By opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest mistake of his political life.
Shakespear would say: to be or not to be (a donkey)
Will Hutton argues that, by opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest mistake of his political life, one from which he cannot recover. Blair's drawn face, with its deepening gullies set in a near permanent hard frown, tells the story. This is the internationalist who is aiding and abetting, however unintentionally, the break-up of the UN system. The pro-European who is the trigger of the most acute divisions in the European Union since its foundation. The wannabe progressive whose closest allies are Washington's neo-conservatives and conservative leaders in Italy and Spain. Worse, he is fighting a barely legitimate war that is already a military and diplomatic quagmire, where even eventual victory may not avert a political disaster.
| Huh huh! He said "quagmire"! |
He knows his capacity to survive the diplomatic humiliations piled on him by the Bush administration is limited; you cannot long lead Britain's centre and centre-left from such a compromised position, wounding not only the country's profoundest interests but torching any linkage with the progressive project. For the first time his premiership is genuinely at risk.
Serves right
It is a political tragedy, Shakespearean in the cruelty of its denouement. 9/11 accelerated trends in America that had been crystallising since the 1970s and which made the political structures in which successive British Governments have managed simultaneously to play both the American and European cards unsustainable. Blair was confronted with an invidious choice that nobody in the British establishment has wanted to make: Europe or America. Side with Europe to insist that the price of collaboration in the fight against terrorism had to be that the US observe genuinely multilateral international due process — and certainly say No to some of Washington's wilder aims. Or side with America insisting from the inside that it engaged in its wars multilaterally, and hope to bring Europe along in your wake.
Either choice was beset with risk, but it's hard to believe that siding with Europe, for all its evident difficulties, would have produced an outcome worse than the situation in which we currently find ourselves: a protracted war with no second UN Resolution, no commitment to UN governance of post-war Iraq, no commitment to a mid-East peace settlement. But Blair misread the character of American conservatism, its grip on the American body politic and its scope for rationality. He continues to do so, the miscalculation of his life. Rumsfeld's exploded strategy is ideological in its roots. This conservatism is a witches brew — a menace to the USA and the world alike.
The Observer Anti American???
So what else is new? The Observer is usually anti-American, and it's true that Blair was pushed into a position, not through events of his own making, where he had to make the choice between the U.S. or Europe. He made the U.S. choice. As the write says, both choices were chock full of risks — the choice he made got him into war with Iraq. Had he made the choice to go with the EU, the same war would have taken place in Iraq — Rumsfeld said we didn't need Britain, even though we wanted them. Had Blair joined with France, Germany, and Belgium he'd be locked in the same position of looking (and being) ineffectual and obstructionist they are at the moment.
The writer makes the assumption that Bush and Blair are wrong, just as he makes the assumption that conservatism is a Bad Thing — a "witches brew — a menace to the USA and the world alike." Many of us don't think so. And many of us think that we'll be proved correct in our belief. |
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