LONDON, 24 February 2003 — Unable to ignore the historic, million-strong anti-war demonstration which took place in London on Feb. 15, Tony Blair tried hard to turn the event to his advantage.
Like some priggish school master, Britain’s prime minister pointed out that such a demonstration would never have been allowed in a country like Iraq: Those who took part in it did well to remember just how lucky they are to live in a free society.
It is Blair’s holier-than-thou attitude, his self-righteous sense of himself as a champion of democracy, free speech and the highest civilized values, that many find increasingly hard to stomach. Here, after all, is a British leader who — in the teeth of concerted public opposition — persists in pledging seemingly blind loyalty to the militaristic US administration of George W. Bush.
Last week, Blair was received by the Pope, a religious leader whose office is based on the doctrine of papal infallibility. British people could be forgiven for thinking that their prime minister has formulated his own personal version of that doctrine.
Blair’s plunging opinion poll ratings stem in no small measure from his high-handed brushing aside of mass resistance to his pro-war, pro-US posture.
But his falling esteem is also bound up with a general loss of public faith in his capacity to tell the truth. Blair’s credibility was badly injured by the recent British government report which purported to comprise up-to-the-minute “intelligence” about Iraq’s secret weapons but which turned out to have been drawn from out-of-date information found on the Internet. Consider, too, the suspiciously shifting nature of his rationale for waging war against Iraq: One moment he is maintaining that the reason for ousting Saddam Hussein is that he possesses weapons of mass destruction, the next he is arguing that the case for toppling the Iraqi leader is essentially a moral one, based on the fact that he is a tyrant who has visited unspeakable crimes on his own people.
The result is that Blair seems less like a high-minded leader than an importunate salesman — quick to adopt a fresh marketing ploy the minute it is apparent that the previous one has failed.
Many Britons have reached the point where they simply do not trust a word that he says. A young woman who is undecided about whether war is justified or not told BBC’s Radio 4 that her biggest problem in making up her mind was the prime minister himself.
“If Tony Blair told me it was raining,” she said, “I’d have to go outside and check.”
So much for the Blair who entered office projecting himself — in sharp contrast to his discredited Conservative predecessors — as the epitome of honesty and plain-dealing.
Blair’s calculation is that if and when war begins the bulk of British people will rally behind the 27,000 British troops who are being deployed in the Gulf. But they are unlikely to do so unless military action has been unequivocally endorsed by a second UN resolution.
A war fought by Britain without such a resolution may well prove fatally unpopular; indeed, it could split the Labour Party and undermine Blair’s authority as the party’s leader. One British political columnist has envisaged a scenario in which an ever more isolated Tony Blair is kept in office by his pro-war Tory opponents.
Blair might have found himself less beleaguered had he offered clearer evidence of having thought through the consequences of attacking Iraq. But on this score he continues to be evasive and unconvincing.
At a press conference the other day, he devoted more time to condemning anti-Americanism than he did to addressing the issue of the fate of Iraq following the planned deposition of its present leader. As for the wider implications for the Middle East of a US-led invasion of Iraq — these seem scarcely to have engaged the British prime minister’s attention.
It is not just civilians who worry about the wisdom of Tony Blair’s bellicosity and unwavering support of the US. There are respected military figures who question the prime minister’s stand. In an article in the London Review of Books (an extract from which was published in the Guardian), the British Gulf War veteran, David Ramsbotham, argued that — leaving aside the pros and cons of declaring war on Iraq in the first place — Blair is contriving circumstances in which the British Army is in danger of becoming disastrously overstretched.
Ramsbotham writes that some 15,000 British troops will be required to police Iraq following the prospective war. But given existing British commitments (and the need to relieve those who have seen military action), he is hard-pressed to work out where they are going to come from. Anxious to sustain their country’s pretensions as a great world power, successive British governments have maintained armed forces designed to enable Britain to “punch above its weight”. Now, according to Ramsbotham, there is a real possibility that the British Army could soon end up barely able to punch at all.
It is impossible not to wonder what became of the Tony Blair who rose to power six years ago preaching consensus and reconciliation.
How did the affable new prime minister of 1997 turn into the divisive warmonger who has provoked such dissension in his own country, such dissension in Europe and such dissension between Europe and the US? It is impossible not to wonder, too, about the peculiar psychology of a British politician so furiously insistent that he is right to be pursuing a course of action which great numbers of his fellow countrymen believe to be wrong — and which he himself did not initiate.
In the 1980s, the American historian, Barbara Tuchman, wrote a best-selling book detailing how throughout history the world’s leaders have regularly set in motion catastrophic chains of events — even as they affected to be acting out of rational self-interest.
Tuchman’s book was entitled “The March of Folly”. The topicality of its theme needs no underlining.
