NOT EVERYONE STAYED for TEA

“America can rise up and surmount [its] problems,” cried Rand Paul, newly elected Senator for Kentucky, “if we just get government out of our way”. And there you have the battle lines of American politics – and indeed of British politics – in a nutshell.

Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Don’t discount Paul Jr – who, I imagine, was named for Ayn Rand – doing the same in 2016 if not 2012. He thinks he’s good. What’s more, so does the Tea Party.

Rand Paul: perhaps his appeal will pall

As the smoke clears from the US mid-term elections, it seems that the Tea Party didn’t do quite so well as they had hoped and everyone else feared. None of the jackasses whose pictures I included in my posting of September 17th (No Pipe of Peace for the Tea P) actually got elected, though to be sure Sarah Palin, the godmother of the movement, wasn’t standing. It’s bracing to imagine how much influence my little blog must have had on American voting patterns. And it’s curiously comforting to note that California was indifferent to Meg Whitman’s billions, just as New York State shunned Carl Paladino’s threats.

Sharron from an unflattering angle

Neither was it entirely the big night predicted for Palin’s ‘Mama Grizzlies’. All bets were on Sharron Angle unseating the Democrat leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, in Nevada, but the disturbing (and possibly disturbed) Ms Angle, who evidently believes that Hispanics are Muslim, was pretty comfortably seen off. In fact, Harry Reid’s son Rory had dropped his surname from ads in his campaign to become state governor and maybe sufficient of the voters thought this unfilial enough to tip the vote against him.

Harry Reid: not a broken reed after all

Also in the west, Carly Fiorina failed to unseat the long-serving Barbara Boxer from her California Senate berth, giving the Democrats a heartening double-whammy in the state, with the retread Jerry Brown triumphing over Whitman as governor. Fiorina used to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard, in which post she was hailed by the Condé Nast Portfolio website as among “the twenty worst American CEOs of all time”. And of course the plum loco Christine O’Donnell, whom even Republican greybeards warned was unelectable when she defeated a mainstream candidate in nominations for the Delaware Senate seat, proved indeed to be unelectable. We’ve surely heard the last of her.

Carly Fiorina: just one out of twenty

But Republicans took the House and Barack Obama will have to play a canny game with the new hand he is dealt. In my view, he and his party have done themselves no favour by cleaving to the time-honoured Democrat stance of declining to carry the fight to the enemy. The Tea Party have been making the political running long enough that the Democrat strategists have no excuse for failing to put together a telling response. It’s not as if the new force in Washington has been at all subtle or tried to keep the White House guessing. You don’t have to look at Fox News for more than a minute or two to get a purchase on where these people are coming from.

Jerry Brown: running in 1975

The American right has been vocal for a long time and it’s time the left got in on the act. There are two aspects that constrain it from doing so decisively. The first is that thoughtful, liberal people do tend to offer their insights with a certain degree of tentativeness and apology. Even when they’re entertainers at the top of their game, they cannot resist exploring the weaknesses and fallacies of their allies as well as their enemies: see passim Jon Stewart. The second is that, for all the long-standing lies about the “liberal bias” of the media promulgated by Republicans, that media is almost entirely owned by right-wing capitalists. No media outlet and no reporter or columnist therein is allowed to conduct themselves in an equivalent manner to that which Rupert Murdoch has decreed shall be standard on Fox News. The outlandish, unsupported ravings of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would never be tolerated if they espoused left-of-centre or even centrist views.

Charles & David Koch: the means to buy power

The same is true in Britain. Simon Heffer, Jeremy Clarkson, Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn and the legions of their fellow pub bores may write what they like, no matter whether any of it can be remotely justified. But the very few columnists who may be taken to be of the left – Seamus Milne, say, or George Monbiot – clearly are obliged to step with care. Nothing that isn’t cogently argued and copiously illustrated is allowed to sully their pieces.

