Just when we thought (or at least hoped) it was safe to consign him to the dustbin of history, Tony Blair has come back to remind us that he’s still alive, still involved in politics, and still being completely ignorant of the role he played in one of the greatest crimes of this century so far. The former British Prime Minister and one of the chief architects of the disastrous Iraq war wrote an editorial piece for The Observernewspaper over the weekend, in which he insisted that religious extremism will be the main cause of war in the twenty-first century, stating that “the battles of this century are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology, like those of the 20th century – but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference”.
This is a very useful thing for Blair to say, as it fits neatly into the old, and now completely disproved, theory that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was somehow implicated in a global Islamic terrorist network. This was not true in the slightest, but it helps Blair to lump the conflicts of the past fifteen years into a ‘religious terrorist’ framework, rather than examining their real causes. It also chimes with a general ‘clash of civilization’ narrative which has been around since Samuel Huntington espoused it in the early 1990s. In this view, the wars of the future will be between groups of ‘civilizations’ that Huntington largely defines in religious or ethnic terms.
Ultimately, both Blair and Huntington’s models are trite, and simplistically split the world up into brightly coloured blocks, a little like the old computer game Civilization. The real world is much more complicated, and the roots of war go far beyond religion alone. The Iraq war was clearly not fought over religion (although Iraq is now full of religious extremists, it was actually a heavily secular place during Hussein’s rule) or even over ethnicity. It was fought because of geopolitical concerns on the part of the rich countries of the west, who believe they have the right to secure oil resources for themselves from anywhere else on the planet – and if a country like Iraq isn’t going to play along, and remains belligerent for long enough, then it becomes a target. The sheen of religious terrorism that western leaders tried to emphasize was nothing more than an attempt to justify their actions.
Most other recent wars have been for similarly calculating political aims. The intervention in Libya and the proposed interventions in Syria have nothing to do with any concern we might have for the civilian populations of those countries. The average person on the street in the US or UK may think it’s terrible if Gaddafi or Assad are attacking civilians, but that isn’t why the west intervenes. It intervenes because it thinks the Libyan or Syrian opposition will do a better job of funnelling money and cheap resources to the west. We can see as much from all the years that Hussein was allowed to gas his own countrymen without being invaded, because he was otherwise being cooperative. As soon as he turned the oil off, his relationship with the west changed and he suddenly became a ‘bad guy’.
War is not caused by religion. Some amount of conflict is caused by religion, but full-blown wars between two or more nation states are caused by the desire of elites to get more – more money, more resources, more land, and more power. War is the means by which the rich take more and more for themselves and leave the poor with less and less – and despite what Blair thinks about his misadventure in the Middle East, the Iraq war was no better. It was simple a way for rich, western elites to take things which didn’t belong to them – less to do with religion, and more to do with pure greed.
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