Opinion: Low dishonest decade in review

Or the search for intelligent life in the universe of Tony Blair.

Michael GoldfarbDecember 25, 2009 10:04Updated May 30, 2010 12:17

Demonstrators with hands covered in fake blood and a Tony Blair mask protest outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference center in London, where an official inquiry into Britain's involvement in the Iraq War was being held on Nov. 24, 2009. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters)

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:

LONDON, U.K. — It was a different time and a different place when W.H. Auden coined the phrase "low, dishonest decade," but it is as apt a way of describing the Two-Thousand Noughties as it was the 1930s. I could sit down over the Twelve Days of Christmas and easily write 10,000 bitter words a day about all the low, dishonest things the great and the good and we ordinary mortals got up to since the turn of the millennium. I'd have written a 360-page book by the time the holiday was over.

You could start with the stolen American election of 2000 and end with the Obama team doing nothing about Goldman Sachs' bonuses, stopping off along the way to visit the useless egocentricity of Davos-man and woman and the bloody duplicity of Israeli and Palestinian politicians, their people and their respective diasporas. I could throw in the way the owners and managers of the news media in the U.S. dismembered their businesses and the way aid work became a gravy train for those who administered it.

But no one reads anything that long online so I will furnish you with a record of the lowest and most dishonest actions from this island off the western coast of Europe.

This was the decade when the "Third Way," the British Labour Party's adaptation of the American Democrats' political philosophy of triangulation, was revealed for what it was — a brilliant method for winning elections to no particular purpose. There are no principles in the Third Way, just slogans. Tony Blair, was its greatest practitioner. He made finding a middle way on virtually every issue his hallmark and won three elections doing it.

But you can't lead a government without eventually having to take a stand on principle. For Blair, that moment came in Iraq in April 2004, the first anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam. That was the week Bush administration arrogance collided with the deepening alliance of Ba'ath loyalists and Al Qaeda operatives. From the shock waves of that collision emanated an insurgency that would destroy Iraq's chances of a decent transition to fair government and bury the prospects of humanitarian intervention by any nation or international organization in the foreseeable future.

I know this was the moment Blair failed because I was in Iraq at precisely that moment reporting on the state of the country a year after Saddam's overthrow. I remember sitting in the Green Zone with a British diplomat on the staff of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's top man in Iraq — Blair's eyes and ears — listening to the diplomat's criticisms about the grotesque politicization of the occupation. It was all being run as an extension of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, he complained. Greenstock, a fluent Arabic speaker, a man with infinite knowledge of the region was completely sidelined, according to this fellow.

Day by day, hour by hour, blunder by blunder, Iraq was falling apart. Abu Ghraib, the failure to co-opt Moqtada al-Sadr, the flattening of Fallujah to avenge the deaths of four Blackwater mercenaries: The White House seemed not to care, so long as the American media was being spun and the president's poll numbers were buoyant.

Blair had to have known all of this and yet, he did nothing. As the only foreign leader of any note to have signed up for the overthrow of Saddam, as a partner of the U.S. in the ending of Slobodan Milosevic's wars in the Balkans, as the prime minister who had finally neutered the IRA and seen the Good Friday Agreement to completion, he had the authority to speak out in private or in public against the Bush administration's blunders. He did not.