A Journey
By Tony Blair
Knopf, 720 pages

Isaiah Berlin famously said that Leo Tolstoy was a fox who wrongly believed he was a hedgehog—someone who knew everything about the little things (human behavior) but wanted to be someone who knew one big thing (the moral nature of the universe). This proves a surprisingly useful prism through which the career of Tony Blair can be examined. He was the opposite of Tolstoy, as his new autobiography, A Journey, reveals. For, having posed as a fox all his political life, Blair turned out to be the most formidable and stalwart British hedgehog to come along since Winston Churchill.

Much of the first 340 pages of A Journey, written by Blair himself with a fountain pen, are devoted to such British domestic issues as health, education, and public services. They reveal the policy shortcomings of a politician who, for the first four years of his premiership, was far too concerned with opinion polls, focus groups, satisfying special-interest groups, and figuring out how to spin. Indeed, from trying to play down the reliance he put on spin and public relations, Blair now openly acknowledges its central importance to his efforts to reform and renew the ideologically moribund Labour Party.

He is evidently still proud that in his first hundred days inoffice he incorporated the egregious European Human Rights Act into British law, gave Scotland devolved powers that has given rise to a fractious and unnecessary independence movement, and allowed the plundering of National Lottery money by the government, among many other dubious policy choices. The case that he makes for the success of these fox-like acts is the least convincing aspect of this lengthy volume.

Of course Blair, like all other politicians in their memoirs, argues that he was right about almost everything almost all the time. But he does find a few opportunities to acknowledge mistakes, too, such as his government’s decision to abolish fox-hunting, and he even acknowledges that during his time in opposition in the mid-1990s, as he was on the attack against the rapidly declining Tories, “some of the tactics were too opportunistic and too facile.”

But to admirers and foes alike, all that pales next to the most controversial aspect of Blair’s premiership, in which his true nature as a hedgehog is revealed. Writing of his initial, instinctive, intestinal response to the September 11 attacks, Blair states:

It was not America alone who was the target, but all of us who shared the same values. We had to stand together. We had to understand the scale of the challenge and had to rise to meet it. We could not give up until it was done. Unchecked and unchallenged, this could threaten our way of life to its fundamentals. There was no other course; no other option; no alternative path. It was war. It had to be fought and won. But it was a war unlike any other. This was not a battle for territory, not a battle between states; it was a battle for and about the ideas and values that would shape the twenty-first century.

The bread-and-butter domestic and parochial issues all but disappear in A Journey once al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States takes place. At that moment, an entirely different Blair emerged—an international statesman who suddenly cared little and often nothing for the views of the naysayers, appeasers, useful idiots, or straightforward honest opponents, both in his cabinet and out of it.

“To win would not and does not require simply a military strategy to defeat an enemy that is fighting us,” he explains. “It requires a whole new geopolitical framework. It requires nation-building. It requires a myriad of interventions deep into the affairs of other nations. It requires above all a willingness to see the battle as existential and to see it through, to take the time, to spend the treasure, to shed the blood, believing that not to do so is only to postpone the day of reckoning, when the expenditure of time, treasure and blood will be so much greater.”

His time horizon changed utterly. “Such struggles don’t last an electoral cycle,” he writes. “They last a generation.”

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Journey has been savagely reviewed in Britain, with commentators objecting with raised eyebrows and pursed lips to its Americanisms (as when he calls former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder “a really tough cookie”) and its occasional descents into the demotic (“she was quite prepared to squeeze the balls very hard indeed of anyone who interfered,” he says admiringly of an aide). But all that is a sideshow. The reason for the vicious reception of A Journey is due to Blair’s discussion of the war on terror, in which he is supremely, sublimely, and superbly unapologetic. His refusal to kowtow to the conventional wisdom that dominates Britain’s intelligentsia about theillegitimacy of that war continues to drive many of those who once happily voted for him into paroxysms of loathing. Thus, though Blair has donated the entirety of the  $7.2 million he received in advance royalties to the British war-veterans association, Royal British Legion, anti-war protesters have described the donation as, in the words of the Times of London, “blood money and an attempt by Mr Blair to buy forgiveness for his decision to go to war in Iraq.”

This is a ludicrous charge because, as A Journey reveals, Blair feels no need whatever to ask forgiveness. He remains convinced that he and President George W. Bush were right to depose the tyrannies in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is more, Blair reminds us that even after the insurgency in Iraq went on for longer than anyone expected, and even after the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction there, he still won the subsequent 2005 general election by a landslide.

Nor does he feel the need to apologize for his capacious view of the United States—“I have come to love America and all it stands for”—or, most impressively, for his closeness to George W. Bush. The accusation that Blair was, in the predictable sneer of the anti-war movement, Bush’s “poodle” is utterly undermined by the speech Blair gave in Chicago at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in April 1999, almost two years before Bush became president. In that speech, as Blair says, “I had already set out a doctrine that put intervention—if necessary, military intervention—at the heart of creating a more just international community of nations. I had enlarged the concept of national interest, arguing that in an interdependent world, our national interest was engaged wherever injustice or danger existed.”

What he found in Bush was a surprisingly kindred spirit. George W. Bush emerges from this book as a man who, after September 11, “was not panicking or fretting or even plain worrying. He was at peace with himself. He had his mission as president. He hadn’t asked for it. He hadn’t expected it. He hadn’t found it. It had found him. But he was clear. The world had changed, and as president of the world’s most powerful country, he was tasked with making sense of that change and dealing with it.”

That is what Blair was tasked with as well. He got it. And in spite of the assaults on his reputation and the rage the very mention of his name provokes in those who once viewed him as the British left’s political savior, he gets it still.

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