Bad diplomacy, bad foreign policy and bad for Britain
Simon TisdallMonday October 21, 2002
Americans have, for the most part, a good opinion of Tony Blair. They think him a sensible man. So it is with a sense of puzzlement, if not dismay, that many of the 76% of Americans who did not vote for George Bush and oppose his Iraq war plans observe Blair's apparently unquestioning support for US policy. Blair's backing, they worry, makes Bush appear more credible.
This bewilderment at Blair's policy is felt in Britain, too. But it also extends across a once anglophile Arab world and is even shared, despite their 12-year battering, by many ordinary Iraqis. It is to be found, too, among the citizens and governments of most of Britain's European partners, in Commonwealth countries and the non-aligned movement, as last week's UN debate on Iraq showed. Is everybody wrong or should Blair pause and think again? Is it really in the British national interest to alienate and antagonise so many influential and valuable allies? Would not a more independent, less uncritically pro-Bush approach be wiser?
No, no, dear me, no, says Blair's Downing Street, Jack Straw's Foreign Office and other foreign policy sophisticates: this is all wrong-headed and silly. Britain's friends understand very well what we are doing, that we do not want a war, they say. Our objective is Iraqi disarmament in support of UN resolutions and authority, in accordance with international law, in pursuit of the terrorist threat and of Britain's legitimate security concerns. What is happening right now, they say, is in fact a rather clever campaign to exert maximum pressure on Saddam to comply and thus avoid a conflict. In this, Britain naturally sides with the all-powerful US, as foreign policy realism dictates it must, but also seeks to guide it. If it comes to a fight, even without specific UN blessing, they say, that is ultimately OK because, as the prime minister fervently believes, overthrowing Saddam is morally "the right thing to do". And if people like the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz may be believed, a broader benefit is within reach: the prospective democratisation of the entire Middle East, using a "liberated" Iraq as both paradigm and linchpin.
It is time, on the eve of a probably definitive UN vote, to expose these arguments for what they are: woolly, contradictory and injurious.
The US resolution presently before the security council will, if passed, bring war closer. Even as modified by the French, it still amounts to an ultimatum to Iraq based on a series of demands that will, almost certainly, prove impossible to fulfil. It turns the UN weapons inspectors into a military reconnaissance unit for Pentagon targeters. Far worse, it will thwart the clearly expressed will of the vast majority of UN members.
Two years ago Robin Cook, then foreign secretary, called for reform of the security council, warning that it "risks losing credibility unless it more fairly represents the world as it is today". His words were not heeded. But they remain British policy and a fearsome price for this inaction is about to be paid. Far from bolstering the UN, as Bush claims, the new Iraq resolution may condemn it to irrelevance and set a precedent for future, peremptory and essentially unilateral US political and military démarches. To help legitimise the chaotic concept of pre-emptive attack, overturning the UN principle of collective self-defence, is not in the British national interest.
The ramifications are many. If Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have their way at next month's Prague summit, Nato members will be expected to endorse the Iraq war, giving Bush the "broad coalition" he seeks but currently lacks, and support a new, out-of-area role for a Nato "rapid response" force under American direction. Never mind that Nato is a defensive alliance; and forget that fond idea of a separate, EU-led military capability, an idea promoted by Blair. Nato and the EU will effectively be told that the "global war on terror", as defined in Washington, overrides all.
Bush has plenty more targets where Iraq comes from: Iran is one, allegedly nuclear- arming Syria is another. How about Libya or Cuba? And then there is North Korea, which has suddenly, rather conveniently, confessed to WMD offences. Yet British policy towards all these states is one of "critical engagement", as defined by Cook, emphasising dialogue and diplomacy. The prospect of being led by the nose into Bush's next dangerous escapades is not in the British national interest.
I n point of fact, British support for Bush on Iraq is jeopardising British interests across the board. Blair's position has allowed France's Jacques Chirac to put himself forward as a champion not just of Arab concerns but of those of Europeans, too. Blair, who wanted so much to place Britain at the heart of Europe, has on this watershed issue set it significantly apart. What a contrast is presented by Chirac's triumphant Middle East tour last week, during which the 55 nations of La Francophonie backed him on Iraq, and Straw's demeaning traipsing around Arab capitals where he was seen, at best, as Colin Powell's messenger boy. What a difference between European perceptions of Blair as Bush's mouthpiece and of Germany's Gerhard Schröder, the man who refused to "click his heels".
Blair has worked admirably to build constructive relations with Russia. But as his recent Moscow visit showed, Vladimir Putin's misgivings could quickly turn to fierce, alliance-shredding hostility if an unsanctioned war is launched. Blair has famously spoken up for the impoverished and dispossessed of the world, especially in Africa. But what prime time effort is now devoted to education and disease? What message is now sent to Zimbabwe's dictator or Kenya's de facto president-for-life?
But Blair's biggest, self-defeating self-deception relates to the US itself, for the Bush administration has grown into a juggernaut impervious to meaningful restraint or reasoned persuasion, an aberration in American political life. It pays lip service to international law but opposes the British-sponsored international criminal court. It says it wants an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. But siding with Ariel Sharon, it spurns Blair's pleas for a Middle East conference this year. It claims to fight for democracy and freedom but plans a military regime in Iraq and locks up terror suspects indefinitely without trial. It fights for cheap oil while scuppering Kyoto. It makes unfounded claims about Saddam's links to al-Qaida and expects Blair and the rest of us to swallow them. Bush flatters Blair at his Camp David hideaway. But his hard-faced hawks play him for a mug, the man whose support they can take for granted, who lends a veneer of international respectability, who makes sceptical Americans think that maybe Bush is right after all.
This is not good politics nor clever diplomacy. This is not good foreign policy. And it is not in the British national interest.
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