So the right gets its rallying cries heard and the resurgent Republicans will pour into Washington determined to force Obama to change course. Their supporters know just what needs to be done. Just get the government out of the way: it sounds so simple and that’s why so many simple people have marched behind that rallying cry. But hey, wasn’t the recession the fault of the banks and the lending houses? And wasn’t it a consensus among all but the anarchist fringe and the supranational squillionaires that the problem with the banks and the lending houses arose because those institutions were under-regulated? Regulation – along with taxes – is just what the post-Tea Party Republicans want to sweep away. They reckon making big bucks is “entrepreneurial”, however illegal the means of making them and however much you keep those bucks to yourself. The Koch brothers who largely fund the Tea Party are among the very richest entrepreneurs in the US. Few enterprises defend more lawsuits than does Koch Industries. The Tea Party followers believe they’re fighting for their own liberty but, much more significantly, they’re in practice fighting for capitalism to be above the law.

Clint Didier: weak argument

Democrats (like the Labour Party in Britain) are more concerned, philosophically and historically, with trying to look after the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus’ poem storied on the Statue of Liberty. That means a degree of government action, what many American voters who clearly don’t know the meaning of the term denounce in the Obama administration as “Socialism”. What’s the alternative? Here’s how failed Tea Party candidate for the Republican nomination as Washington state senator Clint Didier framed it: “We’ve got to get rid of this protecting the weak” [his emphasis]. Throw ‘em in the sea, I say.

There will be two more years of Obama before we learn whether he can gain a second term, whether the Republican hierarchy will have held its nose and pitched Sarah Palin against him and if so to what effect. As the Chinese proverb threatens: we are fated to live through interesting times.

NO PIPE of PEACE for the TEA P

I worry about the Democrats. The conventional wisdom in the party right now is that the continuing and seemingly irresistible invasion of the Republicans by outsiders backed by the so-called Tea Party in general and Sarah Palin in particular is in fact good for the Obama administration. How so? Because, Democrats argue, these “extremists” will repel mainstream opinion in the mid-term elections and preserve the hold on Congress if not the Senate for the Democrats. Well, I wouldn’t bank on it.

In the American system, party nominations for office are chosen in most states by ballots held during the summer of election year and open to any voter registered with the party. These votes determine who gets to fight the Democrat v Republican run-offs in November. The system ensures that, however slick and/or corrupt the party machine might be in any particular state, outsiders who have the money and/or catch a wave can still snatch the right to represent the party in the real election. So far, eight establishment Republican senatorial candidates have been knocked out of those run-offs by candidates without experience of office but with Tea Party and/or Palin backing. Gubernatorial and congressional scalps have also been taken in this insurgency. The views of all of these candidates are more or less off the chart of the politics known to Washington.

Take a look at the website of Carl Paladino who, in Tuesday’s ballot, secured the Republican nomination for the governorship of New York State: it’s at http://paladinoforthepeople.com. His opening foray, concerning the nomination, goes [his caps and bold]: IF WE LEARNED ANYTHING TONIGHT, IT’S THAT NEW YORKERS ARE MAD AS HELL, AND WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! It’s tempting to counter: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” or perhaps “Hooray for Captain Spalding”. But what’s scary about Paladino is that he certainly means it. If you click on ‘Play Video’ on his site, the man himself rises up and addresses you and it’s like you’re being shaken down by the mob.

Paladino: an offer New Yorkers should refuse

And just in case you imagine that being governor will satisfy him, he has included a mugshot of that most reactionary of Democratic presidents, Grover Cleveland, with the tagline: “the last NY governor from Buffalo became President of the United States”. Under Cleveland’s uncompromising gaze is the date 1883 when the first of his three terms began. Under Paladino’s menacing grin, it says “2011?” Quite what might happen in that non-election year is hard to fathom. Is that when Paladino will announce, from his governor’s office in Albany, that he is running for president in 2012? For do not doubt that he intends to win the governorship in November. His Democratic opponent will be Andrew, elder son of the much-loved former governor Mario Cuomo and presently the state’s Attorney General. On his site, Paladino gives us a flavour of the terms in which he will savage his rival: “ALL ANDREW OFFERS IS THE STATUS CUOMO” [his bold].

In California last June, the Republican candidacy to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor was won by Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and the fourth wealthiest woman in the state. She has spent some $120m of her personal wealth on her campaign so far and, if she beats the Democrat candidate, the retread Jerry Brown, in November, she will be the most right wing governor of the state since Ronald Reagan. Perhaps Whitman’s movie quote on her own website should be: “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon – we have the stars”.

