Tony Blair’s haggard face and conspicuous loss of weight have been the subject of much comment. Fifty in May (and reported to be surviving at present off 4 hours sleep a night), Britain’s crusading, workaholic prime minister looks his age.
Some see Blair’s bloodshot eyes as badges of honor, testimony to his unsparing efforts to convince the world that the time to act over Saddam Hussein is now. You may not agree with him, such people say, but you can’t fault Tony Blair’s sincerity.
As he put his case for attacking Iraq to the British Parliament last Tuesday, Tony Blair played the sincerity card with greater zeal than ever before. He was, to be sure, fighting for his political life. One of his key ministers, Robin Cook, had already resigned over the issue; another, Clare Short, was threatening to resign. And now he was facing the possibility of a backbench revolt by anti-war Labour MPs that could have plunged his leadership of the Labour Party — not to mention his position as prime minister — into terminal crisis.
In the event, this did not happen. When the votes were counted, approximately one third of the parliamentary Labour Party turned out to oppose Blair’s pro-war stance. But to all intents and purposes, the rest of the party, together with a substantial number of his Tory opponents, were on the prime minister’s side. Though the rebel vote was the biggest of modern times, Blair and his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw permitted themselves sly smiles when the result was announced. They had hardly secured a great victory but they had pulled off a successful exercise in damage limitation.
Addressing the House of Commons in typically self-dramatizing style, Tony Blair restated his conviction that posterity would never forgive him if he failed to tackle the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Not for the first time, his audience appeared greatly impressed by the sheer earnestness of his performance. Yet for all its passion and rhetorical hyperbole, Blair’s speech was by no means the sole factor in keeping the Labour rebellion down to manageable proportions.
The truth was that behind the scenes Labour Party managers were exerting bare-knuckle pressure on the party’s rank and file to endorse the government’s pro-war line. Blair himself spoke to many of his MPs, issuing promises to some and threats to others; his busy wife, Cherie, meanwhile, though she occupies no official position, set aside time to make cajoling telephone calls to wavering female back benchers.
Two other things helped to forestall the governmental “meltdown” that many half-anticipated: One was Claire Short’s pusillanimous withdrawal of her resignation threat (a decision that has transformed her from a moderately admired politician into a laughing stock). The other was the cynical readiness of the prime minister and his colleagues to exploit anti-French feeling — to encourage the belief that they had been forced into waging war by the anti-war intransigence of French President Jacques Chirac.
Francophobia, it must be said, is nothing like so intense in Britain as in the United States — where the French are being portrayed as monsters of ingratitude for failing to line up alongside a country which rescued them from the Nazis during World War II. Nevertheless, contempt for the French has been widespread enough in Britain of late. The warmongering tabloid The Sun depicted the French president as a worm for insisting that France would exercise its veto if there was a pro-war majority in the UN Security Council.
It was in the scornful spirit of The Sun that British Foreign Secretary Jack Staw described as “extraordinary” the behavior of the French in undermining Britain’s diplomatic endeavors. Yet it was Straw’s own outburst that was extraordinary. For he was, it seemed, insinuating that France had stopped Britain from securing a resolution in the Security Council that could have prevented war. Bent on pinning the blame for the whole Iraq crisis on France, Straw maintained that but for Jacques Chirac, Britain would have secured a majority vote in favor of declaring war on Iraq unless Saddam Hussein complied unconditionally with the UN’s demands. Given such a vote, Straw intimated, Iraq would have opted for maximum cooperation with Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors, and Britain would never have had to join the United States in the business of international law-enforcement.
No doubt France’s reservations about the war have as much to do with pragmatism as high principle: This is a country with long-established commercial connections with Iraq; it is a country, too, with the largest population of Muslims in Europe, and with more reason than most to wish to avoid a conflict that might have divisive domestic consequences. Nor can there be much doubt that Jacques Chirac, in line with Gen. de Gaulle’s grandiose conception of France’s destiny, takes a special pleasure in saying “non” to the United States. (Chirac was perhaps all the more inclined to strike a haughty Gaullist attitude after US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld characterized France and Germany as “old Europe,” with the implication that they were of small consequence in Rumsfeld’s brave new unipolar world.)
For all this, the fact remains that Chirac and his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin have been arguing against war on grounds that are eminently rational and persuasive. Their contention was that mounting a pre-emptive attack on Iraq should be regarded as the last resort, a course of action to be undertaken only when all else has failed. And after all, in pressing the case for giving the weapons inspectors more time, they were reflecting the sentiments of much of the rest of the world.
The failure to acknowledge any of this by the government of Tony Blair was cynical stuff, British politics at its most ignominious. If the French are outraged by their neighbor’s shabby conduct, it is perfectly understandable. Seldom have they had more cause for to think of Britain as “perfidious Albion.”
It is going to take a very long time to restore Anglo-French goodwill. When they met last week, Chirac and Blair could barely bring themselves to be civil with one another. Not even the stridently Europhobic Margaret Thatcher presided over such a sharp deterioration, such an extreme chill, in the relationship between London and Paris as the ostensibly Europhile Tony Blair has done.
A cuckoo in his own party’s nest, this irrepressibly pro-American British politician is also, it appears, a cuckoo in the nest of the European Union.
Arab News Opinion 23 March 2003
