Tony Blair

FILE – In this April 8, 2013 file photo, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair speaks at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. Blair said the West’s failure to intervene in Syria is to blame for the violent insurgency in neighboring Iraq ? not the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. In an essay issued Sunday June 15, 2014, Blair called for Western countries to intervene in Syria, though he did not specify how. He wrote that extremists “have to be countered hard” wherever they are fighting. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)