Whitman: running through her spare change

Whitman’s relationship with the Tea Party is a little patchy, though their support is not confined to candidates of more modest means. Christine O’Donnell, who won Delaware against the odds on Tuesday, only prevented a mortgage company auctioning her house in 2008 by selling it to her lawyer. She remains in dispute with the IRS over her taxes and the Tea Party’s funding support was central to her win, doubtless inspired by the fact that she is a Sarah Palin clone. Paladino, on the other hand, is a self-made multi-millionaire.

It would be foolish to underestimate the success that candidates like these have already enjoyed and to discount the possibility that they could replicate it against an unusually defensive bunch of Democratic incumbents. For anyone like me who had hoped that Barack Obama would prove to be America’s equivalent of Nelson Mandela, the turn-around in 21 months has been deeply dismaying. It is not as if his presidency has looked remotely like a failure. I suspect that it is more to do with subjective perception than objective analysis.

O'Connell: Palin imitation

Obama’s elevation was very specifically steered by notions of hope and change and competence (“yes we can”). This not only drew a sharp contrast with the flounderings of George W Bush, it was also handily underlined by the unfocussed campaign of the Republican candidate, John McCain, in the 2008 election. Well, hope of course is a momentary emotion and change is pretty hard to effect quickly. The competence thing turns out in practice to be something of a red herring. Obama has achieved much, though not as yet a discernible climb out of the economic crisis that he inherited. But what he hasn’t managed to do is to make the American people love him. And that’s much more important.

When you watch him perform, it’s not really so surprising. As articulate, thoughtful, focussed and analytical as he is, Obama comes over like a college professor. His warmth is not apparent. He never seems relaxed or engaging enough, which is why several commentators have urged him to deploy the first lady more often.

Americans – indeed, perhaps voters the world over – aren’t unduly interested in competence or thoughtfulness. Not enough wanted George McGovern or Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis to be president, no doubt because those clever, earnest men were seen as what Richard Nixon damned as “pointy heads”. The people seem to prefer a chief executive with whom they feel comfortable. The folksiest chief of modern times, Reagan, is the one they most hanker for and miss. They feel they could have sat in a bar and had a drink with Reagan and passed the time of day pleasantly. The bar room image has changed in recent years, however. Now the politicians and pundits come across like the bar fly leaning on the counter and giving it out relentlessly. What is extraordinary is that the stupid, ignorant prejudices that sustain the proverbial bar room blowhard have been elevated into a vote-winning philosophy.

It didn’t matter that Ronald Reagan was a know-nothing president, like George W and, though it pains me to suggest it of a man who has grown mightily since leaving office, like Jimmy Carter. All three came across as relaxed, easy-going guys, at least when campaigning. This works with the voters. So does the image of an experienced father-figure, like Eisenhower or LBJ or Bush Sr. So does a smart and/or charismatic persona: Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton (who got the folksy as well) and Obama. But Obama’s charisma has waned and it is endangered by the possibility of being pitched against a new rival who, however ignorant, is clearly a star.

Obama: but can we yet?

Know-nothing presidents are unusually dependent on their advisors and so the crucial ingredient in their administrations is the identity of those to whom they listen. Sarah Palin, if she were to become the first woman head of state in the US, would be the know-least-of-all-time president, but don’t imagine for one moment that such an apparent disadvantage makes her unelectable. That is what most Washington observers currently believe but I submit that they’re wrong. Palin is electoral dynamite, much more so now than when she was number two to McCain. Her biggest hurdle to beating Obama in 2012 would be the presidential debates, where her uneradicable vapidity would be under intense scrutiny. But that by itself would not necessarily be sufficient to rule her out of electability. Obama might make the strategic mistake of being – or seeming (much more difficult to control) – lofty. And whereas it was Obama who was galvanising the electorate in 2008 and bringing thousands of first-time voters (not necessarily all young voters) to join the voting queues, in 2012 it would be Palin who would be achieving that effect. The poor blacks who turned out in pride and excitement two years ago might be too indifferent to bother two years hence.

From the safety – the present safety, anyway – of Europe, the Tea Party and Palin and their candidates look just like what they are: the lunatic fringe. But they don’t think of themselves as any kind of fringe. They have a righteous belief that they stand for the true American way. Whether they have any real sense of what they might unleash is another matter.

