Peace comes dropping slow, as William Butler Yeats recorded, but it vanishes in an eyeblink. In Iraq, the province of Anbar has been overrun by al-Qaeda fighters. In Afghanistan, the Taliban stand ready to reclaim Helmand province when our forces withdraw this year. The road to war, in the case of both combats, ran straight through Downing Street, then under the occupancy of Tony Blair. These were Britain’s wars, paid for in British blood and treasure, and their failures call into question what our future role in an increasingly unstable world will be.

It seems hard, in the first days of 2014, to imagine the sugar rush of Blairite omnipotence, when neither facts, nor truth nor logic ever much impeded a rush to battle. If Afghanistan was, as Lord Ashdown has claimed, a “textbook” example of how to lose a war, Iraq remains the template of a conflict that should never have been embarked upon.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/10555899/Britain-cannot-afford-to-be-the-friendless-pariah-of-Europe.html