The Tone Of The Journey – 2

Politicians’ memoirs can be serious business. With Tone and his Journey, that means not only the signing events (or, in the case of that in London this week, not), but the rounds of the broadcasters. Today he appeared on the first edition of ITV’s revamped Daybreak, but at the weekend he appeared on ABC’s This Week.

The latter, where Tone was quizzed by Christiane Amanpour, was a tad more revealing than his sofa-fest with Chiles and Bleakley (although Ade did manage the occasional incisive observation). His This Week interview includes the continuing conviction that not only was the invasion of Iraq right, but also that there should remain the possibility of military action against Iran.

The trouble with the latter, as I’ve noted previously, is that there is a strong possibility that the Iranians would return fire, and with more force and determination than Saddam Hussein’s motley army. But this does not seem to enter in the certain and righteous world inhabited by Tone.

But where Blair gets seriously scary is in his observations on then Veep “Dick” Cheney and his idea that 9/11 could be used as an excuse to “remake the world” by intervening not just in Iraq, but Iran and Syria. Blair does not seriously dissent from Cheney’s view, and tells that it cannot be “dismissed”.

Well, we’ve seen the effects of intervening in Iraq, and they have not been to the benefit of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have perished as a result. Nor can those deaths and the instability induced by the conflict be simply excused by saying that it was somehow a price worth paying to remove the Ba’athist dictatorship.

Blair seems, over time, to get more certain of his judgment, and less able to inhabit the same planet as those of us who go about our business without the constant attendance of bodyguards. He is sure that he was, and is, right: I’m just relieved that he no longer has his hands on the levers of power.