Point Nemo is a spot in the Pacific surrounded by more than nine million square miles of ocean. The nearest land is an uninhabited atoll 167 miles away, and the closest humans are on the International Space Station, when it passes 249 miles overhead. Point Nemo is the loneliest place on the planet. The second-loneliest place is the stage of a topical comedy club above a snooker hall in Stoke Newington in March 2004, when you have decided to perform a comedy song about the Treaty of Westphalia to people who have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Halfway through the six verses of rhymes (“nail ya,” “failure,” and “shale, yeah?”) the audience was more distant than a royal father.
Topical comedy can be easy; mention halfway familiar news stories and the audience will award themselves laughs for their own cleverness. Just don’t write lengthy songs about the 1648 treaty that laid the basis of subsequent international order. I blame Tony Blair (of course, in 2004 most people blamed Tony Blair). The day before that gig he had given a Happy Birthday speech for the Iraq War. A year in, with WMDs still as elusive as ever, Blair wanted to remind everyone why we had really gone to war. Apparently, it was never about WMDs, so it didn’t matter that we hadn’t found any. Where Winston Churchill had wanted to gas the “tribes” of Iraq, Tony Blair wanted to gaslight the whole country.
Rather than WMDs, or regime change (which would make the conflict illegal), the Iraq War was now about combating Islamic terrorism. Blair pointed out there hadn’t been a terrorist attack at Heathrow the year before, which could mean one of two things: no one had planned a terrorist attack at Heathrow, or the government’s anti-terrorist policies had been hugely successful. He urged the country to judge his success by all the attacks that didn’t happen, of which there could be millions.
Also, he went on, Islamic terrorism was an international, cross-border phenomenon, so it was time to get rid of the Treaty of Westphalia, which said you couldn’t invade another country unless it attacked you first. The new threat of Islamic terrorism – Blair said – meant that countries had to be free to invade other countries if they looked a bit terrorist-y. Someone who couldn’t have agreed more, of course, was Vladimir Putin. Not only did Blair’s Westphalia speech provide rhetorical cover for the West’s invasion of Iraq, it was also hugely convenient for the war Putin was waging in Chechnya, which he always defined as being about Islamic terrorism.
Where Churchill had wanted to gas the “tribes” of Iraq, Blair wanted to gaslight the whole country
Blair was desperate to pull down the international order, to undermine the UN, and to trash-talk treaties, so that he could do the sorts of wars he wanted. Putin happily exploited that absence of order in Georgia, where Russia developed the Medvedev Doctrine: a spiritual successor to the Blair speech, which gave Russia the right to invade any state where Russians might be endangered.
The Blair government increased the number of export licences to Russia by 550 per cent as it waged the Second Chechen War. London was Putin’s first foreign visit. Before Putin was elected, Blair made a trip to St Petersburg to support him (at a time when the Clinton administration wouldn’t). He told journalists: “It is my job to like Mr Putin.” The specious arguments Blair made for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his gelding of the UN, laid the groundwork for Putin’s actions ever since. This month, we remember not just the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War but can look to Ukraine and see another copycat conflict in full swing. The connection would be clearer if our politicians and media hadn’t all decided to try and forget about Iraq, after they got it wrong. In the war least 200,000 civilians were killed and a wave of Islamic terrorism was unleashed across the Middle East. Did it free Iraq? According to Freedom House’s assessment of free elections, media, and other freedoms, Iraq is defined as Not Free.
Still, our media class thinks it best not to talk about it. In the same way it won’t talk about the link between rhetoric on immigration and far-right attacks on migrants. For a sense of the shamelessness of the British media and political class, look at Nick Timothy. The brains behind the most vote-losing election manifesto of recent years, and all the other “successes” of the Theresa May years, he still holds down columns in national newspapers. In a civilised country, Timothy would have been nailed inside a barrel lined with tar and broken crockery and kicked down a hill. Ditto Alistair Campbell, whose career has been spent undermining truth and decency, yet who now hosts a podcast in which he expounds at length about standards in public life.
We act surprised when Putin behaves as if he lives in a world without rules, consistency or principle, when that is the world we’ve watched our media and political class create for themselves. It is a world without consequences for them. It’s just a shame it has devastating ones for the rest of us.
Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate
