Oil, imperialism and "hypocrisy"

Among the hundreds of thousands protesting in London, most saw Bush and Blair as a bigger threat than dictator Saddam Hussein.

By David Akerman

Feb 16, 2003 | A slow, dense river of bodies flowed north from Blackfriars Bridge; another snaked its way south through Bloomsbury. They met at Piccadilly Circus. For four hours a tidal swell of placards, banners and flags flooded past the Ritz Hotel, DeBeers diamond showrooms and the Royal Academy towards the rally in Hyde Park. A million people, at least, and the organizers claim near 2 million. Clearly it was Britain's biggest political rally ever -- on this, everyone agrees.

In the park, the star speakers blasted high-octane rhetoric: Tony Blair is "the devil's chaplain" (the singer Ms. Dynamite); "American barbarism will destroy the world" (the playwright Harold Pinter); "carpet-bombing will not bring democracy to Iraq. Do we want this done in our name?" (Bianca Jagger); "No!" bellowed the crowd.

This issue is hot and getting hotter. The antiwar movement in Britain has been gathering momentum for months. Yesterday it found its voice. Whether or not to launch a war to disarm Iraq -- and possibly rid the world of Saddam Hussein -- threatens the leadership of Tony Blair like nothing else has since his election six years ago.

His long, sun-bathed political honeymoon is over now. Blair finds himself perilously short of goodwill and reliable allies. He faces major battles in Europe, at the United Nations, in NATO, perhaps above all among disaffected activists of his own "New" (for which read Clintonian Third Way) Labour Party. Only hours before yesterday's march, Blair assured a party audience in Scotland: "I do not seek unpopularity as some kind of badge of honor. But sometimes it is the price of leadership, the cost of conviction." Increasingly Tony Blair's spokesmen are speaking gravely of the prime minister's "moral certitude."

In these febrile times Churchillian metaphors and allusions are flowing like the old bulldog's famous brandy. The editorial pages of Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times sing a hymn of praise and say this may be Blair's "finest hour"; the leading antiwar tabloid, the Daily Mirror, characterizes it as (you guessed it) Blair's "darkest hour."

True, there are so many ways this could end fatally for Blair. Yet, though largely unacknowledged, there are also ways it may end well for him, better than most people here even dimly conceive. Certainly that's true for the million-plus marchers who tramped the streets of London yesterday in biting winds, good humor and high spirits.

I began a cycling tour of the long march at the Euston Road, a broad east-west arterial route bounding the northern limits of the city's West End (the theatres, shops, bars and club district). Pedaling sedately down Hampstead Road on my approach to the slow-moving serpent writhing east and west, I was assailed by a rising cloud of fragile bubbles -- the kind of bubbles kids love to blow. I dismounted as two tall, slim girls in woolly hats passed by bearing aloft a Pythonesque placard with a picture of Tony Blair -- frowning, but his eyes ablaze and wearing a teacup as a hat; across his chest he's clutching a heavy-duty military rifle. The caption reads: "Make tea, not war."

A police helicopter circles overhead and the piercing shriek of pee-whistles blown in dotted rhythms hint at urgency, alarm, almost panic as the slow-moving beast with cold feet heads toward Bloomsbury and the heart of London University. A party of mid-lifers in pastel car coats waits to cross the road. Their long banner reads: "Blair -- don't spend millions bombing civilians." Other banners assert: "Oil fuels war," or ask rhetorically: "How many lives per gallon?" I spot a flotilla of Palestinian flags waving above the slow-moving tide. This will be a recurring theme.

I broke into the crowd. Bill Dinsdale, a college teacher, traveled more than 200 miles down from Yorkshire to join the demonstration. The marchers' message was aimed squarely at Tony Blair, he assured me: This war is wrong. Stop it! I wondered if the P.M. gets any credit for bravery, for standing by a domestically unpopular choice. (Blair is often lambasted as a Clinton-esque, focus-group junkie, but opinion polls show his position contemplating war without a second Security Council resolution is opposed by a clear majority.) "No, it's not a matter for admiration. He's just wrong," Dinsdale says. "The evidence we have is not convincing."

Bill's marching companion, Chris Ketchen, a social worker also from Yorkshire, was a stalwart of the anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid campaigns of earlier decades and is still an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. "I left the Labour Party when we went into Afghanistan," she said, "and I wrote to Mr. Blair then telling why." I asked her about one of the "moral" counterarguments for military action in Iraq now -- that we have a duty to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam's brutal tyranny, which we had, in times past, supported and helped sustain. She was unimpressed. "No! That would be total hypocrisy. The only effective way is for the Iraqi people to change the government themselves, otherwise it's just imperialism and bullying, with America and Britain bigger bullies than Saddam." To my knowledge Tony Blair and George Bush don't routinely drown their political rivals in acid baths or gas recalcitrant voting districts, but I'm not here to argue points of moral relativism.

Fearing a descent into clichi, I went in search of someone who was neither a teacher nor a social worker. I found Mr. Shahid, a bearded and "observant" British Muslim of Pakistani ancestry. He disagreed about Tony Blair's credit rating. "Oh yes, he gets credit, but not for standing out against public opinion," Shahid says. "He gets it for controlling and tempering George Bush. But now he's not representing his people." I ask about Britain's relationship with the U.S. and with Europe. "We're European and we ought to be European," he says without any trace of doubt. I ask why he thinks Tony Blair had taken such a firm stance with the U.S. "He's trying to make a name for himself. Britain's role as an imperial power has declined and he's trying to rekindle that through the United States."

I was about to thank him and move on when Shahid volunteers: "We should have finished Saddam off the first time!" He'd caught me short. "You mean George Bush senior should have extended the war and gone all the way to Baghdad in 1991?" "Exactly." I hadn't expected this. "In which case, why should the current George Bush not put right his father's mistake and finish the job?" Shahid wasn't falling for that one. "Because containment has now worked. There's no need. Saddam isn't a threat now -- and if he is it should be dealt with regionally. Anyway, this war isn't being done for the Iraqi people -- it's being done for American and British interests. They want world dominance, we know that. And they want the oil."

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