This is a moment of acute shame for British people of conscience. Last week’s 50th anniversary of the “Suez crisis” — the botched neoimperialist attempt by Britain, France and Israel, to invade Egypt in 1956 — would have been cause enough for shame by itself. That shame has, however, been hugely compounded by the fact that Britain is once again displaying extraordinary moral shabbiness in its dealings with the Middle East.
It could be said that British foreign policy was a shambles at the time of Suez. It is certainly a shambles now. In recent days, it has been hard to make out just what Britain’s official stance is in relation to the Lebanon conflict and the question whether Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s provocation rates as proportionate. To begin with, it seemed the Foreign Office was echoing the line of Prime Minister Tony Blair as Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett likewise effectively endorsed the pro-Israel US position and declined to say anything that could be construed as criticism of the Jewish state. But then Beckett’s deputy, Kim Howells, adopted a somewhat different approach. After scorning those who called for an immediate cease-fire, Howells conceded that Israel’s wholesale bombing of the Lebanon was indeed disproportionate and even voiced something like indignation over Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The impression of Foreign Office incoherence was overwhelming and was hardly lessened by Howell’s impulsive comparison of the evacuation of British people from Lebanon with “Dunkirk”, the episode early in World War II when British troops were evacuated from Nazi-occupied France.
It often seems that under Tony Blair the British Foreign Office has been de-commissioned as an independent entity. All the signs are that its erstwhile role has been usurped by the prime minister who has in turn subcontracted foreign policy-making to the US.
The Foreign Office’s pathetically diminished status was illustrated last week when it became apparent that it was not the foreign secretary herself, let alone the prime minister, but the lowly Howells by whom Britain was being represented in Israel and in Lebanon. Little wonder if there has been mounting frustration among old Foreign Office hands, with their long tradition of informed engagement with the Arab world.
It may be that something of that frustration was finding expression in Howell’s garbled statements. Not that the junior minister deviated from the official British line for long; within days, he was emphasizing Israel’s right to defend itself, leaving no one in any doubt that he had been swiftly brought to heel by his political masters.
Still, it was remarkable that the Foreign Office came near to adopting an independent posture. For the New Labour government of Tony Blair has made a fetish of party discipline, with punitive consequences for those who breach it. From the very moment Blair became party leader in 1994, he and his colleagues went to extreme lengths to appear united, striving at all times to stay “on message”.
Many suspected that the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was relieved of his office for dismissing a possible Anglo-American attack on Iran as inconceivable — an outburst unwelcome to Blair, who seems far from ruling out the possibility of such an attack, and positively offensive to Washington’s neoconservative warmongers, with their determination to remake the entire Middle East. It has been suspected, too, that in replacing Straw with Margaret Beckett, Blair was anxious to placate Washington, while also ensuring that the Foreign Office would henceforth be occupied by a minister whose commitment to his own agenda was beyond question. A sometime leftist, Mrs. Beckett has long since abandoned her radical past and become what is known as a “safe pair of hands”, a trusted exponent of the party line (which among other things at the present time means insisting — despite much bloody evidence to the contrary — that things in Iraq are steadily improving). It is true that at the time of writing Beckett is protesting over the use by the US of Prestwick airport in Scotland as a staging post to refuel planes that are transporting bombs to Israel. It remains to be seen whether this is anything more than a token remonstrance.
Yet what is now plain — following the revelation of the private conversation between Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush at the recent G-8 conference — is that the Blair who behaves like an autocrat toward his own ministers turns into a groveling courtier in the presence of men whose power eclipses his own. It has been widely noted that Bush was sitting down eating nonchalantly at the G-8 as Blair stood beside him like a supplicant and vainly begged to be granted the opportunity to go to the Middle East and exercise his skills as a freewheeling diplomat.
The veteran political commentator Anthony Howard remarked that it was embarrassing to see the prime minister proposing himself not just as an errand boy but as such an enthusiastic errand boy on behalf of the US. Bush, however, is not the only powerful figure before whom Blair is given to genuflecting. His relationship with Rupert Murdoch is one of similar obsequiousness. And after all, there is little enough to distinguish the Australian media mogul from the American president in terms of geopolitical attitudes; both take for granted the beneficence of the US imperium (Murdoch long ago became an American citizen) and regard Israel with reverence.
If nothing else, the G-8 episode has made the British public humiliatingly conscious of the sheer depth of their leader’s pro-US sycophancy. There is growing public unease in Britain about being led by a politician who has turned the relationship between Britain and America into one of cringing servility.
At the same time, there is much disquiet about Blair’s propensity to abase himself in the presence of money. Blair has already been damaged by his close relationship with Lord Levy, the multimillionaire and party fund-raiser who was arrested and questioned by the police over allegations that the British government has been selling peerages to wealthy businessmen in return for donations to the Labour Party. It is worth remembering, incidentally, that Lord Levy, a British Jew with close ties to Israel, has been Blair’s “special envoy in the Middle East”.
It is hard to know what he has achieved in this capacity — apart, perhaps, from helping to establish Downing Street as “Israeli-occupied territory” (to borrow the expression applied by US Republican pundit, Pat Buchanan, to Washington DC). Meanwhile, Blair continues to praise Levy in fulsome terms. And it must be said that in the absence of Levy’s financial assistance, he would never have been able to subvert the old Labour Party and create what amounts to a party within the party.
In recent years, British conservative historians who lament Britain’s decline as a world power have popularized a taste for “counter-factual history”. The temptation to indulge in counter-factual speculation regarding Tony Blair has become hard to resist.
What difference might it have made if, instead of siding with George Bush over the Iraq war, Blair had joined the then chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Shroeder, and the president of France, Jacques Chirac, in opposing it? The war might have taken place anyway, but the US could not have treated concerted European opposition to it lightly.
What difference might he make even now if the White House could not rely on Blair’s endlessly vocal backing? It is also tempting to wonder, though, how much better off Britain and the world would be if Tony Blair had never pursued a career in politics at all.
