Lost in the desert

Why did Tony Blair, who reinvigorated Britain's Labor Party and became Bill Clinton's best friend in Europe, allow himself to get Bushwhacked in Iraq?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Feb 20, 2004 | In a recent article in Dissent magazine, Paul Berman -- the quixotic American intellectual and self-defined leftist who has loudly supported the Bush war in Iraq -- proclaims that he is not in fact alone. His views are shared, he writes, by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "who is a socialist, sort of."

One might uncharitably argue that this is just more evidence that Berman has snapped the tether. Or, to be more specific, that he has drunk so much of Paul Wolfowitz's Kool-Aid he's starting to hallucinate. (He goes on to explain that Saddam Hussein is indeed connected to al-Qaida, and that the secret link between them is, more or less, Adolf Hitler.) But the "sort of" suggests that Berman is trying to be funny. He's too smart not to understand this as a sort of macabre political joke. It's like observing that George W. Bush belongs to the party of Abraham Lincoln -- it possesses a certain technical or historical correctness, without actually meaning anything.

If the beleaguered Tony Blair might be flabbergasted to be described as a socialist at this late stage, it's better than some of the other things he's been called lately. This Clintonesque warrior of the center, an Oxford-educated lawyer who breathed new life into the moribund Labor Party and presided over a British mini-Renaissance at the end of the '90s, wound up loyally following George W. Bush into Baghdad, and may have scuttled his impressive political career along the way. In the vernacular of the ever-vicious Fleet Street press, Blair has become Bush's "poodle."

Blair's government has been exonerated, at least officially, of the charge that it "sexed up" intelligence documents regarding Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. But the fact remains that the British intelligence dossier of September 2002 that was used to argue that war was necessary -- and was heavily relied upon by Bush and Colin Powell -- was profoundly flawed, and was presented in what may generously be described as a distorted and misleading fashion. The charge that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger was almost certainly false (and would have been insignificant had it been true). The headline-making allegation that Saddam could have biological or chemical weapons ready to launch in 45 minutes referred only to battlefield tactical weapons, not to missiles aimed at Israel or the West, a distinction Blair now says he never understood. (And as far as anyone can tell now, that one wasn't true either.)

Blair's masters in Washington, counting on the ever-distractable nature of the American voter ("You're such a cute baby! Now look over here -- ooh, what a scary gay marriage!"), are pretending they never said anything about WMDs. But Blair has remained out there by himself, shivering in the wind, pathologically unable to let go of all the misinterpreted and half-baked evidence that paved the way for George and Tony's not-so-excellent Iraq adventure.

Some point of pride is clearly involved: Rather than apologizing or prevaricating, Blair keeps insisting that he was right all along and that the truth will come out, even as scandal after scandal -- a plagiarized Ph.D. dissertation, a scientist dead in the woods, evidence of Anglo-American spying at the United Nations -- crashes over his government.

Yet Blair's former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned from his Cabinet position to protest the Iraq war decision, suggests that the prime minister is not being honest about his own beliefs. In the most damaging passage of his extraordinary memoir "The Point of Departure" (a book that should be read by anyone interested in the global fortunes of the electoral left), Cook writes that he told Blair, on March 5, 2003, that "Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use." Blair made no effort to contradict him. "What was clear from this conversation," Cook writes, "was that he did not believe it himself."

What is clear from Cook's book, and from Philip Stephens' fascinating new Blair biography aimed at American readers, is that Blair has compelled himself to believe he did the right thing in Iraq, and did it for the right reasons. If he is misleading the world, and perhaps even himself, about what he knew and when he knew it, it's because he needs to think of himself as an independent-minded liberal interventionist driven by "a melding of strategic calculation and moral fervor," in Stephens' phrase, rather than, say, a spineless transatlantic toady who got steamrollered by the neocons in Washington. (In much the same way, Paul Berman needs to see himself as the last noble leftist fighting global fascism, rather than, say, a lonely crank who believes that no one understands the world except him and Christopher Hitchens.)

Using the standard British synecdoche for the prime minister's office (located in the 18th century townhouse at 10 Downing Street in London), Cook writes, "Number 10 believed in the [September 2002] intelligence because they desperately wanted it to be true. Their sin was not one of bad faith but of evangelical certainty." That certainty has characterized Tony Blair's entire career. It catapulted him to the leadership of the rudderless Labor Party, drove him to remake it in his own image and brought him, in 1997, to the doorstep of Downing Street. It tied him first to Bill Clinton and then to George W. Bush. Now it might be his undoing.

Recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Britons believe Blair lied to them about the reasons for war, and half think he should resign. For the first time in Blair's seven years in office, the battered Conservative Party is back in a semi-competitive position; it may mount a credible challenge by the next general election (in 2005 or 2006). It's undoubtedly too soon to write Blair's political epitaph, but public trust in his government has been chewed to splinters, and any further scandal could lead his own party to depose him. His Iraq escapade drew open opposition from 139 Labor members of Parliament (about one-third of the total), but the de facto dissent was much higher than that, and dissatisfaction at the Labor grass-roots is widespread. For a politician until recently seen as an untouchable golden boy, who seemed likely to be one of the longest-serving prime ministers in modern British history, the fall has been dizzying.

Cook and Stephens (who is an editor at the Financial Times) have both known Blair for years, and the portraits they paint of this ambitious and accomplished politician are generally consistent. Both seem to admire and respect him, almost despite their better judgment. Both believe that his impressive domestic accomplishments have been all but obliterated by the Iraq debacle, and that Blair has become so estranged from the core supporters of his own party that his political legacy is problematic at best.

Both authors agree that the roots of Blair's current predicament lie in the contradictions of his personal and political character. Inevitably, though, his crisis also results from the tenuous position occupied by any British prime minister of the post-World War II era, poised uneasily between America and Europe. Faced with a confrontation between Bush on one side and the U.N., Europe and the overwhelming weight of world opinion on the other, Blair bet everything on his ability to defuse the conflict and find common ground. (Compromise and an almost miraculous ability to enfold opposing points of view, after all, have been the hallmarks of his political style.)

Needless to say, there was no common ground to be found between Dick Cheney and Jacques Chirac (except for the fact that both, it seems, dislike Blair intensely). When the United States and Britain failed to win a U.N. resolution authorizing war last March, Blair was left with no way out. In the "special relationship" between the two Atlantic allies tied together by blood, history and language, it's always been clear who's the daddy and who's the punk.

In his brisk and judicious "Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader," Stephens argues that the prime minister saw himself as a crucial member of the Bush coalition, a rational multilateralist who could counterbalance the cowboy recklessness of Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. In this account, Blair held out hope until late in the process that Saddam might capitulate to the U.N. in a manner that would satisfy the Americans and avert war; Blair says he told Bush they had to be prepared "to take yes for an answer." But Blair deluded himself, Stephens writes, about the amount of influence he actually possessed, and violated two cardinal rules of politics: "Never take risks when someone else determines the outcome, and avoid responsibility when power resides elsewhere." (That actually sounds like two ways of stating the same rule, but never mind.)

In Cook's wide-ranging, humble, funny and wise memoir -- if only we lived in the alternate universe where this urbane Scottish leftist, and not his sanctimonious former boss, was a "world leader"! -- he agrees with this analysis, but only up to a point. In the same March 2003 conversation mentioned above, Cook writes, Blair defended his role by saying, "Left to himself, Bush would have gone to war in January. No, not January, but back in September."

But Cook's entire book -- which comes, after all, from an insider -- is underpinned by his more cynical perception that Blair always knew how all this would end. Bush and his cronies had made up their minds, and the British government would do as it was told. The role of the eloquent Oxonian was to be the coming war's friendly face, and to make it look as much as possible like a noble cause supported by a genuine multinational coalition. In Cabinet meetings, Cook writes, "Tony made no attempt to pretend that what Hans Blix might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion." In other words, contrary to everything Blair ever said in public, the U.N. inspections of late 2002 and early 2003 were strictly for show.

Cook believes it never occurred to Blair that a prime minister who dared to defy a warmongering U.S. president -- as Harold Wilson did in the late 1960s by refusing to send British troops to Vietnam -- would be viewed as a hero at home, in Europe and around the world. As always, his thinking was both moral and strategic. No one disputes Blair's conviction that the world would be a better place without Saddam Hussein's regime. His credentials as a humanitarian interventionist, unlike George W. Bush's, are genuine. A few years earlier, Blair was perhaps the principal architect of NATO's war against Slobodan Milosevic, gradually coaxing Bill Clinton into the sustained bombing campaign -- and the threatened ground invasion -- that finally forced the Serbian leader to yield.

But unlike Stephens, Cook does not think Blair was primarily motivated by a grand global purpose in Iraq. The real mortar in the improbable alliance between Blair and Bush, to use his metaphor, is political power. "It is a fixed pole of Tony Blair's view of Britain's place in the world that we must be the No. 1 ally of the U.S.," he writes. "I am certain that the real reason he went to war was that he found it easier to resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the U.S. President."

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