British foreign policy is in terminal disarray following the assertion of the head of the British Army Gen. Sir Richard Dannat that Britain must withdraw from Iraq soon or risk serious consequences for British security and interests. Yet the chances that the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is about to announce an exit strategy from Iraq and dissociate itself from the discredited US attempt to democratize the Middle East remain slim. Save that it has discreetly distanced itself from the human rights violations of Guantanamo Bay, the British government’s posture toward the administration of President George W. Bush remains one of gross servility.
Nor is it possible any longer for Britons who yearn for candor on the subject of Iraq to believe that things would be much different if Chancellor Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party and thus fulfilled his ambition of succeeding Blair as prime minister. Last week saw Brown confirm that he intends to stake his claim to lead the Labour Party on the firmness of his commitment to prosecuting the war on terror. In an address to the foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, he made it clear that he believes facing down the threat posed by Al-Qaeda is the British government’s top priority and pledged more money for British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given all this, it was curious to learn (from the memoirs that Brown’s sometime colleague, the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, has been serializing in the Guardian and Daily Mail) that in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, the chancellor did not share Tony Blair’s zeal for backing the US invasion; indeed, if Blunkett is to be believed, he nursed serious reservations about US plans for the war and its aftermath. It cannot be said that the revelation comes as a great surprise. On the whole Brown has maintained a politic silence on the issue, leaving many with the impression that he might be keeping his dissent about the war to himself.
What explains Brown’s shift of attitude? Arguably it has more than a little to do with the politics of attaining high office in a country that is now hardly more than a satellite of the United States and where major political decisions are never made without reference to the stance of the newspapers owned by the fanatically pro-US and pro-Israel media baron, Rupert Murdoch. The lengths to which successive British prime ministers have gone to appease the right-wing Australian businessman who became a US citizen can scarcely be exaggerated. More frequent than ever in his visits to Downing Street since Blair took office in 1997, the mogul’s opinions have been of far greater consequence to Blair and his kitchen cabinet than those of Labour back benchers.
Brown’s eagerness to parade his anti-terror credentials may stem in no small measure from the fear that he is not seen by the US administration, or by the Murdoch press, as a wholly dependable successor to Blair. It is true that Brown has gone to the greatest possible lengths to establish his bona fides. Though his reputation was once that of a modernizer who retained some sort of socialist commitment, he took the early step as chancellor of ceding control over interest rates to the Bank of England, a capitulation to the power of capital that would have left his socialist heroes turning in their graves.
Even before taking office, to be sure, he had cultivated close ties with the US business world and has since become a friend of Rupert Murdoch’s ideological soulmate, Irwin Stelzer. Despite all this, however, doubts perhaps linger on the other side of the Atlantic that Brown is not really a true believer, a complete convert to the American proposition. Such misgivings will hardly have been allayed by Blunkett’s disclosures. It seems eminently possible that Washington’s neoconservatives would prefer to see Blair succeeded by a mere placeman, such as Britain’s bullish Home Secretary John Reid than by an overweening British politician who once provoked Blair’s inner circle to insinuate that he was “psychologically flawed” and who still talks at least as if he subscribes to the ideals of old Labour.
Yet all the indications are that Brown has remade himself so completely as to have little more in common with an old-style socialist than Tony Blair himself. Admittedly, Brown has taken measures to help the poorest members of society, but he has been centrally implicated in the moral compromises that New Labour made for the sake of rendering itself electable after years during which the Labour Party suffered defeat after electoral defeat. It is Brown as much as Blair who presided over the jettisoning of the party’s socialist heritage and its unconditional embrace of US-style free market capitalism.
It is Brown as much as Blair who bears responsibility for the party’s support of what has proved a disastrous American foreign policy — if only because he declined to exercise his authority as Blair’s most powerful colleague to withhold it. And it is he as much as Blair who has sustained the party line that the war was indeed worth fighting and that those who question this are aiding and abetting the terrorists. It is, moroever, Brown quite as much as the prime minister who has contrived to push Iraq off the political agenda in Britain, endorsing the distasteful fiction that “we have moved on”.
Last week, the former New Labour minion, Derek Draper, now a psychotherapist, wrote in the Daily Mail about his old party’s tormented psychology. Senior New Labour figures, the former director of communications Alastair Campbell and the former Home Secretary David Blunkett are now known to have suffered severe depression.
Draper believes that New Labour’s exponents have been peculiarly liable to emotional conflict because the party was founded on deceit, on the institutionalized pretence that it was not selling out Labour’s traditional ideals.
What has distinguished Brown and Blair is that their capacity for denial seems far greater than that of their colleagues.
Even now they remain wedded to the belief that New Labour has exemplified humanitarian interventionism and is engaged in saving the world. There is little reason to think that either of them will have been much moved by Gen.
Dannat’s fears that their policies are breaking the British Army or by this week’s news that they may have implicated Britain in the deaths of as many as 655,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. The architects of New Labour appear impervious to reality.
