So, is Tony Blair going “wobbly” on the war? “Certainly not,” says one top aide. “If there’s a war, we’ll be there.” Yet the real answer is more complicated. In truth, Blair and Bush have always been something of an odd couple. The British prime minister is an intellectual politician and a trained lawyer whose best American friend was once Bill Clinton. The current American president is an anti-intellectual who built his presidential campaign against much of what Clinton stood for. The Blairs and Clintons enjoyed dining out at fancy London restaurants, swapping tips on how to reform the political left. For the Blairs and Bushes, it’s a much more serious marriage of common interests: a shared view about Saddam’s future and, more generally, a shared faith in the righteousness of confronting evil, perhaps rooted in their Christianity.
More recently, events have begun to intrude on the relationship. Blair, in many ways, is as hawkish as Bush. He’s a more patient hawk, though–and lately he’s had a political storm on his hands. Just as the British P.M. is under pressure to stand by his man in Washington, he’s under growing pressure at home. Antiwar sentiment is rising sharply in Britain, as it is elsewhere in the world. Restive backbenchers in his Labour Party are threatening to revolt. And lately there’s been a rash of mixed signals from within his cabinet. First, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw assessed the odds of war at 60-40 against. His Defense Secretary, Geoff Hoon, followed up by noting that fighting in the heat of an Iraqi summer–once seemingly unthinkable–would not be out of the question. Not exactly the timetable of the Bush administration, which last week was saying that evidence of a “material breach” could be in by the end of January. Indeed, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser, traveled to New York last week to urge the U.N.’s chief inspector, Hans Blix, to drop the idea of reporting again at the end of March.
All this puts Blair in an awkward–and highly visible–position. As U.S. troops flood into Kuwait, the gap between America and the rest of the world is widening. For those who fear a conflict, Blair is the proverbial man in the middle, both an object of hope and a source of frustration. He is the only global leader judged to have the trust and standing with President Bush to slow (or even redirect) Washington’s march toward war. And because everyone knows that the United States would hesitate to attack Iraq without Britain alongside, Blair’s being closely watched for how he chooses to use that influence.
The timing is crucial. This week, key foreign ministers will be in New York for Security Council talks on terrorism. Straw will fly to Washington for meetings with senior members of the Bush administration. On Jan. 27, Blix reports to the Security Council; the next day Bush makes his State of the Union address to Congress–followed three days later by a summit with Blair at Camp David, outside Washington.
As at their last meeting in September, Blair once again will press to go slow–and to stick with the United Nations for as long as is necessary. His aides are confident that the Bush team will agree. Several told NEWSWEEK that the White House was delighted by the “triumph” of the U.N. approach adopted by the president last September, including his widely applauded speech to the General Assembly. But senior British officials tell NEWSWEEK that Blair will also deliver a more uncomfortable message to Bush: you must do more in the Middle East to win Arab support against Baghdad. While the Bush administration has stepped up pressure on Saddam in recent months, it has slowed down the diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supposedly waiting for next week’s Israeli elections. It’s no coincidence that the British staged a conference on Palestinian reform in London last week “to fill a very dangerous vacuum,” according to one senior British official.
There are other sources of friction. One is the Bush administration’s slow sharing of intelligence with weapons inspectors in Iraq, at least as the Brits see it. While the United States started handing over snippets of intelligence to Blix only this month, the British hoped to help the inspectors uncover Iraq’s secret weapons stash far earlier. “There’s no point in going down the U.N. route if we shut it down just two weeks after giving them intelligence,” says one British official. Another adds: “We are just trying to make sure there is the credible evidence required for a second U.N. resolution and for an international coalition.”
Such remarks clash with the message put out by the Bush administration. Administration sources say that when Rice traveled to New York last week, she urged Blix to maintain the pressure on Iraq–and offered targeted intelligence to uncover to Saddam’s secret weapons. “We don’t just walk in and put a lot of documents on the table and walk away,” says one senior administration official. “We are giving them actionable intelligence.” U.S. officials hope they can help the U.N. team make more finds like last week’s discoveries–11 empty chemical warheads and a pile of documents from the home of an Iraqi physicist.
These fissures may signal an emerging distance between the United States and Britain over Iraq–but not a serious rift, let alone a parting of the ways. “Sure, the Brits are one or two degrees to the left of us,” said a U.S. diplomat in London last week, acknowledging some “daylight” between the two governments. “The question is, is it constructive or destructive daylight? I think it’s constructive. It’s analogous to the old good cop/bad cop routine. Plus, when it really counts, they’re with the program.”
Still, Blair’s alliance with Bush is costing him dearly. Abroad, he’s derided as America’s “poodle.” At home, he’s criticized for being out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people–and far too occupied with Iraq. Britons of every stripe complain, increasingly, that he should be doing more to sort out ordinary problems, such as the woeful social services and health care. Bishops of the Church of England last week said Blair had not made the moral case for war against Iraq. A sizable minority of Labour Party members of Parliament is in open revolt, threatening to turn against Blair if he leads the country into an unjust war. Reporters for The Guardian newspaper surveyed Blair’s own cabinet last week and found that, even there, a majority of ministers are against going to war without a U.N. green light.
Why can’t Blair influence public opinion more than he has, much less his own cabinet? How is it that the most effective communicator of his political generation in Britain can’t seem to muster widespread support for his policies? Britain’s chattering classes have a fashionable theory: the problem is not Blair. It’s Bush.
Bush is the British P.M.’s albatross. After two years in office, the American president remains anathema to many if not most Britons. “George Bush is seen as the global village idiot,” writes the columnist Andrew Rawnsley, normally sympathetic to Blair and his closeness to the White House. “This is a one-dimensional caricature of the man–albeit a caricature that he has rather encouraged. The point is that the cartoon-cowboy image is now pretty indelibly stuck.” For Blair, the association is obviously growing increasingly problematic. The closer he cleaves to Bush, the more he’s seen as the opposing face of a very tarnished penny.
Blair’s stand has also cost him heavily in Europe. Britain was once first among equals in the pantheon of European Union leaders. No longer. “Britain isn’t evoked as an actor anymore,” says French political analyst Emmanuel Todd, a confessed “incurable Anglophile.” If anyone is the King of Europe today, it is French President Jacques Chirac, who has taken a more dovish position on Iraq, he says, adding that “Chirac is playing the role that Blair dreams of playing: the moderator between Europe and the U.S.” Ursula Mogg, the ranking German Social Democrat on the German-British Parliamentarians Committee, sees Blair’s Iraq adventure as a lost opportunity for Europe. By being out of step with British public opinion, she says, Blair has thrown away the chance to develop “a common European position” on a hugely important foreign-policy issue.
Blair counters all such criticism in the same way. He is doing what he thinks is right. In the House of Commons last week, an M.P. from Wales addressed Blair–someone who, in his own words, “likes to do things because they are right”–and asked, how, then, could it be right to go to a war that “doesn’t have the backing of international law, [or] the support of the majority of the British people?” Blair fired back: “It is right because weapons of mass destruction–the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons–are a real threat to the security of the world and this country. The job of a prime minister is to say the things people don’t want them to say, but we believe are necessary to say, because the threat is real, and if we don’t deal with it, then the consequences of our weakness will haunt future generations.”
In the end, Blair has made a strategic–and moral–choice. Backing the United States against Iraq is the “right thing to do.” Evil must be recognized and confronted. When the war ends well, as he firmly believes it will, public opinion will change and he will be lauded for his boldness. Bush would agree. After all, that’s his hope, too.
With Emily Flynn in London, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Tracy McNicoll in Paris
