Tony Blair et la haine tenace

Tony Blair et la haine tenace

A partir d’aujourd’hui, semble-t-il, les mémoires de Tony Blair sont en vente. L’ancien Premier ministre n’est pas tendre pour son successeur Gordon Brown. Et l’Irak ? C’est surtout à propos de l’Irak que tout le monde attendait Tony Blair, – “tout le monde ”, c’est-à-dire, surtout, ce que John Rentoul nomme “the Blair-hating community” (désignons cette intraduisible expression comme “la communauté de ceux qui haïssent Blair”), – essentiellement la “communauté médiatique”, selon le même Rentoul.

John Rentoul est le “chief political commentator” de The Independent on Sunday et également biographe de Tony Blair. Il écrit un commentaire sur cet aspect des choses, ce 1er septembre 2010 dans The Independent.

[...] «...What people believe is not that Blair lied, but that he was so desperate to keep in with the Americans that he exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein. That has the advantage of fitting with what was the conventional view, that the British interest is best served by a close alliance with the US, but overlooks the more obvious reason for assuming the worst of Saddam, namely his previous history of concealment.

»Variants of Blair-hating belief are endless; the one that is most pleased with itself being the Clare Short Interpretation, that Blair was so eager to please George Bush that he deceived himself. Well, it's a theory, isn't it? But how does it explain or justify hatred, or the word "evil"? The emotions it might evoke could be pity, or disdain, and the adjective could be weak or deluded. But the anger inspired by Blair suggests that something else is at work.

»I think what happened is that the case for use of military force against Saddam was the dominant view of the political-media establishment. It was supported – for all the good reasons that were given at the time – by the leaderships of the two main political parties, most of the newspapers (this one and its Sunday sister notably excluded) and in Whitehall. There was a strongly held opposing view, which mobilised a large demo on the eve of the invasion, and public opinion remained sceptical, although it swung behind the policy once troops were deployed. There were only two important resignations as the decision was taken, one political (Robin Cook) and one official (Elizabeth Wilmshurst).

»Then, when the weapons of mass destruction could not be found, there was a big gap to be explained. Historians might explain it by Saddam's practising his last and worst-calculated deception, wanting the Iranians and his own apparatchiks to believe that he had the weapons; by US-British intelligence experiencing the phenomenon of groupthink; and by the military overconfidence generated by Kosovo and Afghanistan. But those explanations did not fill the psychic hole in the here and now – so people preferred to say that they had been deceived than that they shared a mistaken assumption.

»That idea of deception is where the poison starts. I don't know why we rarely hear from people who accept that Blair, Cabinet, Parliament and civil servants thought that they were acting in the national interest but miscalculated. But no, we get the most strident commentaries and Socialist Workers Party slogans about lies. From there the idea of deception spreads to contaminate the Labour left, who never forgave Blair for winning elections, and to the Daily Mail right, who never forgave him for winning elections. It feeds the conspiracy theories about David Kelly (who supported military action against Iraq but whose ghost has been co-opted by its opponents). Nothing Blair can say in his book today can stop the flow; the anger against him exists at a deeper level, impervious to reasoned argument, certainly from him.

»But it is interesting that, outside the compound of self-reinforcing London liberal media opinion, there is a more balanced assessment of Blair. A survey of 100 academics specialising in politics or history published last month ranked him third among postwar British prime ministers, behind Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. Professor Kevin Theakston, who compiled the survey, noted mildly that Blair was the second-longest serving prime minister of the period. The poison has not gone too deep, then. But perhaps it is too much to hope that enough people will read the book with enough of an open mind to begin to turn the tide of media bile.»

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