Paul Thomas: Blair puts on riveting act

The heavy hitters are back on the box. There's a new series of House, the medical drama featuring the zany, manipulative, drug-addicted, emotionally and physically crippled genius played by the actor who was even more convincing as a slack-jawed imbecile in Blackadder.

And last night Jack Bauer, now a granddaddy, reluctantly embarked on another frenetic 24 hours during which, one feels reasonably confident, he will be betrayed by someone close to him, attempt to sacrifice himself to save his daughter and then again for the greater good, stumble on a conspiracy at the heart of the US Government, lecture the President on the folly of making deals with terrorists, and foil a plot involving weapons of mass destruction.

Even so, the most riveting television I've seen recently was Tony Blair's appearance before the Iraq War inquiry.

There was no shortage of the wisdom of hindsight when the former Prime Minister fronted the committee of privy councillors to explain how and why he got Britain into the war.

Much of their questioning seemed based on the premise that a leader's overriding responsibility is to be irreproachable, and he should somehow order events and circumstances to procure enough time and information to ensure that.

Blair's sub-text was that leaders have to make decisions in time frames that are often not of their choosing, amid circumstances beyond their control, and based on the information available at the time. One kept expecting him to preface an answer with, "Meanwhile, back in the real world ..."

There was an interesting aside when Blair sought to explain the near-impossibility of obtaining meaningful information from scientists working on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes because if they agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq, away from their secret police minders, their families would be killed.

He was interrupted by Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, who dismissed it as merely "an indication of the difficulties of dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Blair, who seemed anxious not to antagonise, let it go. He could have responded, "Actually, Sir Lawrence, it was an indication of the difficulty of getting a first-hand, eyewitness take on what every major Western intelligence agency and many Arab governments were telling us: that Saddam had WMDs."

Hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars down the track, with the US still in Iraq and suicide bombers still active, the emerging consensus is that without that level of verification the US and Britain had no legal or moral justification for going to war.

But post 9/11 Blair was clearly driven by an absolute determination not to go down in history as the man who nit-picked and prevaricated while the worst-case scenario - technology transfer from a WMD-armed rogue state to a terror network with global reach - was unfolding.

He - and George W. Bush and, most vocally, former Vice-President Dick Cheney - see their vindication in the fact that a terrorist attack involving WMDs hasn't occurred.

But whatever the findings of the inquiry, the verdict of history will probably be that Saddam had little if any capability or intention of sponsoring such an attack, and that the Iraq War was an absurdly costly and destructive way of forestalling such an unlikely eventuality. It's often said that if and when democratic societies resort to curtailing their freedoms in order to combat terrorism, the terrorists will have won.

Seventy-six-year-old Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka thinks differently.

This week he told the American website The Daily Beast that the West's devotion to free speech and freedom of religion is actually part of the problem.

Soyinka pointed out that countryman Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be underpants bomber, was radicalised in England rather than Nigeria: "England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims.

"Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly, but this is illogic because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence."

On the other hand, he agrees with those who have long argued that the sentence of death, complete with multi-million dollar reward, imposed on novelist Salman Rushdie was a turning point: the West's passivity when confronted with this chilling assault on freedom of expression validated the Ayatollah Khomeini's assertion of a totalitarian fundamentalism not interested in co-existing with other belief systems.

"It all began when [Khomeini] assumed the power of life and death over a writer," said Soyinka.

"This was a watershed between doctrinaire aggression and physical aggression.

"The assumption of power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential Muslim in the world, as if someone had given them a new stature.

"Al Qaeda is the descendant of this phenomenon."