Harsh, but fair?
I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That's your call. But believe one thing if nothing else - I did what I thought was right for our country. [Tony Blair - quote from BBC website]
Is it overly harsh for me to think; yes, I believe you when you say you thought you were doing the right thing, but that's not good enough. You are the Prime Minister; you have a duty to do the job properly, it's not a role where you can legitimately excuse your poor perfomance by saying 'I did my best' where your best falls far short of the objective standards of what was needed. And that's not a purely political point - I think there was an arguable political case for involvement in Iraq, the same way there was a good case for not getting involved. But you dodged the issue. You didn't engage with the unpalatable argument, instead you now appeal to the heart; 'I did my best' and fail to engage with the issues.
Is it overly harsh for me to think; yes, I believe you when you say you thought you were doing the right thing, but that's not good enough. You are the Prime Minister; you have a duty to do the job properly, it's not a role where you can legitimately excuse your poor perfomance by saying 'I did my best' where your best falls far short of the objective standards of what was needed. And that's not a purely political point - I think there was an arguable political case for involvement in Iraq, the same way there was a good case for not getting involved. But you dodged the issue. You didn't engage with the unpalatable argument, instead you now appeal to the heart; 'I did my best' and fail to engage with the issues.
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Generally, I think there's several different issues here; "I did what I thought was right" and "I did my best" aren't the same thing. I think it's possible to do what you think is right and still do wrong, if you haven't thought hard enough about it. If you think as hard about something as you possibly can under the circumstances (given limited time and other pressures) and reach a conclusion that you are convinced about and that you think that all the facts you were in posession of at the time would always lead you towards, that is the best that anyone can do and it's definitely overly harsh to ask for more.
I wish the decision had been taken another way in hindsight, but I remember not being nearly so opposed to it at the time, based on very limited information. I don't believe him on everything, but I believe him on that one.
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But then, I was opposed to military action way before it was taken. It was pretty obvious after Afghanistan (on which I spent a lot more protesting energy, IIRC) what was likely to happen. In fact, it was pretty obvious after the Gore/Bush/Fox/Supreme Court debacle, so while I was hardly resigned, I had become tinged with apathy.
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1) Shelters people who launch attacks on our civilians
2) Bans the education of women, and bans them accessing medical facilities
3) Executes women who resist domestic violence
4) Engineers famine in those areas whose people resist them
5) Attempts genocide against ethnic and religious minorities
Do we just wait and hope they go away?
Karen - I don't actually understand the question you're asking. You're saying Prime Ministers should work out what they believe is right, then use the magic psychic powers you get when you walk through the door of number 10 to find out what's actually right, and then do that instead?
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In an ideal world, we (the good guys, UK, EU, whoever) would be able to conquer all the countries where your 5 criteria apply, quickly and easily, and negotiate with the population to create a stable, better government.
Only we don't have that much power. There's many countries where those criteria apply (Sudan, arguably Nigeria, Saudi) and we ignore them completely, partly for political reasons but also because we don't have the manpower or influence to replace the regime in power with a better one.
In Afghanistan, attacking the Taleban has led to similar failure to the problems in the Vietnam war, plus various factions are jockeying for power leading to even less freedom or security, and many people saying that actually, the Taleban weren't so bad.
In Iraq, there used to be a good infrastructure with education and medical care and little crime. Now there isn't, and the situation for repressed minorities doesn't seem any better.
If our forces could have concentrated on one of Afghanistan or Iraq, it might not have been such a cock-up. On the other hand, no-one has ever successfully conquered Afghanistan, so I doubt military might is the way to go. Economic inducements and diplomacy may be slow but at least rarely make a situation worse for a country's people.
As for Tony - he had a duty to listen to his expert advisers before deciding what he thought was the right thing. If his 'best' involved not doing that, then it wasn't good enough for me.
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Economic inducements and diplomacy are unlikely to achieve anything in a country which has cut off diplomatic ties with all countries in the world save one, and whose leadership throws out international aid organisations and declares in the middle of a famine that if people are dying it is because Allah doesn't wish to feed them.
Iraq is certainly better in the Kurdish areas and in the southern marshes. That a religious civil war has kicked off in many other areas is unfortunate, and was always a possibility, but it's not clear that this wouldn't have happened after Saddam was removed from power by whatever mechanism this had taken place. I certainly think we should be doing more in Sudan, but we have a problem in that the Chinese are backing them (in exchange for oil, there, I think 'no peace for oil' might be my new slogan), so the UN will be typically useless.
he had a duty to listen to his expert advisers before deciding what he thought was the right thing
His expert advisers said lots of things. There is both the possibility of them being wrong, of them disagreeing, and it's also important to note that if you choose to take a different view from the one suggested by someone else, that doesn't necessarily mean you haven't listened to them.
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My other, rather cynical justification for supporting the intervention in Iraq is that it's controlling George Bush (and the US in general). It's gone 'wrong' now, so the US will be less happy to intervene in the same way again, because of the personal/financial cost. I don't trust the US to get intervention right and I want them to be more cautious and thoughtful about it. Iraq has sort of accomplished this (ie. Congress passing bills in an attempt to get the troops brought home soon).
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I think there is a case for needing to enforce international human rights law. I'm less convinced this should be done by individual nations to other nations, particularly when those nations have a conflict of interest over oil for example. My first aim would be to reduce arms and armies in every country and think more about multinational forces if needed.
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My first aim would be to reduce arms and armies in every country and think more about multinational forces if needed.
Right, so what you'd like to do is an impossible thing that won't happen, which is fair enough, you're entitled to want that, but the choice which is actually open to us is between doing or not doing those things which we can in fact do.
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Institutions, countries etc. do change so I don't accept it being impossible. Highly improbable possibly, depending on other changes in the world, timescales etc.
I don't find the way things are acceptable. I don't like the currently available options. While accepting that decisions need to be made in the present, I still want to look for better future options.
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Those were my thoughts, too.
What more can people do than their best?
And if it's not good enough, perhaps that means that person was the wrong person for the job. But is that a reflection on the person or on the people who judged him fit for the job?
Expecting more from a person than they (subjectively) can do seems unrealistic to me.
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If someone's not professionally competent then they ought not to be doing the job. And I expect (again arguably unfairly) people to be aware of their own strengths & weaknesses and to understand what is within their range of competence. If you're a politican 'professional comptence' means (to me) 'ability to take the advice you're given, assess its veracity, weigh it up and come to a reasoned conclusion that you're able to present as a reasoned conclusion rather than a 'gut decision'' It also requires 'learning from history' and 'forseeing the consequences and making plans to deal with them'. IMO a lot of the problems in Iraq come not from the invasion itself but from the utter lack of planning with regards 'what do we do once we've overthrown Saddam'. That's inexcusable IMO.
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That makes sense to me.
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