The Blair Doctrine: buried in Libyan sand?

Number 514 in the series of Questions to Which the Answer is No is asked by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a particularly thoughtless version of the standard anti-Blair sneer that has been around since things started kicking off in Egypt.

It runs along the lines of haha Blair propped up Gaddafi and went on holiday in Egypt and didn’t need to invade Iraq because the Arab and Middle Eastern dictators were about to fall like a house of cards anyway if he hadn’t propped them up it’s all about oil (contd p94).

The implication is either (a) rich democracies should have had nothing to do with any of these undemocratic countries, refusing to trade with them, and waited for their people to revolt (for example, sanctions on Iraq 1991-2003); or (b) we should have bombed them all, and Ronald Reagan’s only mistake was to stop bombing Libya in 1986.

Not sure which Guru-Murthy is advocating, although he implies (b), on the basis of the old “if you’re going to invade Iraq what about Burma, Zimbabwe and Libya?” canard.

Whichever it is, it overlooks Gaddafi’s abandonment of his weapons of mass destruction ambitions after the programme was penetrated by British intelligence and after the useful lesson of the Iraq war. It overlooks the liberating effect of trade, engagement and the assertion by the leaders of rich democracies, notably Tony Blair, that democracy is a universal good to which Arabs and Muslims are entitled to aspire.

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