London
IF A DILEMMA HAD more than two horns, Tony Blair would be impaled on all of them. He has to please his electorate, but only 15 percent agree with him that if a war is necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein, war it will be (with or without a new U.N. resolution). He has to please his European allies, but they are dead set against aligning themselves with America. He has to spend an enormous amount of time and energy on foreign affairs, although voters are calling for him to pay more attention to domestic matters. He has to retain his grip on his Labour party, but increasing numbers of its members favor peace at almost any price.
All of which will make this week’s meeting with President Bush–a “council of war,” as the British press puts it–of crucial importance to Blair’s political standing at home, and to his ability to continue to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with America, as he puts it, in the war on terror.
There can be no mistaking the prime minister’s determination to stand with us. In the face of mounting anti-Americanism at home, he called more than 100 of his ambassadors and high commissioners to London to tell them, “We are the ally of the U.S. not because they are powerful, but because we share their values.” Last week, in what can only be described as a bravura, two-and-a-half hour appearance before 28 chairmen of parliamentary committees, he added, “I don’t think it is actually particularly in the British character to think–well, let’s go to the back of the line and hide away.” Great stuff; almost Churchillian.
Blair knows enough history to remember Churchill’s fate–turned out of office less than three months after victory in the European phase of World War II. And that of Anthony Eden, who was turned out of No. 10 by his own party after mounting an unsuccessful war against another Middle Eastern despot, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, in an attempt to retake the Suez Canal. He knows, too, that his parliamentary party includes a substantial number ofAmerica-haters.
So include Blair’s profile among those whose courage deserves our admiration. Robust pro-Americanism just isn’t the route to popularity with Britain’s chattering and political classes these days. Neither is a willingness to send troops into harm’s way in support of an American attack on Iraq. Blair has campaigned to rally support for his position, causing the left-wing Guardian to snort, “Persuading people of the need for war is almost his full-time job. He is like John Wesley, touring the land, speaking to whomever will harken. . . . But unlike a preacher, he hears few ‘Hosannas!'”
True enough. While 85 percent of Brits oppose the use of force unless there is a further U.N. resolution, Dr. Rowan Williams, the new archbishop of Canterbury, probably won’t be persuaded even by a new resolution: He signed a declaration calling war against Iraq “illegal and immoral.” And 69 percent of local Labour party chairmen say they expect members to leave the party if Britain goes to war.
There is worse. Leaders of the opposition Tories, a party that until now could be counted on to support Blair’s backing of America, tell me that their backbenchers are restless, and want to distance themselves from the prime minister’s position on Iraq. Douglas (now Lord) Hurd, who served as foreign secretary under Margaret Thatcher, has added his name to the “voices against war.” Hurd lends Tory respectability to Labour peaceniks.
To the resistance from the clergy and within his own party, and to waning support from the Tories, add the prime minister’s problems with his European friends. It is important to keep in mind that one of Blair’s greatest ambitions is to be “at the heart of Europe.” He believes that by its standoffishness, Britain has squandered opportunities to influence the direction of the European Union. He is firmly convinced that his ability to win a place in history as a great prime minister depends on ending the British attitude best summarized in that old joke, “Fog in channel; continent cut off.”
So it causes this prime minister great pain that his support for America has created a rift not only with many in his party and with the clergy (Blair is deeply religious), but with his European colleagues. Just last week, the French warned him that they might veto any Anglo-American-inspired resolution that held Saddam to be in material breach of U.N. resolutions. Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, called military action a “dead end” and told his British counterpart, Jack Straw, that the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq means Saddam’s weapons programs are “largely blocked or even frozen.”
Germany, with no veto power to use as a club, said it would never participate in an attack on Iraq. Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister, predicted that war will have “disastrous consequences for long-term regional stability.” This, of course, is the logical extension of the anti-Americanism that was a key plank in the reelection platform of his boss, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, struggling to survive in the face of double-digit unemployment and a completely moribund economy. It seems that anti-Americanism is the last refuge of beleaguered European politicians, Tony Blair being the honorable exception.
Opposition from the French and Germans might not matter too much to President Bush, who reacted with ill-concealed annoyance to French and German opposition in the U.N. and to their blocking of any decision by NATO to prepare support for our military build-up in the Gulf. But it is a lot harder for the British prime minister than for the American president to fly in the face of European opposition. He knows that he is jeopardizing his cherished dream of putting Britain at the heart of Europe by taking a stance that is not only different from that of most other European countries, but–worse still–aligns him with the American hegemon whose worldwide power and cultural influence so riles the E.U.
Blair also knows that if the French go through with their threat to veto a new resolution, and if he nevertheless joins the United States in attacking Iraq, he will be going against the will of most of Britain’s voters. Not to worry, he says in private, he will do the right thing. Blair is haunted by the thought that, had he been able to persuade the United States and Europe to move more rapidly in Kosovo, thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–of lives might have been spared. And he takes comfort from the fact that in the end the slaughter was brought to an end by NATO forces acting without the authority of any U.N. resolution.
Equally important, the prime minister’s advisers are reminding him that once British forces are in action, the British people rally round the flag and their prime minister. Important figures in the Labour party insisted to me a few days ago that the only reason Margaret Thatcher won reelection after her first term in office was her successful conduct of the Falklands War.
