Tony has regaled us with a long essay claiming that the escalating slaughter in Iraq has nothing to do with anything he and George did back in 2003. It would all have happened anyway.
This is a version of the defence often heard in our courts: It’s all society’s fault, gov.
The inexorable pull of forces beyond human control exculpates the murderer. He didn’t do it. It’s society that slashed the victim’s throat. Even if the knife wielder hadn’t been there, the throat would have been cut anyway.
Commentators are stuck for an explanation behind Tony’s bizarre piece of writing, but only because they insist on referring to the facts. True enough, these appear unequivocal.
It wasn’t aliens from Planet X-4 who falsified intelligence reports and lied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction aimed at Western cities. It was Tony and George.
It wasn’t visitors from outer space who then attacked Iraq, eliminating the only regime that had a reasonable shot at keeping a lid on the bubbling violence. It was Tony and George.
It wasn’t Martians who then promoted the ‘Arab Spring’, in effect replacing unsavoury secular regimes with jihadists fanatics. It was Tony and George.
It wasn’t creatures with pointed heads who kept changing their professed reason for the aggression, eventually settling on the urgent need to bring democracy to the Middle East. It was Tony and George.
The difference between the two is that George at least has the decency to keep his mouth shut, while Tony not only tries to vindicate his criminal acts but is actually screaming for more of the same.
Anyone with a modicum of education knows that the Islamic world has always been a powder keg waiting for a lit match. This started 1,400 years ago, not 10.
When Mohammed died, one lot felt that power should pass on to the wise elders, while the other lot insisted that only the Prophet’s kin were fit for the role. Since then the two groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites, have been at each other’s throats.
Ostensibly this situation isn’t unique to the Muslims. Charlemagne’s death, for example, was followed by an internecine struggle for succession. When one part of Europe decided to destroy the traditional Christianity still practised in the other part, wars ensued. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers falling out led to a civil war.
All that is par for the course: boys will be boys. The difference between what used to be called Christendom and the Muslim world is that in the former people would set about killing one another with gusto but after a few years, decades at most, they’d come to their senses.
Muslims don’t. Their so-called religion encourages both murderous fanaticism and long memory. When the two are combined, tectonic plates of seismic violence perpetually strain to slam together, and only a greater force can keep them apart.
Specifically in Iraq, the Sunnis hate the Shiites, the Shiites loathe the Sunnis, they both detest the Kurds, who reciprocate with relish. All of them abhor the West, which they claim is decadent, hedonistic and godless.
The claim isn’t without merit, but what weakens it somewhat in this context is the historical evidence showing that the Muslims hated the West even when it was none of those objectionable things.
These overlapping hatreds could only be kept from exploding into a blood-soaked chaos by… what, class? What could have prevented a violent chaos in Iraq? Democracy, Tony? One man one vote, George? Sit down, both of you. You fail.
A check on the murderous passions could only come from ghastly, unsavoury dictators, ideally military. Like Assad. Like Gaddafi. Like Mubarak. And – are you paying attention, Tony and George? – like Saddam.
The criminal aggression perpetrated by Tony and George unseated them all with the exception of Assad, who’s hanging by a thread. The result was wholly predictable: the region is being drowned in a tsunami of blood threatening to engulf it all and then spill over into other regions.
Such is reality. Yet the commentators who are baffled by Tony’s obvious divorce from it are missing the point.
Tony isn’t ignorant of the facts. He isn’t ‘in denial’, a term much in vogue. He isn’t even lying, in the sense of uttering falsehoods he knows for what they are. He’s mad or, to be more forensically exact, a psychopath.
Such people are driven by a single passion to which they dedicate their whole being. Since others are unlikely to want to cater to the psychopath’s obsession, in order to succeed he has to learn how to manipulate people, bending them to his will.
In due course, manipulation itself becomes the obsessive passion. It stops being the means and becomes the end.
Appealing to the psychopath’s reason is pointless, as is trying to argue with him on the basis of obvious facts. He simply wouldn’t understand what you’re talking about – if facts are stubborn things, as Stalin once said, so much the worse for the facts.
When Tony denies that the 2003 invasion of Iraq made the current atrocities inevitable, he’s not lying, meaning deliberately distorting reality. Every lie is a falsehood, but not every falsehood is a lie.
For a psychopaths only his mania is real. Everything else is grist to the mill.
Hence Tony’s famous gift of the gab, making him millions on the lecture circuit. It’s tempting to think that those willing to pay good money to listen to Tony’s revelations are simply stupid. After all, the man has never uttered a thought that isn’t a vulgar banality at best or utter drivel at worst.
Stupidity doubtless features prominently in Tony’s audiences. But most people are simply mesmerised by his hypnotic power of a manipulative psychopath. Rather than listening to the words, they respond emotionally to the miasmas emanating from the mad effluvia.
I’d suggest that, by reducing political success to a talent for manipulating large blocs of votes, modern politics brings this type – and increasingly only this type – to the fore. Tony isn’t the only one, he’s just better than most.
He’s the ideal towards which every modern politician strives, and in this sense Dave is indeed ‘heir to Blair’, his typological son as it were.
But equal talent seldom occurs in two successive generations of the same family. A woman wishing to give birth to a musical genius shouldn’t marry Mozart. She should marry Mozart’s father.
Hence Dave will remain a pale imitation – he’s not quite psychopathic enough. When his time comes, his earnings from postprandial talks will be lower than Tony’s by an order of magnitude.
So yes, Tony, of course you’re right. You’re blameless in the ongoing orgy of bloodshed in Iraq. Whatever you say, dear. Just calm yourself.