David Aaronovitch’s piece in The Times today based on his interviews with the former Prime Minister and his associates for his The Blair Years series on the BBC is fascinating. Once again Blair reiterates that he did Iraq because he believed that it was the right thing to do. His concluding remarks, though, are grim:
There will be lots of people who will not take kindly to being told this by Blair but it is one of the key points in this struggle. Bin Laden’s own statements show how much the US withdrawal from Somalia following the Black Hawk down incident convinced him in his belief that the West was essentially weak.“The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”
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