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Blair lied
Many Americans who know little about either Britain or Tony Blair have uncritically hailed both for their support during both the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns. Nelson Ascher examines the way in which Blair’s intervention may have set back the War on Terror and ultimately cause GWB his presidency.

BLAIR’S MISTAKES
By Nelson Ascher

The aftermath of the Iraqi war is one of the strangest phenomena I’ve ever witnessed.

Even among the antiwar crowd, one will be hard put do find, besides the usual suspects from the lunatic fringe, anyone who would have a nice word to say about Saddam’s regime and its history or murder, torture, genocide and external aggression. Everything points to the fact that even his Arab and/or Muslims neighbors, with the exception of Syria, are relieved that he and his regime are gone.

But the antiwar left, having failed and been proven wrong in all its apocalyptic predicitions, hasn’t given the battle up. Its members are still trying to win their Iraqi war, and nowhere as much as in the UK.

In spite of my admiration for him, an admiration that has been much reinforced by seeing him defend his position like a lion in the House of Commons, I blame Tony Blair for all this mess.

Why?

I cannot prove it, but here’s my hypothesis.

Blair was directly responsible for all that UN circus surrounding the inspections and then the war. Though he seems to be as self-assured a leader as one could find, conscious, maybe somewhat over-conscious, of the power of his charisma, the truth seems to be that he is a deeply divided man.

He may once have felt that his partnership with president Clinton was a match made in heaven. Surely heaven is not the place where his current partnership with Bush has been forged. We have to go back more than half a century, not to Churchill/Roosevelt, but actually to Churchill/Stalin to find, below an artificially harmonious surface, such an uneasy alliance of opposite temperaments and projects as the present one.

I’d bet that, ever since 911, a considerable part of Blair’s thought was dedicated to finding out a way of avoiding any kind of American “overreaction”. Unlike opportunist foxes like Chirac or Schroeder, the trouble with Blair is that he likely believed in his own nice words, that is, he was sincerely in favor of international institutions, the UN, the EU and all the trans-nationalist stuff, not because all this advanced his, his party’s or Britain’s interests, but, well, because he believed that was good for the future of mankind.

He clearly saw that 911 meant or could mean the death of all those nice semi-utopian hopes of the 90s. But it seems that, even then, he could not give up on them. And he heroically chose to try and tame the proverbial post-911 American “bull-in-a-china-shop”, to see how much of what had been built throughout the 90s he would be able to save. While the French and the Germans played to the tune of their own naked, short-term and possibly misguided “realpolitik” and self-interest, Blair tried to remain the idealist, putting his very job in the line in an effort to preserve both a Western block and an “international architecture of rules and institutions” that were, at best, optical illusions.

And he did all this while keeping himself surrounded by a whole bunch of unreliable people, from Robin Cook to Clare Short, people whose goals were evidently at odds with his own.
Says something about Tony the man that he couldn't figure out what a backstabber Cook is, and what a backstabber+lunatic Short is.
Now, immediately after 911 Don Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq. It is easy to see he was right and how many troubles would have been avoided if he had had his way. We also know that, after occupying Baghdad in a couple of weeks, the US army would have found it as easy as it did to defeat the Taliban, and both things could possibly have been done before the end of 2001.
He's wrong there. It took us six months to get our ducks in a row in the build-up to liberate Iraq. If Don had started the mobilization on 9/12 H-hour wouldn't have been til sometime the next spring.
If so, why was Iraq delayed? My theory here is simple: because of an anti-Rumsfeld agreement between Blair and Powell. Blair may have told Bush something to this effect: “It’s either Afghanistan first with me, or Iraq first without me.” An inexperienced Bush didn’t yet know, as did the much more experienced Rumsfeld, about the dangers of allowing the so-called “international community” and particularly Old Europe to have a say in America’s agenda. I do understand him: he faced something completely new for which he wasn’t really prepared and must have been deeply divided between the advice of the “aggressive” Rumsfeld and the “prudent” Powell. Blair must have tipped the scales in Powell’s favor. The fact that Powell seems to have managed to twist Pakistan’s Musharraff’s arm in the days immediately after the attacks may well have given him part of the credit he needed to direct American priorities early in the War on Terror.

As it happens, Blair’s position was more delicate than anybody imagined. While the American population on the one hand, and the Old European peoples on the other were all solidly behind their respective governments, Britain was and continues to be deeply divided between the Europhiles and the Atlanticists. Blair attempted what was basically impossible: to get the Europhiles in the Atlanticist boat, but they, possibly with the full backing of Old Europe, did, and are still doing, their best to destabilize the Blair government.

Thus, Britain became the US war effort’s “heel of Achilles”. The antiwar left scored an important victory because it succeeded in alienating even more the British population from America. It is at least arguable that, had the UK remained far from the hostilities, a larger part of its people would be now supporting the US.

Blair’s problems come from the fact that he actually lied. He didn’t, in the end, send his troops to Iraq because of WMDs, nor did he do it to advance the geopolitical re-organization of the Middle East and to defeat the Islamists decisively. He did it to save a world order that was mainly erected during the 90s, to save the UN, to save the EU (and to place Britain at its heart, as he himself often repeats), in short, to save things, agreements, institutions and ideals the innocence and purity of which he is probably the only world leader to have believed in.
Blair and Bush had the same problem: trying to explain a compelling but complex set of reasons for ridding the world of Saddam in the space of a 30 second sound bite. They both chose WMD, and it's hurting both of them.
He failed in this and, helping to misdirect energies that were needed for the WoT, he may also have seriously damaged the whole war effort, playing eventually into the hands of the enemies of mankind. His indecisiveness may yet cost him his position and Bush’s too.

Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-02-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=27105