Bush's Zombie Shuffles Off - International Social/Political

Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even Blair's greatest sycophants in the British media: Martin Kettle and Michael White (The Guardian), Andrew Rawnsley (Observer), Philip Stephens (FT) confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.

A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House. In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France. He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad. If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:

We realised the actual issue was about long-term access to oil.

Four years ago, I watched, with other young officers, the invasion of Iraq on TV in the mess. We were sick with envy. Our brother officers were having the most exciting time of their lives, at the centre of history, while we, on ceremonial duties in London, marched about in red tunics and bearskin hats.

The invasion, it seemed, was a necessary evil to be redeemed by the creation of a free, democratic Iraq. The WMD issue was a pretext, we all concurred, an honourable white lie to knock an evil dictator off his perch and breathe new hope into the lives of a brutally repressed people.

Our turn soon came, and the ground truth in Basra and Maysan provinces was a shock. The statue-toppling euphoria had been replaced by the horrific chaos of a state in collapse, exacerbated by a rising insurgency and sectarian bloodshed. The truth gradually emerged. The police and army we were training were corrupt and probably loyal to the insurgency. The first supposedly democratic elections for half a century were a façade, dependent on the presence of our Warrior fighting vehicles at polling stations.

Then we realised the issue was not replacing tyranny with democracy, but gaining long-term access to oil. Blair, in bowing to American oil-mad energy hunger, had deployed the British Army on a lie, a much bigger lie than the one about WMDs. Today, the appalling sectarian violence killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians every week is the direct result of our invasion and botched occupation. As Blair prepares to leave office, Iraq is descending into deeper human tragedy, and British troops are still dying.

Those in the forces who, like me, were frustrated and disillusioned after Iraq, took new optimism from British intervention in Afghanistan. It looked like being everything Iraq should have been: reconstructive nation-building to improve the lives of poverty-stricken Afghans.

Sadly, political ill-preparation and haste dropped the military, again, into lethally hot water. Last year, British forces were sent into volatile Helmand, ill-equipped and inadequately supported. Scattered across the north of the province (the size of Wales), small teams occupied "platoon houses" in remote towns.

I was in Sangin where, as in everywhere else, we had no means of starting developmental reconstruction and stood no chance of winning Afghan hearts and minds. To the locals, the presence of British soldiers seemed to presage destruction of their poppy crop and their livelihoods.

Helmand produces 40 per cent of Afghanistan's opium crop, the source of 90 per cent of global heroin. And the people there are tribesmen, infamous for their ferocious hostility to foreign interference. The savage backlash rages still; more than 50 British servicemen are dead in this sub-campaign, countless Afghan civilians have been killed, and opium production is at an all-time high.

The Taliban are thriving on this: every Afghan civilian killed by the British artillery round or helicopter gunship has a dozen brothers, cousins, and friends seeking British blood for vengeance. Today, our troops are risking their lives in a pointless conflict, a nightmare scenario of counter-insurgency gone wrong.

There is the mismatch between Blair's huge military ambition overseas and the scarce resources the forces get to fulfil it. The Army has lost four infantry battalions. Soldiers serving a fourth tour struggle to maintain relationships at home. Half the Navy's fleet is threatened with mothballing.

When you join the Army, you swear allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen and, by extension, the Prime Minister. We commit ourselves, with unquestioning loyalty, to the State. This is founded on trust in our political masters, and the belief that they are honourable people who will not lie to us, will resource us correctly and deploy us with sound judgement, after thorough strategic planning. This bond is unique, set in stone regardless of party politics. Today, this bond is broken. Catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan and years of resource-starvation have taken their toll; this is Blair's legacy.

Late last year, the head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannat, publicly called for our withdrawal from Iraq. Other senior officers voiced concern. Such public statements, unthinkable before Blair, are a glimpse of the military's anger and frustration.

Of those officers I sat with in the mess four years ago, many, like me, have left the Army. Those who remain have no trust in the Government. One told me: "We won't be fooled again."

Leo Docherty is author of 'Desert of Death: A Soldier's Journey from Iraq to Afghanistan', published by Faber and Faber

© 2007 The Independent

This past week marked 10 years since Tony Blair was elected prime minister of Britain and, as he freely admits, it is time to step down.

While there are many examples of high initial expectation and eventual disappointment in the world of politics, there are few to match for sheer drama the boom and bust ride that Britain has had with Tony Blair.

Blair's decline is because of one overriding error of judgement — the war in Iraq. But it may have also been the result of the very talent and technique that shot him to the top to begin with.

It is the stuff of tragedy, really. The Iraq war has contributed mightily to making the world a more dangerous place — something British intelligence warned of from the beginning — though Blair's intention has always been the opposite.

Hugo Young, the late Guardian columnist and one of the best British political writers of our time, caught the essence of Blair in September 2003 when he wrote: "This is a great tragic figure. Tony Blair had such potential. He was a strong leader, a visionary in his way, a figure surpassing all around him and on the continent. His rhetorical power was unsurpassed, as was the readiness of people to listen to him. He had their trust. He brought credibility back to the political art."

That was then. Ten years ago, most of Britain felt blessed to have the youthful, vigorous and modernizing Blair taking over from the tired Tories.

He was a unifying figure, a Labour leader who managed to suppress the class battles that had poisoned the Labour party for generations. His creation was New Labour, which reconciled the social safety net to individual enterprise.

