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Pity, I've been sending your stuff out to my
family but they don't want to hear it either. No one like's
Cassandra Keith but you are right on this one.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 7:27
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Blair lost by
winning
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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