Someone's Ridiculous

Chatham House report concludes that "The root failure (of Blair's foreign policy) has been the inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice -- military, political and financial -- that the United Kingdom has made" and that "Tony Blair has learned the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little."

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett calls this "ridiculously wrong" but, obviously, it's perfectly true. It's particularly sad because, as I've said before, Blair was really near the top of the pyramid in terms of people whose combination of objective authority and apparent credibility were key to persuading people to back the war. Obviously, neither Blair nor Colin Powell could have actually prevented the war, were Bush sufficiently determined to launch it, but without their backing it would have been a much more politically problematic enterprise.

Comments

I would say the root failure is that Blair made these sacrifices without any assurance that he would get anything in return. What an idiot. He's supposed to be the prime minister of Great Britain, not Bush's flunkie.

Posted by Jim W | December 19, 2006 10:51 AM

The trouble for Blair, as for Colin, started when they were asked to lie.

One would have thought that the lies, which underlay the case for war, combined with the determined lack of planning, would have been alarm bells in the night for these guys.

But, evidently not. Colin still doesn't admit that he lied to the Security Council. But, Blair's case is even worse. He actively participated in ginning up a false case for war -- actually drove a good man to suicide! -- and still did not recognize the implications.

I admit I am, personally, an idealist. But, I am not naive. I recognize that Blair and Powell rose in a world, where lying is a routine means to realize personal ambition. But, I would have thought both men were also both respectful of the idealism, and, at the core, ruthless realists, who would recognize that the machine of war cannot be run reliably on illusion. I would have thought that, if the public lies did not stop them, then the lack of realistic planning in private, would have.

Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, after all; surely, he realized that planning was critical? And, Blair -- honestly, what was he thinking?

Posted by Bruce Wilder | December 19, 2006 12:20 PM

As far as I can tell by listening often to Tony Blair, he is pleased as punch with having attacked and occupied Iraq and would do it all again in a flash. The guy has the intelligence and ethical sense of a snail, though I like snails.

Posted by Jennifer | December 19, 2006 12:30 PM

The idea that there is secretly a decent Tony Blair who was led against his judgement to Iraq is nonsense. Tony Blair was a prime war-monger and still is. Colin Powell, the loyalist, is a little less responsible for the disaster Iraq but still responsible.

Posted by Jennifer | December 19, 2006 12:32 PM

I can see this being true in the case of pundits, even less establishment ones like our generous hosts here, but did Tony Blair convince any significant number of American voters? Or any other leaders around the world?

I second Jennifer, as well. Is there any evidence Blair didn't get exactly what he wanted?

Posted by witless chum | December 19, 2006 1:11 PM

I third Jennifer. Is there any evidence that Blair's decision was part of some quid pro quo, for which he was supposed to get something back from Bush? That Blair sacrificed something for Bush?

Posted by Al | December 19, 2006 1:39 PM

I've read accounts, although I'm not sure how accurate they are, which said that Blair went along with Bush because he thought it was important for the UK to stand along the US even if he didn't agree with how it was done.
So, I do think there is some evidence that he sacrificed something for Bush.

Its hard to imagine a more humiliating way to end your political career than being George Bush's poodle.

Posted by Jim W | December 19, 2006 1:49 PM

I've never seen the faintest sliver of evidence that Tony Blair is not a true believer in the neocon worldview, the apocalyptic threat from Islamofascism, the whole nine yards. However, that doesn't mean he agreed from the get-go that invading Iraq was the best way to address the issue.

Posted by Steve | December 19, 2006 1:55 PM

Another point about Blair's current opinions, as well as those of many neocons, is this: they staked their reputation and possible their positive self-regard on supporting the Iraq war. Even though the evidence is overwhelming that they were wrong, it is hard for many of them to face up to it.

I would bet that if many of these people did not have a personal stake in the whole thing, in terms of how it reflects on their judgement, they wouldn't still be true believers in the whole neocon fantasy. I'm talking about you, Krauthammer.

