
Blair offers up an earnest attempt to explain the motivations and thought processes that led him to break with international opinion and most of his own Labour Party to join George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq. At the end of it, you're not entirely sure he has convinced himself, much less the reader. But you cannot help but commiserate, for this is a man (unlike some other world leaders) who has clearly grappled with his conscience.
Domestic politics figure prominently in the book, of course, but for non-British readers, none of it is quite as compelling as the segments devoted to foreign policy. After all, for observers at home and abroad, foreign policy defined Blair's 10 years in office, from 1997 to 2007. That is perhaps the most consequential irony to emerge from this engaging - though occasionally corny - account of his "political life."
"I knew a lot about history before becoming prime minister; but about contemporary foreign affairs, I knew little," Blair writes. "The 1997 campaign was fought almost exclusively on a domestic policy basis."
Like most stints in power, Blair's started out in euphoria and ended on a decidedly more prosaic, if not depressing, note. Who can forget the early Blair years of Cool Britannia? Blair's New Labour, an electable version of the corduroy-clad, ultra-orthodox party he inherited, transformed British politics, the post-Thatcher national psyche and the country's international image.
"It affected everyone," Blair recalls, "lifting them up, giving them hope, making them believe all things were possible, that by the very act of election and the spirit surrounding it, the world could be changed."
In the end, Tony Blair did change the world - just not in the way he or his compatriots imagined he would in 1997. It is entirely conceivable that, domestically, the era of New Labour could have emerged under Gordon Brown - alternately Blair's political soulmate, chancellor of the exchequer, chief rival and successor. But it is harder to fathom British foreign policy following the path it did under Blair.
The reason lies in Blair's Christian faith. Readers looking for a detailed description of his spiritual journey and ultimate conversion (in 2007) to Catholicism will be disappointed in this book. But he does not entirely shy away from it. Indeed, his discussions of moral considerations in his foreign policy-making might be seen as an attempt at explaining his philosophy in terms befitting secular consumption.
Blair confirms most of what has been written about his mentor, Peter Thomson, the Australian-born Anglican priest he met as a young man at Oxford and whose death shortly before A Journey was finished perhaps made his memory even more poignant for its author. "Probably the most influential person in my life," Blair writes of Thomson. "Politically, Peter was on the left, but religion came first. Therefore, so, in a sense, it did for me. … This is vital in understanding my politics."
Blair admits that he would have been "bewildered and horrified" if, in 1997, someone had told him he would lead his country into four wars as prime minister. He depicts the first of these military interventions, to stop the Serbian-led ethnic-cleansing of Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, as one that informed his subsequent decisions on Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and, fatefully, Iraq. As such, Kosovo also emboldened him.
Joining in Bush's invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, on the pretext the latter possessed weapons of mass destruction, will forever define Blair's legacy. He does not shrink from this reality, but instead seeks the reader's indulgence: "I have often reflected as to whether I was wrong. I ask you to reflect as to whether I may have been right."
In the end, the most he can expect from us is respect. He has anguished over his decisions in a way other leaders have not, at least not publicly. "George had immense simplicity in how he saw the world. Right or wrong, it led to decisive leadership," Blair writes of his American vis-à-vis, whose own memoirs, due out in November, may corroborate this view.
Still, the most chilling revelation in A Journey is not about Bush, who emerges from this memoir every bit as one-dimensional as he is portrayed elsewhere. Rather, the author's recollections of former vice-president Dick Cheney make one shudder at the possibilities were the latter still in a position of power.
"He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with their surrogates in the course of it - Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.," Blair recalls. "I did not think it was as fantastical as conventional wisdom opined. It is one struggle. Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom."
Blair qualifies his position by adding that a "hard power" strategy is incomplete on its own. Winning the war of ideas is just as important. But if push came to shove, as it still could with Iran's move toward nuclear capability, the reader is not left doubting where Tony Blair would come down.
Konrad Yakabuski is chief political writer in The Globe and Mail's Washington bureau.