For reasons I don't need to go into, hatred of Tony Blair is much in evidence right now, and there is some puzzlement about it from those who don't share the condition. John Rentoul has written of this several times recently, searching for an explanation of it. He isn't alone: David Aaronovitch (£) and Alex Massie have also tried to get to grips with the phenomenon. Alex focuses the matter so: 'Reading the Guardian - the house paper for right-thinking, respectable progressives - you'd gain the impression that Blair was a greater villain than Saddam Hussein.'
It's not hard to feel the same bafflement. Although, for obvious reasons, political leaders do sometimes attract strongly antagonistic attitudes, especially when issues central to their careers have been very divisive, the degree of the animosity now directed at Blair seems extraordinary. In what follows I offer an explanatory hypothesis about it. It will surprise no one that at the core of this hypothesis is the Iraq war and Blair's role in securing British involvement (though it should not be forgotten by thinking people that this was with the backing of the British parliament). I shall start with some preliminary reflections about different modes of opposing a case in which there are considerations on both sides of whatever is at issue.
People supporting a course of action will cite (say) A, B and C as reasons in its favour, which they take to outweigh whatever combination of considerations there may be telling against the course of action in question. Those opposing the same course of action will, for their part, cite (say) P, Q and R - arguments which, taken together, they see as decisive against A, B and C. Of course, in real disputes the reasons for and against don't have to be so symmetrically balanced in number. Maybe there are only two big reasons in favour, A and B, while the list of opposing factors is longer - P, Q, R, S, T and maybe more. But the general structure of controversy is the same for all that: some reasons on one side, some reasons on the other, with the parties to the disagreement assessing them differently. Notice, however, two different ways of being opposed to a case in support of which some reasons can nonetheless be cited.
(a) One may oppose the case in an all-things-considered spirit, allowing that, yes, there are reasons that can be cited in its favour, but those reasons do not go through once the arguments on the other side have been fully taken into account. So, it may be conceded, A and B are not without force; but when we look at them in light of P, Q, R, S and possibly etcetera, we are more impressed by the force of these. Call this the rational mode of defending a case and rejecting its opposite.
(b) There is, however, another method and a worse one. This is to take an issue in which there are, ex hypothesi, reasons of force on both sides, and to speak as if the considerations on the side of the case you favour don't merely outweigh those on the side you oppose; they altogether swallow or obliterate them - as if those other reasons didn't exist. Call this, in turn, the Gopal mode of defending one case and rejecting its opposite (after Priyamvada Gopal, who has lately given us an especially egregious example of the procedure). Here the reasons on the side of the case you oppose aren't allowed genuine weight while being said by you to be less forceful, less persuasive, than the countervailing reasons; no, they are belittled and sneered at; or, in some mouths, they are altogether denied, that is, claimed not to be authentic reasons at all for the people on the other side of the division of opinion from you.
OK, then, Iraq. Not to rehearse again at any length what is thoroughly well known, just to telegraph it: on one side, WMD, Saddam's failure to comply with UN resolutions, the threat of his regime to the region and beyond, and the nature of the regime itself as a cruel and murderous tyranny; on the other side, the need for UN backing of any invasion, the would-be requirements of international law, the dangers of an angry reaction in Arab and Muslim countries, the risk of Iraq turning into a quagmire for the invading forces, of Baghdad becoming another Stalingrad, the uncertain prospects for Iraq following regime change; and so on.
Now, I do not pretend that the whole range of viewpoints on the Iraq war can be neatly sliced so that they correspond to a small number of paradigms. All the same, two modes of opposing the war (matching the distinction I have made above) were certainly common. Some who opposed the war did so, explicitly, in an all-things-considered spirit, allowing something to the reasons of those who supported it - and in particular to the reason so important to many of us, namely, that to see off a regime that had so bloodily oppressed its own people for so long would be no bad thing - but believing that a combination of the reasons stacked against the war was overriding. But others who opposed the war did not do this. They took, rather, the sneering-belittling and/or denying route. This was the route of 'all about oil', and of 'if Iraq, why not North Korea, why not Zimbabwe, why not Burma?', and of democracy-as-mere-pretext, and of 'Bush's poodle', and of the anti-war view as being 'silenced', and of 'we marched but you didn't listen', and of 'neocon, neocon'; of anything and everything, in short, which might conceal the circumstance that, whatever could be said against the war, there was one glaring point on the other side of the scale: the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.
The failure, with some opponents of the war, to allow that this might have been a conscientious reason for prosecuting or supporting it suggests - and here comes my hypothesis - a strong psychological need not to look in the face that opposing the war meant preferring the continued existence of that regime to its overthrow. Even though opponents of the war had reasons enough - I mean genuine and not spurious reasons - for this preference in an all-things-considered spirit, for plenty of them that didn't suffice. For it didn't and it doesn't fit with their self-image as good liberals and/or leftists that George W. (bloody) Bush, for Christ's sake, should be the agent of dispatching the dictatorship of a blood-soaked monster while they on their side argued for a course of action that would leave him and his regime in place. That was the simple fact of the matter, as anyone could see, but it was not a fact they could live with in any comfort. For some who opposed the war the relevant alignments were simply unbearable; they hated it that the consequence of their preferred course had such a morally and politically ugly corollary. And so the guns were turned with fury on the opposing case, shooting down everything that might suggest the complexity of a genuinely difficult issue in which honest people could take different views and different sides. Hence, to this day, the unwillingness of some to say without knotting their tongues, without the Gopal mode and sneer, that there was a good in there somewhere in getting rid of a genocidal, torturing murderer and his regime.
Well, fury can sometimes make do with the intellectual or political positions which it opposes. But more often it needs a human target. Bush was available, to be sure, but in Britain Bush was far away. Tony Blair, therefore, became yer man - a hate figure whom the demonstrators, the Guardian opinion-columnists and letter writers, the dinner-partyistas, and the right-thinking, left-thinking artistic folk could get off on. It was one great pitiable charade, when it is a matter of public record that the Iraq war split the nation and that Blair could not have led the country to war without substantial support for it at every level of the polity. Yet hate can feel good and give the illusion of moral rectitude, so Blair for many became pure concentration of warmongering evil.
Christopher Hitchens says:
The righteous will evidently never tire of the pelting and taunting of Tony Blair, and perhaps those like him who choose to join the Roman choir of extreme unctuousness must expect their meed of abuse. But I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.
I don't go along with this in its entirety. Not all of the reasons for leaving Saddam in place were discreditable and, correspondingly, not all of the opposition to the Iraq war merits some dark place in the historical record. But some of that opposition has been contemptible in both substance and style; and that Tony Blair became a hate figure to so many is a symptom of its having been so - of an intense psychological discomfort redirected.