The punditry gushes forth re Tony Blair and his memoirs.

Here on the Right is Simon Heffer, quiet Ayn Rand fan and very conservative in all respects, liking Mr Blair (whom he knows) but being baffled by the poor writing:

It appears to be a book written in tune with all the most unpleasant and cynical marketing techniques of modern publishing. Its tenor is often pure Sylvie Krin. The gossip in it will amuse those who like such things – whether about Mr Blair’s liking a drink, his lusts for the late Diana, Princess of Wales, or the Queen’s being "haughty" (a somewhat off-colour observation for her former first minister to make, we should reflect) – but is hardly becoming of an elder statesman.

How much this is the result of an instruction from his publishers to provide something that will make money, and how much it is the product of Mr Blair’s own personality, one cannot be sure.

And on the Left, Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman who looks with some scorn at the Blair record on Iraq:

Six of the country’s top academic experts on Iraq and international security warned TB, in a face-to-face meeting in November 2002, that the consequences of an invasion could be catastrophic.

Cambridge University’s George Joffe, one of the six invited to Downing Street, got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".

… No, I just think you’re being dishonest, Tony. Seven years on from Iraq, nothing has changed.

One of the odd arguments against the Blair policy on Iraq is that it blames the West in general and Bush/Blair in particular for all the suffering caused by UN sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq before the invasion. The Hasan piece drones on in this sense:

No mention here of the sanctions on Iraq, imposed by the United Nations, and enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sanctions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, and were described by the former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, as a form of "genocide".

As even the Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council noted in March 1999: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of the war".

What is it with Leftists? They say they want multilateralism and non-violent pressure against unjust regimes which brutalise international law and attack their neighbours. In this case they got exactly that.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and the planet more or less united around the proposition that he should be thrown off the premises. With bizarre restraint the first President Bush did not used the US presence in Iraq after Saddam’s defeat to topple him.

Which meant that other measures were then needed to keep this madman under control. Including sanctions.

The whole point of sanctions is that they have bad effects. Admittedly the broader the sanctions, the worse the effects on ordinary people and the erosion of middle-class social stability. That, presumably, is again an intended market signal to the masses concerned to rise up and overthrow the regime provoking negative international reaction which is damaging their interests.

In practice odious regimes do well from sanctions and often even manage to blame the sanctioneers for the negative results, as happened in the Iraq case.

The core point is that if ordinary Iraqis suffered pain and deprivation from the sanctions regime, there was a simple answer.

Saddam could have agreed to step down to end the suffering of Iraq and its people, maybe negotiating some sort of immunity guarantees and/or safe passage to a state ready to host him. The international community thereupon could and would have helped Iraq supervise free and fair elections and so bring about a generously supported transition to reasonable modern pluralism.

That approach would have avoided all the misery and violence which happened.

That such misery and violence did in fact happen was squarely attributable not to Bush and Blair but to Saddam’s and his national socialist regime’s greedy desire to cling to power, no matter what.

Thus Leftish/progressive moaning about Blair’s policy on this point at least is trivially dishonest, if not wicked propaganda.

That said, I don’t think I’ll be buying this book. Mawkishly written, plus the fact that Blair left Brown and so many other misfits in key positions for so long showed that, basically, he put his wretched party’s interests (and his own) ahead of those of the UK. I have paid enough for his selfishness already.