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Blair talks big on Iraq, but Washington calls the shots Hawks in America have set the prime minister his biggest test Hugo Young On the Middle East and Iraq, Tony
Blair sometimes makes himself sound like the man in charge of western policy. He
did it again yesterday. It's the tone he adopted after his weekend with
President Bush. Calling the shots and making the promises could be regarded as
the necessary licence we need to give our national leader. He must be seen to be
in control, especially by a fiercely worried swath of Labour MPs. But it would
be a serious mistake to believe that, when it matters, Mr Blair will be the one
to decide what he now seems to pretend is within his power. His zone of decision
will be different.
There was a time when his voice really mattered. Maybe that's the memory that
causes him to speak as though he has some control over what happens next in
Iraq. In the Kosovo end-game, he secured great influence both in private and in
public. His famous Chicago speech in April 1999, setting out a moral case for
intervention, became the text that helped to carry American opinion. His private
nagging swayed Bill Clinton to commit to a position that many domestic forces
had told him he should not take.
The Blair line on intervention has hardly changed. He set it out again, with
a few cautionary refinements, in the weekend speech in Texas. He believes in
interdependence but also in the duty of righteous states, if necessary without a
broad consensus, to root out global evils. He talks about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction as a suit able case for treatment, but insists that "we" will not
act precipitately. He announced that there would be no early decision. His
briefers laid out the nuances and reservations he would apply to any suggestion
of an all-out attack. He touched on the UN perspective, while rejecting the need
for a new security council resolution. This "we" of whom he spoke implied not
just community but equality with his Texas friend.
That's not entirely fiction. Community is developing. Mr Bush needs Mr Blair
alongside, and one of his officials has been quoted saying that Mr Blair's
support would be a precondition for an attack on Saddam Hussein. They had some
hours of conversation at Crawford, partly one to one. The Blair persuasive
powers, formidable in his own mind, had time enough to work their effect, no
doubt in the direction of complicating a policy stance that Mr Bush would like
to keep simple.
But if decisions are not precipitate, that will be Bush's doing, not Blair's.
Nuance and reservation will eventually be smashed aside, if the determination is
made in Washington to set in motion the regime-change in Baghdad that many
voices are demanding. It's hard to find anyone in the American capital who does
not confirm this as a settled objective of the Bush administration, or pretends
it will not be attempted by force. That is now becoming the orthodoxy which the
Blair analysis helps uncritically to establish as something that "we" accept. A
benign imperial intervention is being prepared, subject only to its timing.
There are, however, some things we do not all agree about. A judgment uniting
all European countries is that, in the hierarchy of dangers, Israel/Palestine
takes paramount place. The prime minister told the Commons that this has become
a confluence of tragedies which, for once, makes crisis an understatement. It
rages out of control hour by hour, under the hand of two leaders who now think
no further than violence and destruction. Even Secretary Powell has been obliged
to approach it crabwise, dodging from one advance haven to another, lest his
arrival in Israel be marked by more humiliating evidence of the indifference
both Sharon and Arafat seem prepared to show to mighty Washington.
To European powers it is elementary that Israel/Palestine take precedence
over a widening of the campaign against terror and weapons of mass destruction.
The British foreign policy and defence establishment, let alone the French and
German, look with horror on the notion of throwing more petrol on the Middle
East inferno by advancing against Saddam Hussein before some kind of acceptable
peace has settled over Israel. In their nightmares the US attacks Baghdad while
Israel still occupies the West Bank. They see current events as postponing
indefinitely the showdown with Saddam.
But this isn't everyone's order of priorities. To militant anti-Saddam
elements around the Pentagon and the US Senate, there can be no Middle East
peace until Saddam is disposed of. They would not allow intransigence on the
West Bank to delay the attack on Baghdad for which many are engaged in making
detailed plans. One can see their political reasoning. If you wait for an
Israel-Palestine settlement, they say, you may wait for years. Iraq, by
contrast, presents the opportunity for a winnable, visible, perhaps
uncomplicated war, in which victory would have seismic repercussions that
finally gave Israel protection, and ushered in, as part of the shakedown, a more
malleable generation of Palestinian leadership.
That is close to the policy that Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative party
leader, evidently favours. Not long ago he published a pamphlet making an
extensive case for the forceful eviction of Saddam. He has often argued for
unconditional support of any policy the US adopts, whether bombing Baghdad or
deploying missile defence. Take that in combination with the bias of his Commons
statement yesterday, and you find a card-carrying spokesman for the ideology of
the Pentagon hard right. At a time when the best that outsiders can offer by way
of a Middle East policy are pious banalities, these should at least be
even-handed. Mr Duncan Smith, instead, chose to deliver a shockingly one-sided
defence of Israel to the near-exclusion of the Palestinians.
Mr Blair was better than that. His moral repugnance for Saddam Hussein
doesn't overcome his common sense in seeing the dangers of an escalation in Arab
rage on behalf of the people of Gaza and the West Bank. He finds the right words
for the unspeakable vileness of the suicide bomber. He plainly sees the folly of
an attack on Baghdad without a coalition to support it, and knows this coalition
will not be forthcoming if the Israeli boot is still seen on the Palestinian
throat. His own party coalition, if nothing else, demands that nothing
precipitate is done. His MPs pressed good and honest questions yesterday. They
reflect an anxiety that spreads beyond Labour. Mr Blair must know he could yet
face much the most dangerous political conflict of his leadership.
His problem is how little he controls that. He talks a big game at present.
He's intensely engaged, as he should be. We must hope his influence is as great
as he pretends. But Washington is a sectarian capital, controlled by politicians
unaccustomed to cultivating allies, and peopled by determined thinkers who see
the hour of Saddam's extermination at hand. Washington alone will decide when to
act. Mr Blair's only decision will be whether or not to go along. Place your
bets.
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