Harsh, but fair?

[karen2205]

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.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

That there are some cases where we can't improve the situation doesn't mean that we shouldn't try when we believe that we can. I think it is at the least very clear that the situation in Afghanistan has improved substantially since the Taleban were deposed - there's an elected Parliament with women in it, for a start, rather than a society where women were placed under house arrest. It's an impoverished country with a lot of religious nutters, so the whole place isn't going to change overnight, but there we are.

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.