Palin: what the hell do I know?

As the know-nothing-to-beat-the-band president, Palin would be uniquely dependent upon and uniquely susceptible to the ultra neocons who would pour back into Washington, seeing her as their creature. Which of them would pose the greatest danger to our very survival? The new-generation Friedmanites? The pre-emptive strike advocates? The climate change deniers? All of these would see their chance. Palin would be swiftly told that higher rates of tax must be abolished along with Obama’s healthcare reforms, with only the evocation of the magic name of Reagan needed to persuade her that “trickledown” economics were the most successful since the war. She would be under immediate pressure to order a nuclear strike against Tehran, having no understanding of the consequences (does she even know in which country to find Tehran?) And all measures taken to combat global warming would be reversed, just as George W Bush tore up the Tokyo Accord.

My fear that Palin will be the 45th President is real. She has already written herself more than a footnote in modern politics. If she gains the highest office, she will go down in history. I fear that that history might be vanishingly short because life on earth might well not survive her administration.

The AUDACITY of HYPE

If, like me, you’re only really familiar with the sophisticated cities of the east and west coasts, you doubtless find that it’s very easy to underestimate the depth of conservatism in the United States. Across great swathes of the mid-west and the deep south, attitudes that to you and me would seem absurdly primitive, grotesquely xenophobic and profoundly ignorant are seemingly the common currency of the day.

Much of this philosophy – if philosophy is not indeed too weighty a term for what is hardly above an animal instinct – must stem from the Puritan ancestry of rural and small-town white folks. Those non-conformist Anglican sects who would have no truck with any accommodation with “popery” – Anabaptists, Unitarians, Quakers, Congregationalists, Calvinists, Ranters, Muggletonians and all – constituted the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in 1620 and began the second successful settlement of the New World, following that at Jamestown, Virginia. These were clearly “enough is enough” people.

The precipitate decline in support for Barack Obama by the end of his first year in office is hard to understand unless you accept that his very election in November 2008 was even harder to fathom. Americans elect Democrat presidents rather less often than they elect Republican ones, and liberal Democrats almost never at all. When the Democrats nominated their previously most liberal candidate since World War II, George McGovern in 1972, he won only two states against Richard Nixon: those havens of the east coast intelligentsia, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern – evidently hale and hearty at 87 as I write – couldn’t even take his home state of South Dakota. In the electoral college votes, the ones that actually secure the presidency, McGovern won just 17 to Nixon’s 520. In the modern era, only Ronald Reagan twelve years later gained more (525 to the not very liberal Walter Mondale’s 13) but, by a statistical quirk, the popular vote (ballots counted as totals rather than reckoned by distribution) was then very much closer than the electoral college difference suggests.


Presidential authority sealed

Moreover, once elections are done, support for Democrat incumbents usually falls away much more quickly than that for Republicans. Just as Obama has experienced, so support for Bill Clinton and for Jimmy Carter dropped below 50 percent by the end of each man’s first year in office. Obama’s current approval rating is lower than the lowest ever recorded during the administrations of either Dwight D Eisenhower or Franklin D Roosevelt, the latter of whom was elected to as many as four terms of office.

The astounding Senate win ten days ago for the Republicans in the same Massachusetts that voted for McGovern nearly four decades ago has rewritten the balance of power. In the curious Washington system, a party needs not merely a plurality but a twenty-seat majority in the Senate in order to carry its legislation. Below that dominance and the minority is allowed to filibuster – that is to say, to delay, harass and obstruct with impunity – until the administration either offers a compromise that the minority can accept or admits defeat and withdraws the measure. This is now the position on Capitol Hill. The joke is headlined thus: “Republicans win 41-59 majority in Senate”.

That the Republicans took this particular seat is a measure of how penetratingly the opposition to Obama has got its act together. This was Teddy Kennedy’s old fiefdom, and had been held by Democrats since Jack Kennedy took it from Henry Cabot Lodge Jr in 1952. The new senator, Scott Brown, is no box-checking party creature. He is pro-choice on abortion and even supports universal healthcare (though only for his home state where it is hardly needed), but he will not support Obama’s health insurance reform bill that was within a whisker of being passed into law and now is imperilled. On the other hand, he advocates waterboarding of terrorism suspects and opposes legislation to reduce carbon emissions. (I was sorry that the Democrat lost; although she was reportedly very uninspiring politically, she does apparently possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of Broadway musicals).


