With God on his side: Tony Blair's faith and the decision to go to war in Iraq

With God on his side: Tony Blair's faith and the decision to go to war in Iraq 

The Tablet

06 July 2016 | by Andrew Connell | Comments: 1

How the former Labour PM reconciled the decision to to war with his 'extremely strong trust in his own moral judgement'

The Chilcot Report into the Iraq War was finally due to be published this week. Tony Blair’s powerful religious beliefs were key to Britain’s involvement in the conflict
By the time Tony Blair resigned after a decade in power, many people no longer thought of him as a leader who had won three successive general elections and become the longest-serving Labour Prime Minister in British history. They thought of him as the Prime Minister who had led the UK, on questionable legal and evidential grounds, into joining the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and had entangled the country in a war from which it would not extricate itself for several years.

Blair’s Christian faith was key to his foreign policy, particularly underpinning his advocacy of military intervention in Iraq and, previously and more successfully, in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. In his memoirs, Blair would say that “I have always been more interested in religion than politics”. For all that the Iraq War was opposed by many Christians, including Pope John Paul II and other church leaders, there, as elsewhere, Blair’s faith underpinned his whole political mission.

When Tony Blair was growing up, his family were not regular church-goers. But although his father, Leo Blair, had been a non-believer, his mother, Hazel, to whom he was close, was “religious though not church-going”. She taught her son to pray, and has been credited with laying the foundations, not only of his religious faith, but of his social conscience.

It was at St John’s College, Oxford, that Blair encountered probably the most important single influence on his spiritual and political development. Peter Thomson, 17 years his senior, was an Australian Anglican priest who had come to the college as a mature student. Writing after Thomson’s death in 2010, Blair simply said, “He shaped my life, gave it meaning and purpose; and set its course.” After conversations with Thomson – and with his college chaplain – at the end of his second year he was quietly confirmed into the Church of England in his college chapel.

Thomson’s influence included introducing Blair to the thought of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, for whom people could only realise their humanity and human potential through relationships with others. Blair believed that he had derived from Macmurray a basic message about human interdependence and, thus, the importance of community – a belief that “people owed obligations to each other and were social beings, not just out for themselves”. After leaving Oxford, he met and married Cherie Booth, a committed member of both the Labour Party and the Catholic Church. Blair, too, was committed, but until he was received into the Catholic Church after leaving office in 2007, he was an Anglican.

One of his most complete public statements of his religious beliefs was in an article published in The Sunday Telegraph on Easter Day 1996, a year before his first general election victory. The care that he took indicates both the positioning of himself as a potential Prime Minister as well as the importance he attached to his faith. In the article, Blair declared himself to be an “ecumenical Christian” who found many sectarian debates “baffling”. Christianity, he argued, was a social faith, bringing the believer into relationship not only with God but, necessarily, with the outside world. The Christian could not, therefore, detach himself or herself from the surrounding world: Christian faith imposed a duty and a responsibility to act, and unless one accepted the responsibilities as well as the benefits of membership of a community, all would suffer.

This, then, is the doctrine of community presented as an integral part of Christianity. Indeed, for Blair the connection between individual duty, the greater good, and the interests of community was one of the things that the Church celebrated in the Eucharist.

Three years later, in April 1999, in a speech in Chicago, he set out the application of the principle of community beyond the nation-state. The immediate context was the crisis in Kosovo, and Nato’s intervention in defence of the Kosovar Albanians against Serbian attacks. Blair was determined that the example of Rwanda, where genocidal massacres had taken place earlier in the decade in the face of Western – and especially American – unwillingness to intervene, should not be repeated. Once again the US was reluctant to get involved, and Blair’s speech was part of a concerted effort to bring the Americans on side.

In the speech, Blair justified a breach of the principle that sovereign states should not intervene in each other’s internal affairs. More broadly, the title of the speech – “Doctrine of the International Community” – makes clear the connection between this new doctrine in international affairs and the principles which were, for Blair, so closely related to his Christian faith. Blair argued that in a globalised world, states could not but be interdependent.

This was more than a doctrine of mere enlightened self-interest. Blair had spoken at the beginning of the speech of the “unspeakable and evil” events unfolding in Kosovo, and had declared that the intervention there was “a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values”. Those who had the power to prevent evil had a duty to act to do so – a point hammered home towards the end of the speech when he said that “just as with the parable of the individuals and the talents, so those nations which have the power, have the responsibility”.

This was the only explicitly Christian reference in the speech. An answer as to how far this doctrine of community can be identified as Christian may be found in Blair’s own discussion, in his memoirs, of the relationship between faith and politics in general. “The frame within which you see the world,” he wrote, “is different if religion comes first. Religion starts with values that are born of a view of humankind. Politics starts with an examination of society and the best means of changing it … Of course, politics is about values; and religion is often about changing society. But you start from a different place.”

John Burton, his friend and constituency agent (and another committed Christian), said that Blair “believed that if it was possible to do something about injustice, then you should do it – which is why it’s very simple to explain the idea of Blair the Warrior. It was part of Tony living out his faith.”

If community was one strand of Blair’s politico-religious ethic, then, as Burton’s observation and Blair’s own reference in Chicago to the parable of the talents remind us, personal responsibility was the other. In his 1995 Labour Party Conference speech, he said: “I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side.” And there is his reference to duty in his Sunday Telegraph article: “Christian belief means you cannot detach yourself from the world around you.”

Bishop Graham Dow, who had known Blair since he was college chaplain at St John’s,  saw his decision to join the US attack on Iraq in these terms. In relieving Iraq of a murderous dictator, Blair saw himself, Dow believed, as putting into practice his obligations as his brother’s keeper. And responsibility meant not only a responsibility to act, but a responsibility – ultimately to God – for those actions.

This was certainly a responsibility that Blair took seriously. The journalist Peter Stothard, who spent a month shadowing Blair at the height of the Iraq War in March and April 2003, observed the “momentary blankness” in his eyes as he contemplated his own responsibility for shedding blood. While Blair had said that he was “ready ‘to meet my maker’ and answer for ‘those who have died or been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions’”, he was also aware that there were many others, including other Christians, who believed that “the last judgement will be against him”.

Plainly Blair had an extremely strong trust in his own moral judgement, once his mind was made up. Stothard’s remark concerning his attitude to casualties suggests that he did not take moral decisions lightly. But he was also acutely conscious of the temptation for any politician to do what was expedient rather than what was right.

Matthew d’Ancona, the journalist who worked with Blair on the article, reflected in 2005 that it would have been easy and expedient for Blair to have committed the UK to a symbolic token support for the US action against Saddam Hussein. But Blair believed that he was doing a morally right thing in overthrowing Saddam, even if the cost of doing so was high. Indeed, one may even speculate that for Blair, the high cost of a course of action may have been a confirmation that it was the right one: that his determination not to follow the easy and expedient course may have affected his judgement of what was right or wrong.

It would be wrong to think of Blair’s faith as having simply mandated or commanded his interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Iraq. These actions must, of course, be seen in their wider political and strategic context. Even allowing for the explicit and unusually high consideration which Blair gave to ethical values rather than to simple national interest, the decision to intervene or not in any particular case was shaped, as the Chicago speech made clear, by other considerations.

How history – notwithstanding Sir John Chilcot – will judge him remains to be seen. But Blair’s interventionist foreign policy should nonetheless be seen as an attempt to apply Christian values on the international stage. Whether it is an exemplar, or a dreadful warning, will be for each reader to decide.

This is an edited version of an essay available  in full at www.theosthinktank.co.uk

Andrew Connell is a researcher and academic based in Cardiff.