Engage with the Middle East? Surely Blair means 'bomb'?

Tony Blair's recent speech was packed with darkly flexible terminology. Perhaps he is owed an 'intervention' of his own

Have you ever experienced a painful engagement? There you are, betrothed to your beloved, but something goes wrong and it is broken off in tears and recriminations. Tony Blair knows how you feel, and wants you to know he knows. In his speech last week, the Middle East envoy for the Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia) described the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he helped to start as "painful engagements".

No doubt they were painful for the victims, but the pain of those maimed and killed was not Blair's focus. These "engagements" were "painful", he meant, for the perpetrators, who were sensitive enough to feel bad while raining death down on thousands from halfway around the world. It is a matter of regret that these "engagements" in Iraq and Afghanistan have been "painful", said Blair, because now "public opinion in the UK and elsewhere resents the notion that we should engage with the politics of the Middle East and beyond".

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