Rarely can a political leader have snatched such disaster from the jaws of victory, as has Tony Blair in his dealings over the Iraq war.
He was right – and has since proved to be right – to oppose the socialist, the corporatist (including “Tories” like Kenneth Clarke) and communist elements in the British media and politics, most of the Labour Party and the usual rent-a-peacenik forces which always emerge to condemn war (in suitably warlike and hate-filled language!) whenever a tyrant is threatened by the forces of democratic nations. Blair even opposed himself – by embracing that very pro-Americanism and sovereign national defence and foreign policy which he seeks to abolish inside the new (French and German dominated) Euro-State. Even at the financial level Blair, had he already abolished the Pound for the Euro, would not have possessed the fiscal freedom to finance a war against Saddam Hussein!
Despite the doom merchants, free Iraqis now laud the British, American (and Australian and Polish) forces which have driven out a tyrannical regime. Peace is returning slowly, shops are opening, torture chambers are being revealed, the first mass grave of circa 1,000 bodies, has been uncovered, the relatives of hundreds of thousands of “the disappeared” are coming forward and many sites are being investigated as possible stores of chemical and biological weapons – which leading Iraqi scientists have always admitted existed. In short nothing could have gone better for Tony Blair’s one decent public stance since coming to office – and all because he supported an American foreign policy, an American defence policy and an American war strategy.
But when it comes to his own foreign policy Blair has gone from one disaster to another. When a black version of Saddam Hussein murders white farmers and black opponents in Zimbabwe (an area of the world for which the British Government is more recently and more directly responsible than Iraq or Yugoslavia) Mr Blair is strangely reticent. He goes to war against one Baathist dictator in Iraq and embraces another – President of Syria, inviting him to London and flattering him with a reception in Buckingham Palace (as an earlier Labour Government did for President Ceaucescu of Romania).
But like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Syria has a national socialist regime, it has also supported terrorist groups, has sent war materials and many fighters to Iraq (an American soldier guarding a Baghdad hospital has been killed by a Syrian) and is the first stop for fleeing members of the Saddam Regime. It is of course near the Syrian border that many “sensitive” weaponry sites are located. A defecting Iraqi – General Ali al-Jajawi – revealed that his political superior the leading Baath Party deputy and close aid to Saddam Hussein, Izzat Ibrahim had plundered his local bank and escaped to Syria!
Then of course Mr. Blair has made great play of his friendship with Vladimir Putin, with mutual back scratching in London and Moscow. Now it emerges (papers found in the heavily bombed headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Services) that Russia has been spying on Blair and informing the Iraqi regime of the results – including details of discussions about Iraq between Blair and President Berlusconi of Italy. Moscow also provided Saddam with lists of assassins available for “hits” in the West and agreed to share intelligence. Putin demanded UN resolutions authorizing the war against Iraq, but strangely never consulted the UN for his own country’s genocidal destruction of Chechnya. Putin and the Russian spying will go down in history as another act of supreme misjudgement by Mr. Blair – which the Bush regime will surely appreciate!
It was of course the great statesman himself who persuaded the Americans to go to the UN for “permission” to enforce UN Resolutions. The UN is one of the most incompetent and failed supranational organisations and, like its predecessor The League of Nations in the 1930s, a useful tool for tyrants to hide behind. The abject and drawn out failure of the UN (in which some of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships voted on the conduct of two of the world’s leading democracies) contributed precious time to the Iraqi dictator who every week that passed was executing scores of his opponents. US and British forces arrived too late for those courageous Iraqis.
Then of course Blair introduced to the Americans his very special friends and partners – the French and German Governments. The latter’s Social Democrat Government has proved to be blatantly anti-American and much of its political Establishment overtly anti-semitic – no wonder its cities proved to be havens for most of the 9/11 terrorists. The French, traditionally anti-American, took no fewer than 81 trade stands at the Baghdad trade fair last year, led by a President who brokered the deal to supply Saddam with a nuclear power plant in the late 1980s. Both the leaders of the new Euro-State are dedicated to “competing for world hegemony” with the USA and seeing in the Euro the alternative to the Dollar not least in the Middle East (and therefore world) pricing of oil.
Just as US troops were marching into Baghdad, Blair entertained President Bush in Northern Ireland (a haven for so many of those who should be the subject of America’s “War against Terrorism”) in order to demonstrate the next stage in the “peace process”. Unfortunately even the lavishing of more concessions on Sinn Fein/IRA could not bring them to abandon their “armed struggle”. Worse still the IRA led demonstrations against the war in Iraq. George Bush must be absolutely delighted with young Master Blair!
At home Blair is fading fast within his own party and will soon learn as did John Major, that a political leader can betray his own party principles only for so long before the reckoning comes. Gordon Brown has, at least for the present Parliament, won the battle of the Euro, much of the Labour Party detests Blair’s policy when it is right but has no particular desire to support him when he is wrong – as in his pursuit of the Euro and more European integration. If there is one figure who has suffered a more disastrous war than Tony Blair it can only be Saddam Hussein.
