Anxious to link Saddam Hussein to the general threat of anti-Western terrorism, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is abandoning rational argument in favor of uninhibited emotionalism. The other day he exhorted fellow British members of Parliament with doubts about the impending war to consider how they would have reacted had he informed them in the days before Sept. 11 that there were dangerous people in Afghanistan — people who needed to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The prime minister was quite certain that nobody would have believed him. And yet just look what happened, he exclaimed — projecting as he did so the triumphal air of a barrister who feels that he can now rest his case.
Many among the British press hailed Blair’s House of Commons performance as a bravura stuff. Rather fewer seem to have pondered its actual substance. As a result, Blair’s improbable suggestion that timely intervention in Afghanistan could have prevented the catastrophe of Sept. 11 went largely unchallenged. One journalist, however, who found what the prime minister had to say less than cogent was the seasoned London political columnist Alan Watkins. With some reason did Watkins characterize Blair’s speech as so much “raving”.
If Blair’s efforts to justify waging war on Iraq are becoming increasingly frantic, it is not hard to see why. He is said to believe that if and when British soldiers begin fighting, the British public will rally behind them — after all, this was what happened at the time of the Falklands War in 1981 and at the time of the Gulf War ten years later. Conceivably, it could happen again. Yet at present, far from strengthening, public support for war is declining sharply; it may shrink still further now that Britain is at odds over the Iraq issue with its chief European partners, France and Germany — not to mention with Russia and China and much of the rest of the world. Opinion polls currently indicate that without a mandate from the United Nations, British people are against attacking Iraq by a margin of 2 to 1. Nor can Blair dismiss opposition to the war as springing merely from the “usual suspects”, from that familiar stage army of British “bleeding hearts” and anti-US leftists, such as the playwright Harold Pinter and the voluble old upper class socialist Tony Benn.
Apart from swelling numbers of ordinary people, the anti-war movement is attracting many media celebrities — individuals not exactly known for political agitation, like the football pundit, Jimmy Hill, and the former wife of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall. Without doubt, opposition to the war is fast becoming as broad as it is deep. The organizers of the demonstration scheduled to take place in London on Feb. 15 (as part of a co-coordinated anti-war protest embracing many countries) are anticipating a turnout of historic magnitude.
It must be of particular concern to Blair that the Daily Mirror, a British popular newspaper traditionally supportive of the Labour Party, is emerging as the chief public medium of the anti-war movement. This week the paper invited like-minded readers to sign its front page anti-war petition. Some 15,000 people responded immediately. The paper also scored a not inconsiderable PR coup in recruiting to its peace campaign the Falklands War hero Simon Weston. A soldier who suffered disfiguring facial burns during the Falklands conflict, this esteemed figure wonders if the British public really has the heart for a war against Iraq. Weston has reservations, too, about how well-equipped the British Army is for fighting a war. Why, he demands, are the “best trained soldiers in the world” being asked to go into battle with rifles and radios of proven inefficiency?
Blair’s problem is that he lacks credible grounds for involving Britain in war against Iraq. There is no palpable provocation in this instance, no clear-cut casus belli — such as there was in the case of the aforementioned conflicts. The invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1981 constituted an undeniable breach of international law. Ridiculous though the Falklands War appeared to many observers (the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges memorably likened his country and Britain to “two bald men fighting over a comb”), it could be justified as an honorable struggle to repel an illegal invasion, to right a flagrant wrong. The same was true of the effort to drive Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait. It was because both these military actions wore an aspect of legitimacy that ultimately the bulk of the British people backed them.
Launching a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, however — and without presenting evidence that the regime of Saddam Hussein represents anything like an imminent threat — is a very different proposition. Small wonder Blair is finding making the case for it to be a tough sell. Few share, it seems, the prime minister’s conviction that there is a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden; few appear persuaded, either, that invading Iraq is going to lessen the threat of terrorism. Indeed, it may be that a lot of people are worried that starting a war will actually increase the danger of terrorist attacks in Britain itself.
What is perhaps handicapping Blair above all, though, is the growing perception that he is Washington’s “kept man”, a British prime minister who routinely does the bidding of his American masters. This perception is especially damaging in the eyes of his own party: That a leader of the Labour Party should have entered into so servile a relationship with a rampantly right-wing US leader is anathema to the party’s left-wing die-hards. But because the current American president is little liked or respected in Britain at large, it is also undermining Blair’s standing in the eyes of the whole British public.
Angered that he is widely seen as George Bush’s poodle, Blair recently declared that “anti-Americanism” is an unhealthy attitude, a “foolish indulgence”. At the same time, he insisted that his support for America over the matter of Iraq is based on what he truly believes is right. Yet in stressing that he is not the United States’ obedient servant, he is running the risk of seeming to protest too much — and of thereby simply entrenching the impression that he is in fact precisely what he claims not to be.
Blair believes that the Anglo-American relationship has served the world well — and that it will continue to do so. That America has in the past been a force for good in the world, many older Britons would doubtless agree. But in 2003 it is far from clear that most British people really want a leader who positively advertises their country’s status as America’s 51st state. By making more or less unconditional common cause with President George Bush, Britain’s impetuous prime minister is pursuing a high-risk strategy which may yet cost him his political career.
— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance writer since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