Posted by Jim W | December 19, 2006 2:02 PM

Well, in one sense, I think that Blair was doing what any British Prime Minister would have done in his place. Being "America's Ally" has been a longstanding bipartisan foreign policy tradition in Britain, and Blair may have felt he had certain obligations to uphold. That may have been what drove his strong support of Clinton's Kosovo policy.

But beyond that, there was something about Blair that sort of disturbed me way back in '97, when he moved into Number 10. You could see that he was just a little too awed by all the power and the powerful. I think it's a certain shallowness that causes him to enthusiastically and uncritically embrace whatever the zeitgeist is at the moment. Mid-'90s: "The Third Way!" Post-9/11: "We Must Confront Islamofascism!"

I say this while recognizing that Blair does, in fact, have a pretty good domestic economic record at home in a number of respects, and has moved the British political debate quite a ways away from Thatcherism. But God knows the man has his flaws.

Posted by Chris | December 19, 2006 2:12 PM

I'd say that I've read some evidence that Blair's quid-pro-quo was that Bush would work hard on the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

I think what happened is that Bush gave it a shot and the Israeli lobby crushed him. And he never came back to give it another shot. He, Bush, wasn't really convinced.

Now Blair is giving it all, he says, at the close of his term. But it won't be enough.

If he had gotten what he dealt for, I think it would have been worth it.

Posted by Robert Hume | December 19, 2006 3:34 PM

Saying that no one could have prevented the war strikes me as being a lot like saying Bush could never have prevented 9/11. It's comforting and agreed-upon because pondering the alternative -- that they could have, and should have, done something to prevent this -- is just too awful and depressing. Certainly an objective examination of the facts doesn't really support either conclusion.

Bush was able to get his war because he had the media, the people, and the Congress on his side, even though he didn't have the facts on his side, and wasn't acting in good faith. To a large degree, each of the sides of that triangle (people, Congress, media) depended on the others. If there hadn't been an overwhelming chorus of people we considered trustworthy, supporting the war, maybe the lack of facts and the bad faith would actually have been examined... and maybe Bush would have had to stick to his actual words and treat war as a last resort, rather than a foregone conclusion.

It's all good and well to say that Bush had his mind made up and he was going to find a way to do it, no matter what. But you can say that about any number of things he's had to flip-flop on ("we've never been 'stay the course'", for example) since he lost all his political capital. Given what we've seen from him in the last two years, I find it incredibly hard to believe that he would have gone forward with a war if the people had been against him at the time. And they would have been, if a critical mass of the "trustworthy" voices had told the truth at the time.

So I don't buy the notion that neither Powell nor Blair could have prevented the war. Whether either one of them alone could have stopped it is unclear. But both of them together, applying pressure in the right places and saying the right things to the right people, almost certainly could have.

Posted by Charley | December 19, 2006 7:27 PM

"Being America's ally" wasn't the reason Blair supported either Clinton in Kosovo or Bush in Iraq. In fact, it was Blair that convinced Clinton to intervene in Kosovo. Blair, more than any other political figure, is the architect of the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention," the idea that the wealthy and well-armed liberal states have a moral obligation to override national sovereignty and use armed force in cases of genocide or some other humanitarian disaster. You could say that both Clinton and Bush are Blair's poodles, really.

Blair also sent British troops into Sierra Leone in the late 90s to honour a treaty the UK had signed guaranteeing British defence of the former colony. In that case, diamond-trade militias were overrunning the country and the Brits had to be sent in.

And it's not as if the UK has supported the US on every foreign policy question since the end of the Second World War. Labour prime minister Harold Wilson refused LBJ's request to send British troops to Vietnam, and the Brits were pretty well pissed off when some special-relationship Reaganites tried to tilt America favour towards Argentina during teh Falklands War. And then there was the matter of Reagan invading Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth, without consulting Mrs. Thatcher.

Posted by MortimerPeacock | December 19, 2006 10:08 PM