Whither Tony Blair?
by Patrick Seale  
Gordon Brown, Britain’s new Prime Minister, has a first task of repairing the damage caused by the Iraq war. As well, predecessor Tony Blair is likely to devote his energies to the Middle East -- perhaps in an attempt to repair damage to his own, much battered, reputation. Neither man faces an easy task.

The problem for Gordon Brown is that the damage from the Iraq war is so extensive that it will take years, perhaps decades, to repair.

 

The problem for Tony Blair is two-fold: First, his pro-American and pro-Israeli record is such that few Arabs will trust him, certainly not the radicals.

Secondly, the job he's to be given as the Quartet’s envoy to the Middle East is strictly limited. The United States, Israel, and even the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, do not want him to play a political role, because this might encroach on their own interests and activities. They do not want him to get involved in negotiating a final settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The U.S. wants to remain in control of the peace process, while Israel wants no other external interference.

 

Blair’s restricted brief is to help the Palestinian Authority develop honest and effective government institutions -- no doubt with the aim of making it an acceptable partner for Israel. This means he will be working closely with President Mahmud Abbas and Prime Minister Muhammad Fayyad on the West Bank, who are already being showered with funds and international political support.


It remains to be seen whether Blair will spend much time -- indeed any time at all -- helping Hamas in Gaza, which, like the United States and Israel, he persists in demonizing as a terrorist organization. This will be the real test for Tony Blair. If he boycotts Hamas, his mission is doomed. If, on the contrary, he establishes contact with Hamas and attempts to persuade the European Union and other donors to channels funds and political encouragement to it, he will anger Washington and its Israeli ally, and will soon be out of a job.


Blair comes to the job with considerable negative baggage. The Iraq war, for which he was an eloquent advocate, has been a strategic, political, economic and moral disaster. The cost to the United States has been very great in men, treasure and authority; the cost to Britain somewhat less but nevertheless considerable.


Iraq has been smashed as a unitary state and is now in the grip of a grisly fratricidal conflict. It is no longer able to play its traditional role as the guardian of the eastern frontier of the Arab world. The regional balance of power has been overturned in favour of Iran, which has emerged as a major actor with wide regional ambitions. The possibility of nuclear proliferation has increased sharply.


In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and wounded and millions have fled or been driven from their homes. The damage to property and infrastructure is so vast as to incalculable. The release of sectarian demons threatens to wreak havoc in neighbouring countries. Anti-Western feeling is rampant, while Al-Qaida has acquired a territorial base with ominous extensions throughout the region.


Having suffered malign neglect at the hands of the Bush administration, the Arab-Israeli conflict now seems further from a peaceful resolution than at any time in the past forty years. It does not look as if Blair, in his new restricted role, will be able to give the peace process the decisive push it desperately needs.


Blair has contributed to dividing the Middle East into two hostile camps -- on the one side the United States, the UK and Israel, together with some tame Arabs like Jordan and Egypt; on the other side the Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah-Hamas axis. The contest between these two camps is tearing the region apart.


One might add that, by siding with the United States in Iraq, Blair has exposed Britain to terrorist attack, and has sharpened divisions in British society between Muslims and non-Muslims. Hostility towards immigrants from Pakistan, in particular, has increased significantly.


This is by no means an exhaustive list of the damage Tony Blair and his senior partner, George W. Bush, have inflicted on the Middle East.


The tragedy of Tony Blair is that, although well-intentioned, he was unable to follow his instincts or indulge his preferences. Largely because of Britain’s strategic dependence on the United States, he was driven to adopt policies which, in his heart, he knew were of doubtful wisdom. He has himself admitted that the decision to join the war in Iraq was a difficult one. It has involved him in a whole series of flagrant contradictions.


• When he first came to power in 1997, he declared that he would pursue an ethical foreign policy. Unfortunately, he has not kept his promise. His policy has been marred by scandals and, even worse, by lies. He knew that the evidence was flimsy concerning Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, but he nevertheless hyped the threat from Iraq to persuade the British public of the case for war. Showing great good sense, the public was not convinced.


• Blair was a passionate advocate of liberal or humanitarian intervention -- that is to say the need and the duty of Western democracies to intervene, if necessary by military force, in countries where tyrannical regimes were inflicting intolerable and criminal hardship on their populations. The principle is laudable. But the disaster of the Iraq war has discredited the very notion of such intervention.


• Blair has always been a passionate pro-European, vowing that he wanted to place Britain at the heart of Europe. His family holidays were spent in Europe. He took the trouble to speak passable French. But his quarrel over the war with Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Shroeder, the French and German leaders, split Europe down the middle, dealing a fatal blow to attempts to forge a common European security and defence policy.


He wanted to be the bridge between Europe and the United States spanning the Atlantic. In the event, he sided with the U.S. and the bridge collapsed.


• The most tragic aspect of Blair’s pro-American policy was that Bush never rewarded him. He became Bush’s spokesman -- defending the Iraq war with more eloquence than the tongue-tied Bush could ever match and joining America’s ill-starred Global War on Terror -- and he got little or nothing in return. He hoped and expected to be able to influence Bush on such issues as the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he discovered, too late, that Israel and its American friends, inside and outside the Bush administration, were more influential than he could hope to be.


• The Arab-Israeli issue was, in fact, where the contradiction in Blair’s stance was at its most flagrant. He was passionate about the need to resolve the festering Palestine questions -- he said a thousand times over that he was 100 per cent in favour of an independent and viable Palestinian state -- but, in waging war on Iraq, he allied himself with Washington’s neo-cons, who backed Israel’s land-grab on the West Bank and were totally opposed to any expression of Palestinian nationalism.


Can Tony Blair resolve these contradictions in his new job? It must be doubted. Although he often expresses himself in high-flown moralistic terms -- and is a devout Christian about to convert to Catholicism under the influence of his wife, Cherie -- he is, above all, a pragmatist, well aware of the facts of life which govern Britain’s relationship with the United States.


Britain is involved in world-wide intelligence gathering with the United States. It purchases Trident ballistic missiles from the U.S. for its nuclear submarines. It is committed to the Joint Strike Fighter, an advanced next generation combat aircraft, which relies on secret American technology.


These are only some of the highlights of an intimate strategic relationship with the U.S. that constrains the foreign policy of any British prime minister -- as Tony Blair discovered to his cost -- and as Gordon Brown will, in turn, have to recognize.




Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.


Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale


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Released: 27 June 2007
Word Count: 1,331
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Advisory Release: 27 June 2007
Word Count: 1,331
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com  
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