But winning an election and rebranding his party was only half the battle. Blair also had to convince the public that Labour had changed. He needed a disciplined political party that would absolutely stay on message.

Seduction of the left

Blair and his people, notably media guru Peter Mandelson, were ruthless in shutting up the old left and putting down the raucous internal debates that Labour regulars cherished.

The lure was that Blair would return an obedient party and its members to power after 18 years of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

The price for the party? Centralized control, especially over communications. It was a formula that became a model for governments elsewhere, including Ottawa.

Blair's first term delivered big wins: A peace accord in Northern Ireland; devolution of political authority to Scotland and Wales; parliamentary reform, including the end of hereditary membership in the House of Lords; and, as the film The Queen depicts, reforging public confidence in the monarchy after the death of Diana.

In foreign affairs, as a soulmate of Bill Clinton, Blair won U.S. support for armed intervention in the Balkans against the self-evident aggression of Serbia and its Bosnian allies.

Easily the most popular politician in the European Union, the British PM could credibly speak for Europe to Americans even as his own public remained perversely Euro-sceptics.

Blair's world picture was enlightened and summed up in his 1999 Chicago speech on "liberal interventionism" in which he called for democracies to lead the way in defending democratic and humanitarian values wherever these were threatened or abused.

He and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, presided over a high-performance U.K. economy. It gave Blair the international credibility to promote a "Third Way" as an alliance between social democrats and liberals then in power in Germany, Italy and elsewhere, including Canada.

Having his cake

Blair addressed the Canadian Parliament in February 2001 to almost rapturous adulation from politicians and media alike. But the Chrétien-Blair relationship was underwhelming for the most part.

Blair was a bit too self-involved to connect easily to the understated Chrétien, even if his respect for Chrétien's acumen as a politician went up after the Liberal PM won his third majority.

But Canada was really only a glimmer in Blair's eye, which was otherwise fixed on the seductive and all-consuming relationship with the U.S.

That is a classic cause for the British political and military establishments. And Blair was constantly declaring he would not "choose" between Europe and America (only in Canada did he refer to "North America") but would have both.

The outcome, Hugo Young could sense even four years ago, was that Blair risked ending up with neither, by being so tied to a discredited U.S. presidency that he lost his influence in the EU.

What went wrong?

It was natural for Blair to have rushed to offer comfort and support to U.S. President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attack on America, which also killed many Britons. Blair feared that if isolated, the U.S. in its anger and its pain would strike out dangerously.

Of America's friends at the time, Blair was the most natural and most equipped to influence Washington toward a collective and rational response to the attacks. It was an opportunity, too, for the politically astute Blair to bond again with a new U.S. president in the enduring interests of British foreign policy.

Unfortunately, Blair became more influenced by Bush than vice versa.

In the summer of 2002, Blair concluded Bush was bent on regime change in Iraq and mobilized all his personal powers of self-conviction to convince himself he had to support the undertaking as well.

The inner case for invading Iraq may have welled up from what Young has called Blair's "terrifying faith in personal moral crusades," but the public case for going to war had to be made on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to international security.

Reservations about that ran rife through the British civil service. But by this point the modus operandi of the Blair government was top-down command and control, especially in communications.

Yes, prime minister

Blair is personally a very pleasant man but on important issues of policy has no taste for disagreement. He is extremely strong-willed and views the political and government structure as instruments to deploy his will.

Dissent was no way to get ahead in Whitehall in 2002, and among his political colleagues, he brooked no interference with his personal objectives, as ex-ministers Claire Short and the late Robin Cook were to discover.

Blair will maintain until his dying day that the accusation he doctored the public dossiers against Saddam, to alarm the public into supporting the war, is an outrageous assault on his integrity and that of the public service. But it's pretty clear he did fit his presentation of the intelligence to suit the case he believed he had to make.

In order to help Bush, Blair took on the role of propagandist for the war on Iraq, even to the point of making the unsubstantiated claim that Saddam had the ability to launch a WMD attack "within 45 minutes."

Defenders argue that his judgements were honest mistakes and misplaced emphases shared by many.

As for the botched occupation, who could have known that this U.S. administration would be so incompetent?

But Blair was in a better position to know than anyone else. British officials around him were professionals who could see the inexperience and low quality of those in the Washington bubble who were preparing the post-invasion plans. By then, however, Blair was losing his influence; the Brits had fast become the junior members on the U.S. team.

Stage left

For a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions, there has to be a fatal flaw. What is Blair's?

Well, to a large degree it is that he shares with Clinton an over-confidence in his personal, persuasive skills, a belief that he can in the end convince anybody of anything. While in most ways he is a very conservative and pragmatic person, he becomes a risk-taker when his moral dimension clicks into sync with his theatrical talent and suppresses his normal caution.

He confided once that he paid "a high political price for George Bush," but that price only hardened his resolve as the stakes increased. Taking Britain to war was an accident waiting to happen.

Sadly, the damage from the Iraq fiasco is vast. Blair maintains that history will vindicate the decisions he made, but this is whistling in the dark.

Blair's departure occurs as new players move onto the world stage. Effective multilateralism is what Blair always believed in and about which he spoke more eloquently than anyone.

But at a critical time, he felt he had to set this quest aside to get his slice of American power. He judged that if he had argued against invading Iraq, he wouldn't succeed and the greater danger would be that America would go it alone.

No one will deny Tony Blair has been a greatly talented leader, taller than his peers in so many respects. But he risks being remembered for having misjudged the greatest issue he faced.

Copyright © CBC 2007

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