UNTIL A WAR STARTS, though, Blair will remain a prime minister scratching for support at home. And not only because of his insistence on standing with America on the question of Iraq. He has lost popularity and credibility because he and his Labour colleagues have failed to deliver on many of their campaign promises. London is now a far more dangerous city than is New York, in part because Blair’s chancellor has told judges not to mete out jail terms to convicted burglars for first and second offenses. Illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers, some now found to be active in terror rings, are entering in numbers that the government is unable to control, to the consternation of taxpayers who end up footing the bill for the housing and other welfare benefits they receive. The National Health Service is a shambles, a 20 percent increase in funding having produced only a 1 percent rise in the number of cases handled, no surprise since the number of administrators among its over-one-million workers exceeds the number of hospital beds. The firemen are on strike, seeking a 40 percent wage increase, forcing Blair to assign troops to cover for the absent firefighters; many of these soldiers and airmen would otherwise already be on their way to the Middle East.
To add to Blair’s woes, his decision to commit fully one quarter of Britain’s army to the Gulf took even his supporters by surprise; most people guessed that he would send only a token force, as a low-risk show of support for America. The bad news is that the 30,000 troops are paying the price for the priorities of Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown. In order to satisfy the appetites of the public service unions, Brown shortchanged the military. Only last week was the Ministry of Defence able to place “surge orders” for 30,000 desert-worthy boots (standard-issue boots are so unsuitable for desert war that many soldiers have bought their own) and 90,000 pairs of lightweight trousers.
Britain is counting on its tank units to make the most significant contribution to any joint effort. Iraqi Soviet-era T72s are no match for Britain’s Challenger 2s, operated by the 7th Armoured Brigade, the famous “Desert Rats” who bested Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps in World War II, driving the Nazis out of Africa. In one of those strange quirks of history, the Brits have been honing their skills on the Bergen-Hohne training grounds, adjoining the old Belsen concentration camp, the same grounds Rommel used to train his men. Unfortunately, Germany’s fields aren’t the Iraqi desert, and the Challenger 2s, designed to hold back a Russian advance across Europe, tended during maneuvers in the Middle East to stall when clogged with sand. Blair has been told by his military advisers that the “desertification” filters being added to the tanks while they are en route to Kuwait will cure the problem. He hopes that they are right, and that they are not the same people who equipped his forces with the frequently malfunctioning SA80A2 rifle and near-obsolete Clansman radio equipment.
NOT THAT ALL IS A MESS. Brits take pride in the fact that their troops will be better fed than their American comrades. Our guys rely on MREs–meals ready to eat–that are close to fast food. British soldiers will have a variety of rations, which they often spice up with “their own stocks of curry powder, chillies and herbs to add flavour to the Lancashire hotpot or chicken pasta . . . that would cost . . . a handsome sum if served on bone China in St James’s,” according to the Times. And they are proud of the fact that while “U.S. ships and units are drier than a minibar in a Riyadh hotel,” their soldiers and sailors will have rations ranging from “Boddington’s [bitters] for the poor bloody infantry to Bombay gin for the most senior members of the Service.” The class system lives, and thrives, even in the desert.
Meanwhile, the recent discovery that terror networks have used and are using “Londonistan” as their base has been a mixed blessing for Blair. Illegal immigrants, many of them North Africans trained in the civil war in Algeria, circulate freely, using local mosques as their headquarters. But so wedded is the U.K. to preserving warm relations with its Muslims that when the police last week raided the infamous Finsbury mosque and found weapons, false passports, and other paraphernalia of terror rings, police officers wore paper shields over their shoes so as not to offend religious sensibilities.
And so wedded to the letter of Europe’s Human Rights Act are Britain’s courts that they have refused to deport to Afghanistan a Taliban fighter who fled to the U.K. after fighting against British and American forces, on the grounds that he might be prosecuted if returned home! The French are less fastidious in these matters, and have simply “derogated”–i.e., declared inoperative–the relevant clause of the Human Rights Act, enabling them to ship suspected terrorists back to their home countries.
The internal threat does allow Blair to point to a clear and present danger at home, and to warn that a terror attack is “inevitable,” making it in Britain’s vital interest to disarm Saddam so that his weapons of mass destruction do not find their way into the hands of the Muslim fanatics so active here. But it also raises questions as to his government’s ability to cope with homemade terrorism, and allows Blair’s critics to charge that his devotion to disarming Iraq is diverting attention from the more urgent task of homeland security.
All of which means that President Bush must recognize that Tony Blair circa January 2003 is in a somewhat different position from Tony Blair circa September 2001. He is weaker at home, and has far less support for his policy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with America. Bush should also understand that the memory of Suez will be the ghost at the banquet this week at Camp David. Blair knows that once a war starts, America will call the shots, and if things go wrong it is he as well as Bush who will pay the price. Responsibility without power is never attractive for a national leader, but that will be Blair’s lot when the shooting starts.
It would certainly be helpful to an ally who is risking a great deal if the president were to find a way to emphasize that Blair’s loyalty has enabled the prime minister to influence in a major way the making and execution of policy. It could be helpful if Blair were to come home from Washington looking less like an American poodle and more like a British lion.
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of regulatory studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