Logo of Fox News

Despite at least one headline about the senate result that will have gladdened hearts in Downing Street (“Big Win for Brown”), Barack Obama remains the hope of the whole world beyond the boundaries of the United States. This is a mirror image of the status of his predecessor. George W Bush was considered a bozo from the get-go right across the planet (especially in Europe) but remained hugely popular in the States, certainly until his response to Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it caused in and around New Orleans, a domestic miscalculation that began the erosion of his authority.

For the foreseeable future, Republicans are likely to continue to benefit electorally from any significant level of disenchantment with the Obama administration. But it is certainly not the GOP that has marshalled the opposition. The party is still in disarray and no one can guess which of its several strands will prevail in time to lead the campaign for the mid-term elections in November.


Dissenting version of the logo

Rather, the opposition has been sharpened by vested interests, particularly those in the media. Whatever their particular political inclination, media outlets continue to be fascinated by Sarah Palin and afford her endless free publicity. Palin is at best a semi-detached representative of the Republicans and, were she to begin seriously positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012, you can bet your boots that the Grand Old Party would be looking hard for a rather more mainstream alternative. Meanwhile, she acts as a lightning rod for inarticulate, ill-informed rage (always a potent ingredient in politics).

In another part of the forest, the phenomenon of The Tea Party has galvanised populist reaction – though doubtless quietly funded by vested interests – against the present administration. Naming itself after the legendary revolt against the British tax on exports of tea that broke out in Boston harbour (Massachusetts again) in 1773 and became the pivotal event in the campaign for American independence, the modern Tea Party was launched in 2006, originally as an independent libertarian movement. In the last year, the incidence of Tea Party gatherings has gathered pace, concentrating its attack on what it characterises as the “Socialist” and “big government” policies of Obama.


A billboard rewrites the tagline

The Tea Party is a natural for a media looking for colourful images of disaffection from government. The lately crowned leader of such media outlets is the satellite and cable channel Fox News. Founded as recently as 1996, Fox News has made remarkable advances in influence by rewriting the rulebook of broadcasting’s coverage of news, current affairs and politics. Fox’s owner Rupert Murdoch has noted the popular appeal of radio’s “shock jocks” – Rush Limbaugh and his kind – and gradually unleashed a similar approach on a television station that purports to report the events of the day. (By the by, a measure of the success of such approaches may be that my spellchecker always questions ‘Obama’ but has no problem with ‘Limbaugh’, and that’s not because ‘limbaugh’ has any separate meaning as a noun – the OED does not recognise it).

Traditionally, western media has carefully positioned itself in a non-partisan stance, at least in party terms. (Only utterly blinkered media apologists would suggest that even the most diligent media outlets are wholly agnostic on every issue. One only has to recall the occasion in the polarised 1970s when BBC newsreader Angela Rippon read out the phrase “trade unionists and other extremists”). Republicans and other extremists have always chastised this even-handed stance as “liberal bias” because, to them, straight reporting can only be the kind that reinforces all their prejudices. This is the kind of reporting that Fox News gives them by the bucketload. Straightfaced, the two slogans most used by Fox are “Fair & Balanced” and “We Report. You Decide”. You don’t need to watch much of the Fox output to be able to decide.

Once more the essential conservatism of middle America was dramatically illustrated in a survey of attitudes to news coverage conducted last September by Sacred Heart University of Connecticut (New England yet again). Since the first such research in 2003, Fox News has decisively overtaken CNN as the US’s “most trusted” television news channel, garnering a rating of 30 percent. The context, though, was a “significant decline” of general belief in news reporting to 24.3 percent. One of the survey’s most revealing findings was that 59 percent of respondents reckon to choose their news source for its “objective reporting” against 19 percent because that source reflected the viewer’s own outlook. If ever there was poll evidence that depended on the respondent’s subjective rather than objective view, this was it.


