Lindsay Tanner’s exposé on Tony Blair’s legacy (‘Chariots of Fire’, April 2011) and his assessment of the primary issue that has tarnished it – Iraq –nevertheless seeks to exonerate Blair from what proved ultimately to be a futile and misguided war. (Not to mention the very significant number of Iraqi and servicemen’s lives lost.)

That Blair may have had a genuine belief that he was doing the right thing – and in this respect his propensity towards Messianism and religious righteousness was clearly compatible with the simplistic, evangelical justifications for going to war emanating from the US administration at the time – is not reason enough to justify or condone his actions, or the tragedy that ensued.

Blair’s stance on the war should also not be regarded as more morally upright than the corresponding position of his French and German counterparts, whom Tanner describes as having succumbed to “cheap popularity”. While it may be hard to conceive when seeing things from an Australian perspective, where the majority of the population was initially favourable to Howard’s stance on the war and swept up in the rhetoric of the “war of the willing”, the vast majority of the planet nevertheless remained adamantly against any military intervention. Anyone who saw Dominique de Villepin’s (the former French foreign affairs minister) speech at the UN Security Council denouncing such intervention, or Joschka Fischer’s (his German counterpart’s) heated repudiation of Donald Rumsfeld’s clarion call to war, will have come to a similar conclusion as to the sincerity of their convictions.

While I am sceptical of defending someone who sincerely believed and continues to believe in the indefensible, I have even less sympathy for Lindsay Tanner’s attempt to bring down to the same level those people who, quite courageously, thought and fought against going to war.

Stéphane Levinson

Paris, France