On her eponymous CNN show on Thursday night, Christiane Amanpour verbally harassed former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair over his involvement in the Iraq War and specifically whether he and former U.S. President George W. Bush “feel pain” and “a sense of responsibility” for the war having supposedly caused recent Islamic terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
As the pair were discussing the Western world’s fight against ISIS, Amanpour tried to divert attention away from that and pin the recent attacks around the world on the fact that the actions of Bush and Blair by going into Iraq somehow caused all of this to happen.
Amanpour demanded after examining “when you see what we’re faced with” as “these innocents who are slaughtered in Paris or in San Bernardino or in Beirut, the people who were killed on the Russian plane,” does it give him pause and cause him to “feel pain.”
The obnoxious CNN anchor then attempted to drop the hammer: “[D]o you feel pain? Do you feel a sense of responsibility that people still point to what you did and what Bush did and they say never again? We are not going there. So, lives are being lost because of what you all did.”
An astonished Blair tried to push back, but Amanpour immediately interrupted him twice to answer her diatribe.
When Blair finally did get a chance to respond, he capitulated that he “feel[s] a huge amount of challenge and pain about the situation that we've experienced since 9/11, which is still the worst terrorist atrocity the world has seen,” but also pointed out that 9/11 happened “before any foreign intervention” took place in that region of the world.
With Islamic extremists groups proliferating in places other than Iraq with “Boko Haram in Nigeria and across parts of sub-Saharan Africa” plus “al-Shabaab” and “groups in Central Asia, groups in the Far East,” Blair demolished the latest attempt to blame Bush and Blair for the world’s problems:
You know, at some point we've got to realize we didn't cause this problem. We got caught up in it and we're caught up in it now — and really what I've been trying to say to people is that when you learn the experience, not just of Afghanistan-Iraq but of Libya and Syria, certain lessons are very clear: intervention's tough. Partial intervention's tough. Non-intervention is tough. Right?
Blair finished up his demolition of Amanpour’s shameless attack by explaining that defeating ISIS and its allies will take “along, hard fight but you have to deal with the broader ideology that gives rise to this fanaticism, not just the fanaticism.”
The relevant portions of the transcript from CNN’s Amanpour on December 10 can be found below.
CNN’s Amanpour
December 10, 2015
11:04 p.m. Pacific
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: It has to be said that many in the United States are saying now and here obviously, that because of the debacle that was Iraq and the post-Iraq mess basically, that the West is scarred, that the people of Great Britain, the people of the United States, the President of the United States, are presumably, you know, politicians all over Europe, they're scarred by that and that's why they haven't done the kinds of things you're suggesting now and that others have suggested as well. Do you accept that?
TONY BLAIR: I accept, of course, that the experience we went through post- 9/11 with Afghanistan and then Iraq, of course, we live the lessons of that and the pain of it. On the other hand, it's important that we learn from that experience and don't become incapacitated by it because, since Afghanistan and Iraq, we've had Libya, a partial intervention and Syria, effectively until recently, not much Western intervention. Libya today is a problem for the whole of that part of Northern Africa, indeed leaching across into the Middle East and Syria is — is really a catastrophe, which has not just cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but has got the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Ultimately, we need to get to what I would call a new foreign policy synthesis, if you like. So, if people think, well, the problem with the first period of policymaking is we were intervening too heavily and probably we didn't fully understand the depths of the forces we were up against at that point in time, we've also got to learn the lessons of the reaction to that.
AMANPOUR: When you see and when you say what you're saying, when you see what we're faced with, we citizens of the world are faced with today, this, as you call it, fascism, these innocents who are slaughtered in Paris or in San Bernardino or in Beirut, the people who were killed on the Russian plane and, and, and, and — do you feel pain? Do you feel a sense of responsibility that people still point to what you did and what Bush did and they say never again? We are not going there. So, lives are being lost because of what you all did.
BLAIR: Right, but I think at some point we've got to —
AMANPOUR: No, it's just a question.
BLAIR: Yes, sure, I understand, but at some point we've got to —
AMANPOUR: Do you feel that pain?
BLAIR: I — I've — I feel a huge amount of challenge and pain about the situation that we've experienced since 9/11, which is still the worst terrorist atrocity the world has seen and came before any foreign intervention and, you know, when you've got Boko Haram in Nigeria and across parts of sub-Saharan Africa, you've got other groups, al-Shabaab, you've got groups in Central Asia, groups in the Far East. You know, at some point we've got to realize we didn't cause this problem. We got caught up in it and we're caught up in it now — and really what I've been trying to say to people is that when you learn the experience, not just of Afghanistan-Iraq but of Libya and Syria, certain lessons are very clear: intervention's tough. Partial intervention's tough. Non-intervention is tough. Right? So the answer is it's going to be a long, hard fight but you have to deal with the broader ideology that gives rise to this fanaticism, not just the fanaticism.
