LIKE many people – would “most” be an exaggeration? – I have never felt overcome with admiration for Tony Blair’s efforts as Special Envoy to the Middle East, the role he was given when he left Downing Street in 2007.

His mission to bring peace to the region is on behalf of the so-called Quartet Group, the unusual alliance of the UN, the US, the EU and Russia. He’s unpaid, and it’s probably unfair to criticise his base in a luxury penthouse in an area of Jerusalem dubbed Millionaires’ Row. He can’t be expected to operate from a hut amid a war-ravaged part of the region.

But God, or Allah, knows, there are plenty of those. And that’s the point. There seems scarcely a grain of evidence of success by Mr Blair. The region is in greater turmoil than ever. Long simmering, the cauldron is coming to the boil, with worryingly unpredictable consequences.

Was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that joint enterprise by Tony Blair and George Bush, a catastrophic mistake? Did it create a vacuum now filled with the Islam extremists ambitious enough to be aiming to establish a radical Islamist state across both Iraq and Syria, and beyond?

One wonders, initially, where these new jihadist warriors, an expanding army, get their weapons from. Have they some secret underground facility? Obviously not. So who equips them? Do they do it for nothing?

If not, how do the jihadists pay? Whatever, obtaining instruments of death never seems a problem.

But back to Tony Blair. Denying any responsibility for today’s crisis he nevertheless observes: “The biggest single lesson out of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere is once you lift the lid off these very repressive regimes, out come pouring these tribal, ethnic and particularly religious influences… a fresh set of problems begin.”

This is an astonishing admission. It means that Mr Blair sent British troops into Iraq in the naive belief that the removal of Saddam Hussein would be followed with relative ease by the creation of a Westernstyle democracy. This ignored the fact that Iraq, like Syria, was a manufactured state, cobbled together by the victors of the First World War, on lines always thought to hold the seeds of conflict. If Mr Blair and Mr Bush didn’t know this, there should have been plenty of people around to warn of the dangers.

Mr Blair’s history lesson cost the lives of 4,804 US and Coalition troops – 179 British – and an estimated 124,000 Iraqis. Now worse carnage is in prospect both there and in Syria. But Mr Blair is correct to say we can’t ignore it. For militant Islam has us in its sights, not just secular states in the Middle East.

NOT militant except with bat and ball, but none-the-less wanting prominently to declare his Muslim faith is England’s Test cricket debutant, Moheen Ali.

The Birmingham-born 27-year-old allrounder says his thick black beard symbolises his religion, and he sees himself “representing the Muslim faith.” I prefer to think of Moheen’s beard as a tribute to “The Great Cricketer” WG Grace: “Old WG, whose burly beard no more is seen, no more is feared,” as Herbert Farjeon finely wrote.