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October 10, 2010
In Preacher on a Tank in the London Review of Books David Runciman reviews Tony Blair's A Journey. Blair had always puzzled but 'preacher on a tank' describes my understanding of Blair. Blair, for me talked like a social liberal, but acted like a Conservative.
Martin Rowson
On Blair's account he 'drills down’ when faced with a seemingly intractable problem. He, means by this, being willing to go back to first principles, ‘behind and beneath the conventional’ analysis, and if necessary to look at the problem from a completely new angle to find the key that would unlock a political problem, and make all the pieces fit together. It is joining the dots by going back to first principles.
After drilling down by thinking through the problem Blair then grips it, rather than merely ‘managing’ it, which it is never enough. Gripping it enables you to begin the process of turning things around.
So how did 'digging down' and 'gripping it' function with respect to the war on Iraq? Runciman says that Blair's:
analysis of 9/11 was ... wrong, but Blair is still a long way from being able to admit this. He accepts that it was an act of deliberate provocation, designed to draw the West into war, and he recognises that Western politicians had a real choice: they could have chosen not to be provoked. But going down that route would have meant simply ‘managing’ the problem, instead of confronting it. It would also have meant disaggregating the threat of global terrorism into its component parts, rather than seeing it as part of a greater whole. Blair can’t bring himself to do that.
Drilling down here means grasping the greater whole. Joining up the dots for Blair was 'global terrorism'.
Runciman continues:
Blair’s mistake after 9/11 was to try to grip things that were not grippable, certainly not by him.
First in Afghanistan, then Iraq, he vastly overestimated his ability to control what would happen. There were far too many unknowns, and nothing he or his experts could do to magic them away. Moreover, these weren’t his wars, they were America’s, and they were going to happen with him or without him. In those circumstances, his ability to exert any sort of grip was negligible.
Blair makes a great deal of the closeness of his relationship with Bush, and describes how Bush regularly consulted with him and consistently impressed him with his grasp of the big issues. Yet he supplies no evidence that Bush ever actually listened to what he was saying or followed his advice. Blair was ignored by Bush. Blair ends up grasping illusions.
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Many thanks. That is a mighty thread starter.
He works on the same principles of infantile reactive adhocracy as Dr. Frankenstein or a comittee- in the end the camel or whatever dysfunctional phenomena that arises from this delusive thinking becomes the indictment for wishful thinking and failure to face facts- self-will run riot, particularly in the inability to see globalisation and the US, for what they are.