The fat lady is singing. She has bowed to much applause and announced her final aria. Its title is not an end to war, not the defeat of poverty, not a cure for Aids, not even some vague agenda for change. With jaw-dropping banality, Tony Blair declared last week that “from now until I leave office I will dedicate myself to advancing peace between Israel and Palestine”.
Never did the gulf between Blair and reality yawn so wide.
Total policy seizure is already enveloping Britain’s government. Two months ago a set of meetings at the Treasury were debating a white paper on local government. Officials from Ruth Kelly’s department were doing the usual horse-trading with junior Treasury ministers. Progress was being made and a policy announcement was planned for the autumn, a process that occurs in Whitehall every day.
Suddenly an order came from on high, from the chancellor’s office no less, calling a halt. Nothing further was to be discussed and there would be no white paper. Nothing and nobody would move until the coming of what is now called “Gordon’s watch”.
Where a future is clear, as in fixed-term presidencies or overnight departures, a transition can be envisaged. In today’s Whitehall there is no route map. Tony may say yes to a proposal, but what about Gordon — and what now about John Reid? Will we know in March next year, or May or September? With a Scottish takeover of English government now a certainty, there is no telling what clan feuds and ancestral vendettas may envelop Whitehall. Not since James VI of Scotland saddled his horse and rode south in 1603 to succeed Elizabeth I have English eyes looked to the Scottish border with such apprehension.
Nowhere is this uncertainty more disturbing than in foreign policy, where continuity is normally considered crucial. A recent poll of “friends of Brown” left us in no doubt that he is sceptical of Blair’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and of his hyping of the war on terror.
In his Manchester speech Brown’s references to Iraq were formulaic, confined to calling for “no safe haven for terrorists and no hiding place for terrorist finance”. On relations with America he merely declared his opposition to anti-Americanism.
Blair wants to make foreign affairs his farewell performance. Eager to deck his stage in trophies he wants the maximum number of contacts, interventions and “agreements” to his name. But how will he be received on his planned progress round the troublespots of the world? Whom does he represent? Can he deliver his own future government, let alone a crippled American president over whom he has not the slightest leverage? Blair’s foreign secretary is a cipher. He himself has been ejected by a putative successor who has studiously ignored his foreign policy. Only on Europe has Brown leapt to life and then in furious opposition to his boss.
The idea that Blair might in six months exert any influence over the intractable conflict between Israel and her neighbours is ludicrous. It is as ludicrous as his claim last month that “we” got Israel to lift the economic siege of Lebanon. In the run-up to the Iraq war Blair tried to use his influence on George Bush to promise a Middle East settlement in return for British participation in the war. Bush called his bluff. If Bush would not put pressure on Tel Aviv to win Blair’s help in war, he is hardly likely to do so merely as a leaving present.
All that said, this does not mean there is nothing for Blair to do with his remaining time. He will be leaving Brown (we assume) with the worst foreign policy inheritance of any prime minister for half a century. The utter mess in Iraq, the entrapment of British forces in Afghanistan, the resulting terrorism threat and the uncertain responses to troubles in Sudan and Zimbabwe will all soon land on Brown’s desk. Must the British people endure another prime minister crawling painfully along a learning curve?
Brown must know, as most sensible Americans know, that his term in office will be dominated by a simple imperative, the need to withdraw British and American troops fighting Muslims in their own countries and repair the West’s relations with their governments after the catastrophic over-reaction to September 11. Every other aspect of foreign policy, every trade deal, every arms negotiation, every fight against genocide, Aids and narcotics will depend on that disengagement and that repair. Before any global policing can be resumed, Britain and America must abandon their military occupations and recover a degree of moral authority.
Blair’s interventionism has been reactive and often unjustified, if not illegal. It replaced the war on communism (a real war even if mercifully “cold”) with jerky military expeditions. They were supposedly explained in his Chicago speech of 1999, replacing the traditional foreign policy of national interest with a vague humanitarianism, summed up as “we cannot turn our backs on the violation of human rights in other countries”.
Intervention would be limited not by a respect for the sovereignty of foreign states but by what was feasible and achievable and by an ambiguous requirement that “our national interest be truly engaged”. The declaration ended with the fatuous remark that “success is the only exit strategy”. (On how many graves is that written?) Washington understandably complained that Blair had “sprinkled too much adrenaline on his cornflakes”.
The Chicago speech has underpinned British wars in Iraq, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Iraq again and Afghanistan, yet not in Sudan, Congo, Somalia, Lebanon, Chechnya, Burma or Zimbabwe, from all of which the humanitarian cry could have been heard. Nothing explains such choices apart from Downing Street’s willingness to do whatever Washington wanted and vague references not to humanity but to terrorism.
In the cold war Britons knew where they stood. They recognised a threat and accepted the means of defence against it (unless they were a CND MP called Tony Blair). The so-called war on terror has redefined what should be a co-operative fight against gangsterism as a conventional war between states and armies. It is hard to conceive of a better way of compelling potential friends into becoming inevitable enemies. This could yet turn out to be the great mistake of the 21st century.
Blair’s policy sent soldiers to fight what have inevitably become domestic insurgencies. Troops trained to kill are accused of not winning hearts and minds for foreign governments. Diplomacy does not know with whom it must form alliances and who may next join the axis of evil. Last week the nuclear dictator of Pakistan and harbourer of the Taliban was the toast of the American television chat shows. Nothing joins up or makes sense.
Whether Blair’s choice of wars has made Britain safer than before is being doubted by politicians and intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. The consensus is the opposite: he has put Britons more at risk. Sooner or later that view will feed through into a change of policy and, it is hoped, a new period of military withdrawal, reconciliation and repair.
Only then might the true threat to western interests from militant Islam be assessable and some means of realistic containment plotted. As last week’s intelligence leaks in Washington and London indicated, present policy is making the threat worse.
Brown’s good fortune could be to preside over withdrawal and repair while the world attributes to Blair the “mistakes” mentioned by Jack Straw on television on Thursday. Such a prospect makes it more plausible for Blair to help Brown to prepare a sensible exit strategy from Iraq and Afghanistan and build a realpolitik relationship with Iran. The hard grind of getting out of Basra and Helmand will require more head-banging in Whitehall than the vacuous soundbites of Middle East diplomacy.
Brown is clearly an ingénue at foreign affairs. Blair’s best legacy, whatever the errors of his past policy, would be to start now to refashion British policy towards the Muslim world, with or without American collaboration. The alternative is that Blair is for ever blamed for wars which Brown alone gets the credit for ending.
Simon Jenkins’s Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts is published this week by Penguin
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