Fox promotes The Tea Party

What should we make of all this? The Sacred Heart survey was conducted by telephone with 800 individuals. The Guardian’s report of the poll (January 28th, but written as if the findings were new) differed in many details from the information that I found on Sacred Heart’s website, including its report of the number of respondents: 1,151, described by the paper, but not by the website, as “registered voters”. Either way, it is a vanishingly minuscule sample in a voting-age population above 231million. How much weight can we possibly give such a poll?

That disenchantment with Obama is widely felt in the States is, however, clear. My gut feeling is that it will pass, that Obama is very shrewd and understands exactly what is at stake and how to play it. At this point in the electoral cycle, it only matters insofar as the Massachusetts aberration shifts the balance of power. But the new balance could well prove to be a bear-trap into which the Republicans easily fall. If the electorate feels that the recession is not ending quickly enough but also sees that the President cannot get his programme through, it may well take out its frustration on the obstructive senators. Obama is playing a long game and he still holds a strong hand. November in the US – even more than May 6th in the UK – is still a long way off.


Another survey of news channels

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Yesterday will surely have been the last occasion on which anyone can have hoped to call Tony Blair to account for throwing in his lot with George W Bush and invading Iraq in 2003. Facing the Chilcot Enquiry, the former Prime Minister and (let’s not forget) barrister was masterly after a tense start; this was clearly a dry run for the definitive account that will furnish the centrepiece of his forthcoming autobiography.

More significantly for the present purpose, he was allowed to be masterly. Even though the enquiry members must be well played in by now, they seemed greatly overawed by this political superstar. On two crucial aspects of his perception of the choices that faced him, they failed to press Blair: the matter of the legality of invading a sovereign state (much explored in previous sessions with Lord Goldsmith and other members of the Blair cabinet) and the notion of a connection between the regime in Baghdad and the operations of al-Qaida.

On the second of those issues, Blair was allowed to get away with the smart retort that “the crucial thing after September 11th was that the calculus of risk changed”. In other words, anyone whom we didn’t trust was capable of committing unimaginable outrages against our citizens (noting that Blair also said “I never regarded September 11th as an attack on America. I regarded it as an attack on us” and his definition of “us” might have been usefully challenged). This begs the question: why did we/do we not invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, the Yemen and, if regime change is itself a legitimate objective, why exclude Myanmar, Zimbabwe or Kyrgyzstan? While we are at it, Russia is clearly embarked on a systematic elimination of dissident and irritating journalists. As Ronald Reagan once proposed when he thought mics were off, “let’s bomb Russia”. The world, Mr Blair, is your lobster. As it happens, it seems from his testimony that, were he still PM, we would have attacked Iran by now. And you thought you were worse off under Gordon Brown.


Coat of arms of the British government

But the key to Blair’s self-justification lies in his brilliantly simple formula that, I have no doubt, will go down in the lexicon of all-time political sayings: “This is not about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision”. Oh, that’s deathless. That’s worthy of Richard III, Macbeth, Milton’s Satan. With that one bound, he is free. He made a decision. You can of course debate whether it was a correct decision. But whatever you decide, it is intrinsically legitimate. It is what politicians are elected to do. You cannot now impugn his morality. He did his job.

The closing question – as to whether Blair would proffer anyone any kind of apology – seems to me to be fruitless and infantile. In all humanity, I cannot comprehend the grounds upon which the families of service personnel who died imagine they are entitled to some kind of mea culpa. Blair clearly believes with all the fibre of his being that he did the right thing. So did Churchill in leading the nation against Nazi Germany for most of the duration of World War II. So did Thatcher in sending the fleet to the Falklands. That military people lost their lives is what happens in war. At perfectly comprehensible levels of perception, that’s what they’re for. Of course the families of people sent to the front line hope that they will return alive and unmaimed but they can ask for no more succour than that. (Care of invalided service personnel is an altogether separate and historically shaming issue that I have addressed before).

If Blair is content that the invasion of Iraq was morally and politically defensible, he has nothing to apologise for. If any apologising is to be done, I would rather it be offered to the civilians who were injured and the families of those civilians who perished. They had none of the advantages that the invading military took for granted. If Blair has blood on his hands it is that of innocent Iraqis.