Tony Blair's simple solutions to complex problems

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week addressed a gathering in London and spoke about Iraq, the Islamic State group - and what steps should be taken next.

In what was perhaps the closest he has come to an admission of failure - or indeed an apology - for his decision to go to war in 2003, he told the audience gathered by Prospect Magazine: "We underestimated profoundly the forces that were at work in the region and that would take advantage of the change once you topple the regime.

"That's the lesson. The lesson is not actually complicated, the lesson is simple - it's that, its that when you remove the dictatorship, out come these forces of destabilisation, whether its al-Qaeda on the Sunni side or Iran and its militia on the other side."

While the erstwhile peace envoy's statement may make for a digestible soundbite on the current conflict, it is in fact yet another oversimplification of the situation.

For starters, Blair still fails to gauge the complexity of the region that he helped push into further peril when speaks about the current conflict in terms of "sides". 

Al-Qaeda has certainly re-emerged into the daylight in the form of the Nusra Front in Syria, but neither the rise of the IS group, nor even the presence of Iranian-backed militias, can be explained by a paradigm of two sides fighting each other to death.

The IS group did not exist before Blair and Bush's invasion of Iraq, and their presence is due to much more than the simple toppling of a dictator, or a sectarian taking of sides.

Given that the group recruits a wide range of supporters - from religiously illiterate European fighters who purchase copies of Islam for Dummies prior to boarding their flights, to bitter relics of the deposed secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, Blair's characterising the conflict as one of "sides" explains his equally inadequate solutions.

The former PM insisted to his British audience that the IS group must be tackled, because it "will come and attack us here", further proposing that "there is no way of defeating these people, without defeating them on the ground".

Although a military defeat of the IS group through local forces is certainly a necessity, the group's acts of violence in Paris and Belgium have shown that this is not simply a war for territory, but also one that requires defeating their ideology of hate and its contributing factors.