Geoffrey Wheatcroft's op-ed in today's New York Times is a
pretty fair summary of how Blair got us into the Iraq war
single-handedly. I see that the author is writing from Bath. M'mm . . . .
I'm glad to see he's succeeded in getting his stuff accepted. I can think
of another Bath writer who hasn't been quite so successful with the NYT
editor!
Keith Hudson
<<<<
HOW BLAIR LOST BY WINNING
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
BATH, England
On BBC radio the other morning, there was a poignant moment when the
Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman was talking about the war in Iraq.
"It bothers me that people in Britain don't see it as people in
America see it," he said. "We did a beautiful thing."
He is quite right in supposing that most people here don't see that. The
trans-Atlantic gulf has grown wider since the invasion of Iraq,
regardless of what Prime Minister Tony Blair likes to think. And now,
with Mr. Blair's popularity at an all-time low, his temporary political
success on Iraq looks ever more like a self-inflicted wound.
As he said at his Labor Party conference last week, he is "more
battered" although also "stronger within" than at any
point of his six years in office. His hold on power is still tenacious,
and reports of his political death are exaggerated, thanks not least to
what remains an unelectable Tory Party. And yet his credibility had been
badly damaged, with his approval ratings plummeting even before the
weekend brought him more bad news.
First came the report from David Kay's Iraq Survey Group. Like the White
House, Downing Street tries to pretend that Mr. Kay vindicated the
decision for war. But while the report shows that Saddam Hussein had the
capacity to make chemical and biological weapons, and would have liked
atomic weapons as well (all of which we knew already), it also makes
clear that he did not have any such weapons available last
spring.
This fact was embarrassingly confirmed by the second bit of bad news.
Robin Cook, who served as Mr. Blair's foreign secretary from 1997 to 2001
but resigned from the government in March over the war, now says that the
prime minister told him two weeks before fighting began that Saddam
Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction ready for
use.
Because of Mr. Blair's tendency to say different things to different
audiences, some of us suspected that America should not necessarily count
on him in the event of war. In that, we failed to foresee the truly
remarkable way in which he would lead his country into a war it didn't
want.
Perhaps we overlooked the warning signs. It is, after all, nine years ago
this month that Mr. Blair took over a party he never pretended to like,
and he has since treated his colleagues with a disdain that is almost
impressive. After he became prime minister in 1997, one pressing decision
was the future of the Millennium Dome in London, a black edifice that
looked like a white elephant. We now know that almost the whole cabinet
wanted to scrap it. But Tony Blair takes after the college head who,
according to Oxford legend, said after a vote in a college meeting had
gone 22-1 against him, "I see we have deadlock." He prevailed,
and the dome went ahead (to prove, as feared, an expensive
fiasco).
That was a trivial matter compared with Iraq, where the prime minister
waged war against the wishes of most British people, and apparently of
most Labor members of Parliament and most cabinet ministers. Well under
half of voters here supported the war beforehand. Once British soldiers
were under fire (sometimes Iraqi fire, sometimes American) that figure of
course rose sharply, but it has now fallen back to where it was in the
spring.
Although Mr. Blair won his Iraq vote in the House of Commons by
browbeating and cajolery, few imagine that there was a majority of Labor
members who truly wanted the war. It seems unlikely that there was even
an sincere majority inside the cabinet.
Even though Jack Straw, Mr. Cook's successor at the Foreign Office,
didn't resign, we have since learned that while he was prepared to give
the Americans a friendly cheer from the bleachers, he too privately
opposed the use of British troops. So did many other ministers, but they
decided to swallow their principles and, as David Lloyd George once put
it, to perish with their drawn salaries in their hands.
And yet for all the prime minister's political skills, and the way he
overwhelms party and cabinet, and for all that his conduct may seem
formidable in its sheer stubbornness, he cannot control events or dictate
public opinion. Not only has the past year seen a drying up of the great
well of sympathy for America that followed Sept. 11, but Mr. Blair's
highly personal policy of unconditional support for Washington has turned
sour.
"I ask just one thing," Mr. Blair said about Iraq. "Attack
my decision but at least understand why I took it and why I would take
the same decision again." This sounded brave and sincere, except
that his alleged "why I took it" is not the true one. When he
speaks about receiving intelligence "not just about Iraq but about
the whole murky trade in" weapons of mass destruction, it has become
painfully clear that this simply wasn't his real motive.
Someone who saw through this was Hugo Young, the longtime columnist for
The Guardian, who died last month. Mr. Young was a man of very high
principle, who despite all he had seen retained a capacity to be shocked
by political mendacity. He was also a liberal centrist with much fondness
for America, if not for the Bush administration.
Shortly before his death (when Tony Blair, needless to say, fulsomely
joined in the tributes to Mr. Young's career), and maybe with an urgent
sense of mortality, Mr. Young wrote a series of devastating columns. He
put his finger on "the great overarching fact about the war that
Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny." This was that
"he was committed to war months before he said he
was."
He was committed because he had persuaded himself though not the British
people of the necessity of following the United States, come what may.
Mr. Blair even elucidated this (albeit only in private, as reliably
recorded by the journalist Peter Stothard) "It would be more
damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone
defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do
so."
And so what he insistently calls "my decision" was, in truth,
made for him in Washington. After that, it was simply a matter of finding
what the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, has called
"bureaucratic reasons" for war. And on that count, Mr. Blair
performed a very useful service for President Bush.
When the Cuba correspondent in cables back to the newspaper that he could
"send you prose poems" about the scenery but that "there
is no war," Charles Foster Kane replies, "you provide the prose
poems I'll provide the war." That, in effect, was the deal between
George Bush and Tony Blair.
And provide them Mr. Blair duly did, even if some of the prose rhapsodies
particularly those about 45-minute missile deployment and exotic minerals
out of Africa were just a little too fanciful. Now even the prime
minister must begin to see the perverse consequences of this far from a
greater closeness between the two countries, there is now a palpable
estrangement.
Although no cleverer or nicer than the Americans, the British are perhaps
more literal-minded, with an innate distaste for being misled. More and
more they sense that they were taken into war on false pretenses. And,
no, they do not think that this was such a beautiful thing.
New York Times -- 8 October 2003
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include ``The Randlords'' and ``The
Controversy of Zion.''
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
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- Re: [Futurework] Blair lost by winning Ray Evans Harrell
- Re: [Futurework] Blair lost by winning wbward
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