LONDON, 30 March 2003 — Tony Blair could still get his Churchill moment. Basra might fall, Baghdad could follow, with the British and Americans finally winning their long-promised tears-and-cheers welcome from a grateful Iraqi nation — and Blair would be vindicated as surely as Winston Churchill was six decades ago.
If that happens, the prime minister will carry all before him. “The doom-mongers got it wrong once again,” he will say, allowing himself a wry smile. “They lost heart because the first days of war were difficult; they forgot that Kosovo and Afghanistan had their dark days too. But we stuck with it and we were proved right.”
Any doubters on future plans — domestic or foreign — will be swept aside. Opponents will be lumped in with the anti-war crowd: naysayers who lack the prime minister’s wisdom and vision. For Tony Blair, victory in Iraq will mean victory everywhere.
But this week another scenario hoved into view. We are not there yet, not by any means, but in the past few days we have glimpsed an alternative future — one in which this ill-thought out and badly planned war claims the prime ministership of Tony Blair as yet another of its unintended victims.
Of course, events on the ground could rapidly unblock with Saddam’s regime belatedly following the Pentagon script and duly falling to its knees. But the way things stand now, this war is going badly for the prime minister. These first 10 days have disproved two of his core, pre-war arguments: that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that his people would instantly see foreign invasion as liberation. If, heaven forbid, Baghdad had let loose a chemical warhead or two, it would have confirmed everything Blair and George Bush had said: that, for all his lies, Saddam has these vile weapons and is prepared to use them.
Conversely, if there had been no Iraqi resistance, London and Washington would again have been vindicated: Iraqis hate their leader so much, they prefer invasion to their current plight. But this war has been neither hard enough nor easy enough to prove Blair right. Instead it is turning out to be a slog that shows he and the military planners read Iraq wrong. In the choice words of America’s top infantry commander, William Wallace: “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against.”
But in Blair’s war the defeats are not confined to the battlefield. Diplomatically he is being humiliated, running to Washington or Camp David or wherever Bush summons him, only to receive the most meager reward. So, having reassured a skeptical country and party that this war would be authorized by a second UN resolution, he broke his back to get one while the US barely broke a sweat. Blair worked the phones; Bush made no secret of his nonchalance whether he got a UN mandate or not.
Rebuffed once, Blair set his sights a little lower. Instead of UN approval before the war, he sought a UN role after it. That promise was enough to keep the UK’s International Development Secretary Clare Short on side, but even that is proving too much for Washington. Blair returned to Britain on Friday with next to nothing from Bush and certainly no firm promise that the US will let the UN administer post-war Iraq. At their joint press conference, Blair was reduced to talking merely of an “appropriate” post-conflict administration, while Bush pointedly did not mention the UN at all.
No topic confirms Blair’s humiliation more fully, though, than the Middle East peace process. Blair wants progress here partly because he genuinely believes in it and partly to mollify anti-war anger on both the Arab street and in his own Labour Party. And what does Blair have to show, in this area, for his shoulder-to-shoulder loyalty to Bush? Nada, zip and zilch. All he has managed to extract is a promise to publish a document — the much-vaunted road map — which was written last autumn and which, in itself, has no teeth at all.
Bush made that pledge on the eve of war, when London was still trying to win over the waverers: he probably said it to help Blair out, with his Cabinet and in the Security Council. But it has still not appeared. Blair is repeatedly asked to explain this fact, and watching him make excuses for Washington’s laggard behavior is becoming excruciating.
First, we were told the road map would appear once the Palestinians had appointed a prime minister. On Tuesday Blair revealed that the goal posts had shifted: the new Palestinian premier, Abu Mazen, would have to name his Cabinet first. Then, on Thursday, Blair explained that Abu Mazen’s “confirmation had to be properly administered” — whatever that means.
A British prime minister is having to cover for the fact that Washington is not interested in advancing Middle East peace while this war is on — and maybe not afterward either.
