Tony Blair’s remarks yesterday to the Liaison Committee of the British House of Commons contained some very to-the-point passages. I saw some brief quotes yesterday, but today found the full transcript. Here’s the key passage on the war in Iraq and beyond (all bolding is mine):

Q174 Dr Wright: Prime Minister, you will have noticed in all the assessments that are being made of your ten years at the moment there is one phrase that crops up all the time and that is the phrase “but for Iraq”. You will have seen Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer yesterday, I quote: “But for Iraq he would be leaving Downing Street able to make an unambiguous claim to be one of the most successful world leaders of his time and one of the most successful British Prime Ministers of all time. But for Iraq, he would probably not be leaving Number 10 at all”. That is simply the case, is it not?

Mr Blair: No, I do not believe it is the case on the latter point and, as for the rest of it, it is a judgment people are going to have to make. I believe what we did in Iraq was right. In the end, you take a decision of that importance on the basis of what you believe to be right, and you stand or fall by it.

Q175 Dr Wright: When people say, as you know they often do, that it was the worst foreign policy mistake since Suez, or some people say longer - now obviously I do not want to get into the argument - you will say that is not the case. Would you allow at least for the fact that might turn out to be the historical judgment?

Mr Blair: It is for others to make the historical judgment. I do not make the judgment in history. I am just giving my view about this because I think you can see the same thing happening in Afghanistan if we are not careful. We are making a fundamental mistake. We think we are creating this problem; we are not creating it, it is being created for us. The very forces that we are fighting in Iraq, which are basically al-Qaeda doing the suicide bombing, including the bombing of that shrine, deliberately to provoke sectarian conflict, the elements of the Iranian regime who are backing the Muqtada al-Sadr people down in Basra, these are the elements that we are fighting in Afghanistan, that we are fighting everywhere, if we do not stand up and fight them back, and at some point in time we are going to have to, they are going to get stronger. What they now believe is that they can give us, and the politicians who are democratically elected in the West, such a serious problem, in terms of the destruction and carnage that they are able to cause, that we will lose our will and fall away.

Q176 Dr Wright: I think we understand your analysis because you have given it to us many times, the questions are about its effectiveness. You were sitting in front of us in July 2003, just after the war, and you said - and this is a direct quote from our session here - “The test will be what does Iraq look like in a year’s time”. We are four years on, we now know what Iraq looks like, is it not a tragedy that you happen to find yourself as British Prime Minister when the crazies are in the White House?

Mr Blair: Again, it is immensely comforting to people to say “You know, if it was not for George Bush everything would be fine”. September 11 was planned before George Bush came to power, any American president would have had to have dealt with it. Yes, you are absolutely right, I thought in July 2003 we had removed a terrible dictator, we had got in place a UN process for democracy, we were going to have an elected government, the important thing is to ask “What happened?”. In August 2003, the first thing happened, which was that they murdered the UN Special Representative and his staff by blowing up the UN Headquarters. At that moment - at that moment - we had a fundamental decision to take as an international community, did we say, “Right, we are not going to let you succeed” or did we say, “This is going to be really difficult”?

Q177 Dr Wright: With respect, we are finding out more about this whole process now, and you will tell us whether it is true or not, but yesterday’s newspapers were telling us about the fears/worries that you had about the lack of preparation for what would happen after the invasion. We have got Sir David Manning, your foreign policy adviser, being quoted saying that you were terribly exercised about the lack of preparation in Washington, he was sending you memos about this. Jeremy Greenstock says you were tearing your hair out afterwards about the chaos that was ensuing. Peter Mandelson says that you came close to resigning. Was it not your burden that you carried us into a war knowing that there had been no effective preparation and it was likely to be catastrophic?

Mr Blair: Yes. First of all, I was not concerned about the lack of preparation, I was concerned to make sure that we were properly prepared. Secondly, however, the issues that were exercising everybody in early 2003 - and there was a lot of work done across Government in order to deal with this - were issues to do with the humanitarian situation, to do with economic reconstruction and so on. The absolute key to this - and this is in the end why I will carry on making this argument and I believe in the end that people will understand the importance of standing up for what we believe in - it is so comforting to people to say, “There was an error made in the planning, someone did not spot what was going to go on”. You can have this argument about de-Ba’athification, the disbandment of the Army, and I am happy to go through that with you but, in reality, even if you had taken different decisions on those things, that is not what has created the problem. What has created the problem is that the people we are fighting have decided to give us a problem. What they have decided is that if they can hang on long enough in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, then we will lose the will, and that is their argument, that is what they are doing.

Q178 Dr Wright: Just to finish this, was it the case that you were warning about the lack of preparation?

Mr Blair: I was not warning about the lack of preparation, Tony, I was saying it was important that we were prepared. The areas of preparation that people were most concerned about were to do with the fact that you were removing the Government, 60 per cent of the Iraqi population was on a food programme - 60 per cent of them - there were large areas of the country which did not have proper power and fuel and so on, so there were a whole series of things like that which were immensely important. Now, what happened subsequently, however, is that as we began to get the country on its feet, as they started to make preparations for democracy, then of course the people who were fighting suddenly realised, “If you let these guys succeed here, how do we manage to get across our case? How can we say that the purpose of the West and America is to oppress the Muslim world if actually Muslims for the first time in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting the right to vote”, it is a difficult argument to make.

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Addendum: Thanks to Jay for sending the link to the C-Span page where you can access the video of this question and answer session.

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