In America, they have something called the Pottery Barn Rule – “you broke it, you own it”. Over time, the saying has evolved to mean something different. It’s used to refer to the negligence of companies who make mistakes and must pay for it, or for the errors of governments who must bear the responsibility for cleaning up after themselves.



Which brings us – once again – to Tony Blair, and Iraq.

Over the weekend, the former Labour leader and PM has been hitting the airwaves, wielding an essay in which he claims that the current rise of ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) – now controlling significant portions of the Iraqi state – is nothing to do with him, or the2003 invasion of Iraq.

Now it’s easy to see why Blair would want to make this argument. After all, the War on Terror – of which Blair was one of the most prominent and powerful proponents – was targeted against al-Qaeda. And whilst efforts were made to link Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government with al-Qaeda, they weren’t terribly successful or believable. Other justifications (primarily WMD) were sought. Iraq was a detour on the road to ridding the world of al-Qaeda, and become a recruiting group for al-Qaeda, and worse. There were many legitimate arguments for wanting to see the removal of Saddam Hussein. He was a dictator. A despot. He had used chemical weapons on his own people. He led a state that tortured and brutalised its inhabitants. Few will have been genuinely sorry to see his regime toppled.

But what came in its place? The army of the Ba’athist state was shut down. The Iraqi state collapsed, and a decade later – after the “coalition of the willing” have left – we left behind a government that’s incapable of defending their own people. Now, instead of a thriving democratic Iraq, we’re now faced with an Iraq that has lost large swathes of territory to ISIS – a group disowned by al-Qaeda for being too extreme.

ISIS are undoubtedly an abominable organisation. A brutal band of dangerous killers who wish to impose an absolutely terrifying brand of absolutist, extremist Islamist law on any and all territory they can lay their hands on. Any rational western government should want to help Iraq’s fledging democracy – and those under their yoke in Syria – to fight back. But we do not live in rational times. Every debate on intervention is shot through with the emotion – still red hot in many places – of 2003. Back then, few were opposed to British military action of any sort – now even in the corridors of Westminster that’s a sentiment you’re more likely to hear. It was just such a sentiment that turned the pause of the Commons Syria vote into the full stop of us sitting on our collective hands as thousands more died.

Tony Blair’s Iraq errors loomed large over that debate, and they loom large over the ISIS debate today. There are good reasons why Britain and other allies of Iraq would want to see such a group crushed, driven back and defeated. But the odds of the British people swinging behind another military intervention in Iraq at the behest of Tony Blair are remote to say the least.

If Tony Blair wants to make an intervention in favour of intervention – one that would actually have the desired impact – he should refer himself to the Pottery Barn rule. He should state that regardless of his intentions, the invasion of Iraq was a disaster – and one foretold by many critics of the invasion. He should say that replacing Saddam Hussein with a democratic government was the right thing to do, but at a terrible cost to the people of Iraq, the cause of fighting terrorism and the credibility of western military intervention. He should hold his hands up and say that the trust of the British people was lost due to dubious claims in a rush to war – and accept that he is no longer seen as an impartial arbiter when it comes to the need for such intervention in future.

But he should also point to the Pottery Barn Rule. He should say that regardless of how people feel about the Iraq War, the impact it had on the Iraqi state is our shared burden. Even those of us who cried that the war was “not in our name” must surely accept that liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam only to see them brutalised by ISIS is perverse. He should accept that we broke Iraq, and did not sufficiently fix it – and that we must do so now to stop the rest of Iraq (and other countries too) falling to such a grim fate. He should accept responsibility, because doing so is the most compelling case for the British government to help the Iraqi’s reclaim their nation from ISIS.

He needs to do that. And if he can’t – he needs to be quiet, because otherwise his interventions, however well intentioned, are spectacularly counter-productive. (Sound familiar?)