Iraq will be “a work in progress for a long time,” Gates said, and, “how it all weighs in the balance over time, I think remains to be seen.”

Image Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Blair writes that he thought he was right and that he and W. rid the world of a tyrant. But he winds up with a bitter anecdote: “I still keep in my desk a letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began. She told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced having fallen foul of Saddam’s son. She begged me to act. After the fall of Saddam she returned to Iraq. She was murdered by sectarians a few months later. What would she say to me now?”

There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.

He concedes that the invasion of Iraq was more about symbols than immediate security, about sending “a message of total clarity to the world,” after 9/11, that defying the will of the international community would no longer be tolerated.

In other words, Osama bin Laden had emasculated America, and America had to hit back, and did so against a country that had nothing to do with him or 9/11.

Blair did not want to be W.’s peripheral poodle. He wanted to “stand tall internationally” with Britain’s main ally and not “wet our knickers,” to use a Blair phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).

Blair fantasized that Saddam might someday give W.M.D. to terrorists. This, even though the dictator didn’t like terrorists because they were impossible to control, and even though, as Blair admits, (the secular) Saddam and (the fundamentalist) Osama were on opposite sides. (When Saudi Arabia felt threatened by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Osama offered to fight the Iraqi dictator.)

It is criminally naïve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W. muffed the postwar planning because they never perceived what Blair now acknowledges as “the true threat”: outside interference by Al Qaeda and Iran. So the reasoning of the man known in England as Phony Tony or Bliar amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq because Saddam could hypothetically hook up with Al Qaeda. But they didn’t properly prepare for the insurgency because they knew that Saddam had no link to Al Qaeda.