Tony Blair’s long-awaited memoir says the former British prime minister doesn’t regret the Iraq war — although he wept for the victims — and carries revelations about the politician’s alcohol use, his interactions with the queen and his testy relationship with his successor.
Tony Blair’s A Journey was stirring political passions as it hit bookstores yesterday, with excerpts revealing that the former British prime minister cried for soldiers and civilians killed in Iraq, but still thought it was right to invade Iraq and topple then-president Saddam Hussein.
The decision to go to war remains Blair’s most divisive legacy.
PHOTO: EPA
In excerpts from the book released by the publisher late on Tuesday, Blair says: “I ... regret with every fiber of my being the loss of those who died.”
“Tears, though there have been many, do not encompass it,” he says.
However, he says, “on the basis of what we do know now, I still believe that leaving Saddam in power was a bigger risk to our security than removing him and that, terrible though the aftermath was, the reality of Saddam and his sons in charge of Iraq would at least arguably be much worse.”
“I can’t regret the decision to go to war,” he says.
Blair also reopens domestic political wounds, saying he found his rival and successor as prime minister Gordon Brown difficult and maddening.
British booksellers are reporting heavy interest in the book, for which Blair was paid an estimated £4.6 million (US$7.5 million).
He’s donating the proceeds to a charity for injured troops.
Billed by publisher Random House as a “frank, open” account of life at the top, A Journey is being published in a dozen countries, alongside an e-book and an audio version read by Blair himself. It’s in the top 10 on Amazon’s British best-seller list — though it’s only 4,000 on the retailer’s US site.
Blair — who was scheduled to be in Washington on publication day, attending Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in his role as an international Middle East envoy — has said he “set out to write a book which describes the human as much as the political dimensions of life as prime minister.”
The book promises to give readers behind-the-curtain insights into major world events from the death of Princess Diana to the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
It is unlikely to resolve the conflicting views and emotions Blair evokes.
For many Americans, he remains a well-regarded ally who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the US in the fight against international terrorism. He’s scheduled to receive the 2010 Liberty Medal from former US president Bill Clinton in Philadelphia on Sept. 13.
Anti-war groups say they will picket Blair’s book signings in Dublin on Saturday and in London on Sept. 8. Both are high-security affairs at which book buyers will have to surrender their bags, cameras and mobile phones — and are barred from asking for personal dedications.
Blair, 57, stepped down in June 2007 after a decade that included a historic peace accord in Northern Ireland, the deeply unpopular war in Iraq and the continuing conflict in Afghanistan.
He was Labour’s most successful leader for decades, moved the left-leaning party toward the center and brought it back to power after 18 years in opposition.
However, when he left, after years of increasingly open hostility with Brown, his party was divided.
He also details his interaction with Queen Elizabeth II in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, when support for the British monarchy was at a low ebb. Blair said he tried to get Elizabeth to make a public statement and worried that she found him “presumptuous.” For his part, he said she was “a little haughty.”
Elsewhere, Blair speaks of his relationship with alcohol, saying he drank “a whisky or a gin and tonic before dinner, then one or two glasses of wine.”
Blair said that while he believed he controlled his intake, he had been aware that drink was becoming “a support.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS