This is a strange juncture in geopolitical affairs, with the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites by the US and/or Israel often seeming more or less inevitable, yet with few able to believe that such an attack will actually be carried out. There is a widespread feeling that a strike against Iran would be a piece of cataclysmic recklessness that not even US President George W. Bush, with his impressive record of cataclysmic recklessness, could possibly perpetrate.
The news that the Bush administration is at last prepared to talk to Iran and Syria may suggest that the military option is receding. But one thing that surely does little to assuage fears that the US may indeed launch an attack on Iran is the categorical denial by Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair that anything of the kind is in prospect. This after all is a leader with an appetite for warmongering that has become proverbial. The plain fact is, moreover, that US aircraft carrier battle groups are massing in the Gulf with Britain pledging additional if token support in the form of mine sweepers. On anti-war websites, meanwhile, rumors have been circulating that the White House is coordinating the build-up to bombing Iran with the winding-down of Blair’s term of office, in the confidence that the British prime minister may once again step forward as an eloquent exponent of the Washington line. And who would care to say that in the event of the Bush administration calling upon his support Blair would withhold it?
It cannot be said that any of this is featuring much in British political debate. When last week the former Blairite ministers Alan Milburn and Charles Clarke launched a website to debate future Labour Party policy — a move seen as a barely concealed challenge to Blair’s anticipated successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown — foreign policy was the last thing on their agenda. What seems certain however is that Blair’s successor will feel bound to affect an altogether more independent posture vis-à-vis the United States. Blair himself is said to have recognized the need to distance himself from Washington. His announcement of a forthcoming drawing-down of Britain’s troops in Basra has been taken as a signal that Britain is no longer marching in lockstep with the US. With a possible Labour leadership contest looming, and beyond that a possible general election, the Blair government is certainly under mounting pressure to heed public opinion and not only begin military withdrawal from Iraq but re-establish the Anglo-American relationship on terms compatible with national self-respect. One minister, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, an aspirant deputy prime minister under Gordon Brown, has already broken ranks, pouring vitriol on the Bush administration and the bellicose neoconservatives gathered around it. A minister who fell mutely into line with the decision to attack Iraq now seeks to reaffirm his status as a progressive politician, one who was honorably deluded by what turned out to be defective intelligence.
But how far would Hain and others protest if Blair, while still in office, did indeed endorse a US attack on Iran? Admittedly, as it seems at present, it would probably require some major crisis — a devastating terrorist strike of plausibly Iranian complexion — for Blair to stand any chance of making British support for American military action against Iran at all domestically palatable. In such circumstances, he might, just conceivably, be able to enjoy one last hurrah as George Bush’s staunchest ally, as the courageous freedom fighter and humanitarian he fancies himself to be.
Yet whatever happens during this terminal phase of Blair’s premiership, the great majority of Blair’s colleagues, along with much of the parliamentary Labour Party, will be forever remembered for having slavishly sustained Blair in policy-making over Iraq which proved a recipe for catastrophe. During the years when Britain was ruled by Margaret Thatcher, it often seemed as if her ministers were whimpering lapdogs, incapable of independent thought or action. When, in a famous episode of the satirical television puppet show, Spitting Image, a waiter asked Mrs. Thatcher what vegetables she would like, she assumed he was referring not to an accompaniment to the raw meat she has ordered but to her lobotomized colleagues. Nobody could have guessed that Blair’s Cabinet would make Mrs. Thatcher’s vegetables seem like paragons of independence. The truth is that not merely the British Cabinet but the whole British Parliament has become stuffed with political vegetables, groveling career-minded sycophants whose instinct is to obey the party line on all occasions. Indeed, one of the few British politicians who thinks for himself, the Labour MP, Alan Simpson, recently resigned in despair over the endless timeserving cynicism of his colleagues. Those who refuse to follow the party line are likely to find themselves ostracized. This has been the fate of the Liberal MP and professional dissident Norman Baker. Fellow MPs perhaps regard Baker’s determination to question the official verdict that the government weapons inspector David Kelly committed suicide as a piece of harmless eccentricity, but his campaign to expose abuse of MPs’ expense allowances has made him a parliamentary pariah.
The other day, in a contribution to the online current affairs magazine, First Post, the journalist Matthew Carr spelled out what has long needed to be spelled out: That an appalling preponderance of people in British political life are actuated by nothing except base self-interest. It was base self-interest that motivated Peter Hain to keep his mouth shut as the US subjected Iraq to military “shock and awe”; it is base self-interest that motivates him now. Matthew Carr wrote that the British Parliament is these days characterized by a degree of conformity and docility that would be the envy of a police state, and few would want to brush this off as mere journalistic hyperbole. It follows that Tony Blair’s habit of vaunting Britain’s status as an exemplary democracy is not so much presumptuous as preposterous.
The irony is that if he has been surrounded by careerist yes-men, Blair himself has been a perfect model of servility in his relations with George W. Bush. What distinguishes him from his colleagues is that he seems truly to believe that he is doing the right thing rather than merely what is expedient. In his current BBC series on Blair’s years in office, the veteran broadcaster Michael Cockerell has underlined how from the outset Blair saw himself as a Christian crusader with a mission to rid the world of evil; one of Cockerell’s contributors pointed out that even in his leisure time this self-consciously pious prime minister seldom reads anything except religious texts. The question remains what has persuaded MPs to take Blair seriously even as he has mouthed messianic rhetoric of ever more fantastic extravagance. The explanation may be that it comforted them to believe that they were engaged in saving the world and not simply their own skins.
