Should we trust Blair's judgement on the Middle East? © Chatham House.
We can be the prisoners of our mistakes, especially if we do not learn from them; but when we do learn from them we can be their beneficiaries. Which do we most tend to be? No doubt we all wish the latter. We console ourselves that to err is human, and that, as George Bernard Shaw once remarked, it is better to make mistakes than to do nothing.
Shaw’s point does not hold without exception; it depends on the nature of the mistake. Inadvertently leaning on the button that fires the nuclear missile is not preferable to having stayed in bed that day. Some mistakes teach lessons that come too late to apply.
In the larger spheres of life—politics and government, international affairs—it is less easy to regard mistakes as learning opportunities for the perpetrators. If government ministers start a war, get economic policy 90 degrees wrong, attempt reforms in healthcare, education or the armed forces in ways that turn out to make things vastly worse, we are naturally reluctant to entrust them with big responsibilities again. That is part of what elections are for.
Recently, Tony Blair made an outspoken speech about the dangers posed to global stability by militant forms of political Islam. Among those who think that he made a calamitous mistake in going to war in the Middle East are those who think his judgement should never again be relied on. A man who takes a nation to war on such a questionable basis does not deserve to be listened to.
Are they right? It depends. There are different factors at work in the matter of mistakes, even calamitous ones. At one end of the scale there is incompetence, at the other there is bad luck. In between there might be one or more of inexperience; unforeseen circumstances; pressures of various kinds; an assortment of motives some of which have the effect of clouding the vision or distorting the judgement. Can one conclude that someone is permanently untrustworthy because of a mistake unless one has looked at the circumstances of its making?
Compare it with how we think about people who have served a prison sentence. We say they have paid their debt, and we hope that they will be reformed by the experience, or at least disincentivised against repeating it. Can someone never recover from being the perpetrator of a mistake? In fact, is there not a presumption that—unless sheer incapacity is to blame—the perpetrator is less rather than more likely to repeat it?
If we never forgive and excuse, never allow second chances, we are not only being very harsh, we are losing the opportunity to benefit from what someone might have learned. If mistakes pave the road to insight, if mistakes are better tutors than always (and sometimes by accident) getting things right, then not giving second chances is a lost opportunity.
On the other hand, there is the question of risk. A perpetrator of a mistake has a known negative record. Is it not rational to act accordingly, by withholding trust? To do otherwise is to allow hope to triumph over experience (as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages). In relatively inconsequential things this might not matter too much. But in affairs of state? Of war and peace?
In Blair’s case one might be inclined to think that his experience, both negative and positive, and what he has seen and done since, might give him an entitlement to be heard. He is not asking to be Prime Minister again, so the case is not quite parallel to mistrusting a mistake-perpetrator with a second go at the same thing. On the contrary: you might think that the views he holds now on aspects of the sequel to his earlier actions are all the more worth noting, precisely for that reason.
If we turn inwards and reflect on our own mistakes and the fallibilities that prompt them, we are sure to hope that we will be allowed second and even third chances; that we will meet with generosity when we err. It has been said that the saddest of all words are “it’s too late.” Not wishing to hear them said to oneself is a reason for being diffident about saying them to others. For after all, as the great Cicero pointed out: not every mistake is a foolish one.
