LONDON, 17 May 2004 — It was John Smith’s sudden, premature death 10 years ago that led to the fateful election of Tony Blair as Labour Party leader. Inevitably, there has been much speculation about the very different trajectory recent British history might have followed had Smith lived. Certainly, it can now be seen that Smith’s death was an event with far-reaching consequences — not just for the Labour Party and British politics but for the world at large.

Smith’s passing prepared the way for the emergence of “New Labour”, a party in many ways modeled on the US Democrats and altogether more business-friendly than “Old Labour” with its close relationship to trade unionism and commitment to the welfare state. In some measure, to be sure, this transformation was already under way. Smith himself had set out to woo the business world on Labour’s behalf, to convince bankers and financiers that his party could be trusted to serve their interests. But if Smith had survived and become Britain’s prime minister in 1997, would Britain ever have taken part in the United States’ pre-emptive invasion of Iraq — particularly when the country’s leading partners in the European Union, France and Germany, were so reluctant to support such a venture? It is hard to imagine this cautious, sober-minded Scotsman, with his Old Labour tribal loyalties, sharing Tony Blair’s zeal for the unilateralist foreign policy of Republican President George W. Bush. The chances are that, like Harold Wilson, Britain’s prime minister at the time of the Vietnam War, John Smith would have stopped short of involving British troops in an undertaking so fraught with risk and uncertainty.

Tony Blair is insistent that historians will vindicate his actions. What they will certainly note is the fetish he made of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, allowing it to overshadow the entire rest of Britain’s political agenda. Seldom if ever before has a British leader genuflected before US power so abjectly — or held forth in such bombastic terms about the extent to which the special relationship constitutes a boon to mankind. It is more than a little ironic that the British leader who has said so much about the Anglo-American dedication to the highest ideals now finds himself inescapably implicated in the ignominy visited on the USA by the revelations of gross prisoner abuse in Iraq. Some will feel it is a fate this inordinately self-righteous leader richly deserves. But his critics are bound to reflect that the British in general, for all that many of them opposed the invasion of Iraq, are much implicated in that ignominy, too.

It must be said that Blair’s reverential attitude toward the US is but the latest episode in the long history of British self-deception and disingenuousness on the subject of the special relationship (of which far more has always been made in Britain than it ever was in the US). Not for nothing was the expression much favored by that arch-exponent of British humbug, the Conservative leader of the 1950s, Harold Macmillan. Ruefully conscious of his own country’s imperial decline, Macmillan toyed with the notion that Britain was to the US what Ancient Greece had been to Rome: An older, wiser civilization whose destiny was to serve as a moral and intellectual exemplar to the brash new superpower. Underlying such talk was the incorrigibly imperialist cast of mind of the British ruling class. Pathologically loath to accept that Britain itself no longer presided over a great empire, Macmillan and his ilk consoled themselves with make-believe, with the thought that, by virtue of its intimate connection with the United States, their country might yet retain something of its old imperial prestige.

The truth is that from the very start the special relationship had much less to do with idealism than crude realpolitik. As Stephen Kinzer shows in his grimly enthralling book, “All the Shah’s Men”, at the very time when Macmillan was flattering himself about his country’s maturity and wisdom, British politicians were busy inveigling Washington into organizing the destabilization of the popular Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh — for no more exalted reason than their determination to preserve Britain’s monopoly over Iran’s oil reserves. This, to be sure, was a time when the British were if anything rather more cynical and duplicitous, rather more contemptuous of the rights of small nations than the US, which, in the aftermath of World War II, had yet to assume its now familiar guise as a predatory rogue state. What were the Iranians after all, sneered Britain’s eminently civilized Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but a bunch of “rug salesmen”?

Mindful that the US would have to feel more was at stake in Iran than Britain’s claims on the country’s oil, the scheming British sought to persuade their American friends that mounting a coup in Iran was vital as a means of forestalling the spread of Soviet Communism in the Middle East. In the event, the hawkish administration of Gen. Eisenhower — keen to usurp British interests as well as to contain Communism — did not need much persuading. And by successfully accomplishing it, the recently created CIA was to acquire a taste for subversive activities which rapidly turned into a raging addiction.

The tale of infamy told by Stephen Kinzer suggests that the present clash between the West and Islam has its roots in the encouragement the British gave the US to take over their role of imperialist meddling in the Middle East. Indeed, Kinzer argues that a straight line can be drawn from Anglo-American subversion in Iran all those years ago to Sept. 11, 2001. Consider that US patronage of the Shah of Iran ultimately spawned the implacably anti-Western regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which in turn bred revolutionary Islamists who became heroes in many countries — not least of course Afghanistan, where the Taleban was to provide the base from which Osama Bin Laden would launch devastating terrorist attacks against the West.

Far from being a boon to mankind, the “special relationship” has led to an increasingly divided and unstable world. It is to be hoped that the debacle into which the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq has degenerated will discredit it irretrievably.