One can only be impressed at the scale of the man’s delusion: on the weekend, Tony Blair issued a manifesto nearly 3000 words long calling not merely for a new intervention in Iraq but for intervention in Syria — and indeed more widely in the Middle East.

Blair insists we need “a plan for the Middle East and for dealing with the extremism world-wide that comes out of it”. His one-time press secretary, Alastair Campbell, even tweeted the link, bringing an enjoyably 2002 feel to things — can a sexed-up intelligence dossier be far away?

The essay is part desperate attempt to salvage Blair’s own shattered reputation and part rallying cry for neoconservatives to revive the project of Western intervention in the Middle East.

Blair asserts that the collapse of Iraq is nothing to do with the illegal war that he and George W. Bush orchestrated — at best he will allow that the invasion exacerbated ethnic tensions in that country, something neither the British nor the Americans evidently considered before using confected claims about weapons of mass destruction to remove Saddam Hussein.

This call for a repetition of the Iraq debacle coincides with increasing pressure in the UK for the long-delayed release of the Chilcott Inquiry report into the circumstances that led the UK into Iraq under Blair. The British, at least, have undertaken a serious process of examining the disaster that was the Iraq War and why the UK participated. It is a process that Australia has never undertaken — despite Labor’s commendable and public opposition to our participation.

Thus we find ourselves once again debating intervention in Iraq, when Australians haven’t even been told the truth about why we joined that intervention a decade ago.