Blair - more dangerous than ever

A Prime Minister in his dotage seeks to condemn another generation of young men and women to an early grave.

That’s how history should judge Tony Blair’s spine-chilling speech today. Oblivious to the catastrophe he and George Bush have already unleashed, Blair has announced his intention to fight to the last drop of many other fathers’ sons.

With an end-of-days zealotry that would draw whoops from the Republican right, he glibly affirmed that the current ‘war on terror’, which is already widening beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, is to last a generation.

The public, he declared, will need to get used to a “long campaign” against an ideological enemy that, bizarrely, he likened to the Communist movement of the early twentieth century.

The associations conjured up by Blair’s performance today are deeply disturbing: a Messianic leader telling a war-weary populace that it must embrace a 30-year, ideologically-driven, global conflict to annihilate a communistic menace which is incubated by a religious-ethnic group.

He is propelling this country along a path even more dangerous and delusional than that blood-drenched road to Baghdad.

His speech comes two days after Bush’s surge of 21,500 extra troops to Iraq. That was in the teeth of the opposition of the American electorate, Congress and the US establishment (in the shape of James Baker’s commission), but with Blair proclaiming it a “sensible” idea.

It comes after a foolhardy, illegal and portentous US raid on an Iranian diplomatic mission in northern Iraq, and after Bush turned the Horn of Africa into another hot front of the global, long war.

Blair is not only trying to justify his craven support for Bush at just the time that more and more people would like to see life imitate Channel Four drama and the war criminal of Number 10 dragged off in handcuffs. It is about more than him locking his successor into a neo-conservative foreign policy.

The timing of his rant raises a frightening prospect: that he wants to use his remaining weeks and months in office to commit this country irrevocably to the monumental folly of an attack on Iran or some equivalent blunder of world-historic proportions.

The mass anti-war and anti-Trident protest called for 24 February could not have come at a better time. It must be supplemented with unremitting pressure on MPs to speak out against this madness in Parliament – in the debate on Iraq on 24 January, for example – and to join the demands for Blair to go before he plunges us deeper into the inferno.