Casualty of War

Tony Blair, who is about to step down as Prime Minister of Britain, has been called the "Prime Minister of the United States" for his unblinking support of Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, in fact, no friendly foreign leader has done more harm to this country than Mr. Blair. If Blair had spoken out against it, the Iraq war would not have happened — so many of us believe. In the run-up to Iraq one heard, "If Tony Blair is for it…" more often even than "If Tom Friedman is for it…" Blair lent his fatal glibness to the case for war, as well as reassuring solidarity ("If the Brits are with us…").

Blair’s best chance to stop the war came in the summer of 2002, when he received the "Downing Street memo." Reporting on secret talks in Washington, security advisor Matthew Rycroft wrote: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Moreover, "there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." The memo was leaked in May 2005. What if it had leaked in 2002? What if Blair had declared that Britain wanted no part of a preventive war based on deceit and planned without thought? The "special relationship" between Britain and the United States survived President Eisenhower’s ultimatum to Prime Minister Anthony Eden to end the Anglo-French intervention in Suez in 1956. If Britain persisted in forcibly trying to achieve regime change in Egypt, Ike warned, "all of Asia and Africa would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation." Blair could have spoken Ike’s lines to Bush. Instead, Blair’s PR man, the sinister Alastair Campbell, took twelve-year-old information on Iraq’s WMD off the Internet, combined it with "sexed up" British intelligence, and issued this farrago in a "dossier" marred by typos (the bloggers had nodded). Among other sensational claims, it asserted that Saddam could deploy his WMD in forty-five minutes. You’d think so brazen a deception would have won the respect of Donald Rumsfeld, but you would be wrong. Rumsfeld showed his contempt for the country formerly known as "Great" when he let drop that British troops were not needed for the invasion of Iraq.

Blair favors the cliché "the hand of history." History fairly smote him with it in 2002. Why did he ignore it? Why did he imbibe the folly of the witless pol who greeted him at the 2006 St. Petersburg G-8 summit with "Yo, Blair!"? To one journalist Blair confided that he did it to "keep the U.S. in the international system." He later amplified the point: "It would be more damaging to long-term peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support." An outlaw U.S.—"outside the international system"—was unthinkable. "Tony Blair has taken a brave decision, that the only hope of influencing American behavior is to share in American actions," Max Hastings wrote in the Daily Mail. That does sound like a brave decision. But was it in Britain’s national interest? In his biting, mordantly witty book, Yo, Blair! (Politico’s, London), Geoffrey Wheatcroft plunges a forensic knife into Blair’s logic: "You don’t say, ‘My big brother is a crazy kind of guy. On Saturday night he likes to get blind drunk and ride through town at ninety. It would be bad for peace and security if he acted alone, so I’ll go along with him for the ride.’" Operating on the disloyal maxim, "Their country, right or wrong," Blair took his country into our war, a step that achieved the opposite of Blair’s intent—that of "binding the Bush administration into the international order."

If we Americans had only known Tony as many of his countrymen knew Tony, we would have resisted his wordy spell. On Wheatcroft’s showing, Blair should be known as "BLIAR"—as one native placard branded him. Wheatcroft furnishes examples, but an anecdote about another British leader captures the BLIAR essence: "‘Dicky,’ Field Marshall Templer said to Lord Mountbatten, ‘you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail you’d shit a corkscrew.’" Inveterately dishonest about matters small and large, Blair is free of principle, historical knowledge, reading, or ideas. His intellect begins and ends on his tongue. Says the novelist Doris Lessing: "He believes in magic. That if you say a thing, it is true. I think he’s not very bright in some ways." Blair enraptured liberal American journalists ("the leader of the free world," Paul Berman effused) with his accent, fluency, show of eloquence, and, above all, moral earnestness. As to that, a "Whitehall joke" early in Blair’s tenure had it that the Downing Street answering machine "asked callers to ‘leave a message after the high moral tone.’" Blair is deeply religious and, partly from that, deeply unscrupulous. Like Bush, he acts on the antinomian precept that "to the pure, all things are pure." Bismarck’s cold-blooded realism, according to A. J. P. Taylor, "could not rival the freedom from the principles and scruples of this world which is given by devotion to a supernatural cause." "That describes Blair exactly," Wheatcroft writes. Echoing Bush, Blair avows, "God will be my judge." God save us from these one-constituent politicians.

By his maidenly surrender to Bush—"We will stay with you to the last," "I’m there to the very end," "I said I’m with you. I mean it"—Blair has made Britain "an American client state." It isn’t only Blair who’s been "pitifully diminished" by serving as a human shield" for Bush; it’s the British people. At the St. Petersburg summit, after Bush "Yo, Blaired!" him, Blair revealed the self-contempt beneath his groveling. Before he detected and "hurriedly switched off" a microphone, he volunteered to help Bush’s diplomacy in the Mideast. "I don’t know what you guys have talked about, but, as I say, I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is…" Bush reminded him that he was sending Secretary of State Rice to the region. "Well…it’s only if, I mean…you know. If she’s got a…or if she needs the ground prepared, as it were… Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can go out and just talk." Indeed. When Britain appointed a new ambassador to the U.S. after 9/11, a Blair courtier told him: "We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there." But the Prime Minister had got up there ahead of him.

Britons seem to have concluded that the Blair years have been "just talk," most of it deceitful; he is at 28% in one recent poll. Under once-Socialist Labor, Britain has seen ten years of "market economics powdered with caring rhetoric." To quote a leading Blairite, "New Labour is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich." Turnout has fallen steadily under Blair: "Fewer and fewer people want to vote, because politics means less and less to them and they despise politicians more and more…" In the still-unfolding "cash for honors" scandal, Blair has become the first sitting Prime Minister ever to be questioned in a criminal inquiry. Tony Blair leaves office after, as Wheatcroft sums up, "the most dishonest and disastrous prime ministership in modern times." Longing for the deliverance of January, 2009, American readers will substitute "presidency" for "prime ministership" and strike the qualification "modern times.”