Who would have thought that the British peace movement would discover a powerful ally in the person of Tony Blair? After all, if there were a Nobel Prize for War, no living person would have a clearer claim to it than the former UK prime minster with his insatiable appetite for military action. Yet arguably it was in no small measure because of Blair that the present UK Prime Minister David Cameron failed to get parliamentary backing for missile strikes against Syria, suffering the humiliation of being the first British leader in 200 years to lose control of his own foreign policy.
In the run-up to the Aug. 29 parliamentary debate in London that has proved so consequential, Blair published a bellicose article in the London Times urging the necessity of Western intervention in Syria. It was rapidly apparent how far he has lost favor even among the patriotic conservative readership of the newspaper still seen as the mouthpiece of the British establishment. The following day, the Times letters page gave pride of place to a stinging riposte from Gen. Sir Michael Rose. To solicit the views of Tony Blair on such a matter, observed the distinguished retired soldier, was like seeking advice from an arsonist on how to put out a fire.
Blair had argued that the West must stop wringing its hands over Syria and act. He should, in Rose’s view, wring his own hands and explain to the people of the Middle East how he proposed to atone for his part in the debacle of the Iraq war. Rose recalled how, after presiding over the disaster of Britain’s Gallipoli campaign in 1915, the penitent Winston Churchill volunteered to redeem his honor by risking his life for his country as a serving soldier. That his contempt for Blair is widely shared among the British public and its parliamentary representatives is certain. The Conservative MP, Andrew Bridgen, declared that Blair’s article was the “nail in the coffin” of the case for British military intervention in Syria, indicating that not a few of the MPs who voted against it did so precisely because Blair was pressing for it.
Millions of British people remain bitterly indignant that Tony Blair got away with deceiving his country over the case for going to war against Iraq in 2003 — that with total impunity he flouted the democratic process, instigating military action that precipitated untold death and destruction before brazenly embarking on a vastly lucrative post-prime ministerial career as globe-trotting consultant. And while it is true that Blair has in no formal sense been discredited, his cynical conduct has had lasting consequences, implanting among British people profound skepticism about calls for further British military intervention in the Middle East. In the vote over Syria, British MPs were acutely mindful that public opinion was heavily biased against it. For all the horror that chemical attacks in Syria have evoked, few can forgive or forget the way Blair stampeded Britain into attacking Iraq with spurious claims that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction against British interests in 45 minutes.
Commentators have observed that David Cameron lost the vote on Syrian intervention because of the “shadow of Iraq”. It is more to the point to invoke the “shadow of Tony Blair”. The irony is that, in principle at least, there may be a more credible case for intervening in Syria than ever there was for intervening in Iraq.
If Blair’s war mongering has evoked a furious backlash, so has his corresponding readiness to outsource UK foreign policy to Washington. Following British intervention under Blair in the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001, and subsequently, in Iraq, Britain was scoffed at as America’s poodle, a country whose vaunted “special relationship” with the US actually bore witness to British impotence. Now, against all expectation, the British Parliament has conspicuously declined to accede to American wishes. Nobody anticipated when David Cameron rushed to the House of Commons after a phone conversation with Barack Obama that he would fail to get parliamentary support for prompt participation in a US-led strike against Syria. Still less was it foreseen that following the vote in London the US president would feel obliged to heed the British example and appeal to Congress for a democratic mandate before initiating military action.
In 1776, America declared independence from Great Britain. Belatedly, after a long era during which it has appeared ever more like a put-upon appendage of its former colony, Britain is showing signs that it might be ready to declare independence from the US. What is bizarre is the strident insistence of philo-American sections of the British media that the parliamentary verdict against intervention in Syria has left Britain isolated in the world, shorn of political and moral significance. For how could this be when the vote in question has had such tangible consequences on the other side of the Atlantic and also obliged French President Francois Hollande to pay closer attention to public opinion than he was previously inclined to do?
The striking thing is that those who revile the British democratic decision not to intervene in Syria are precisely the people who are forever trumpeting the virtues of democracy — except when it delivers a message that they find unpalatable.
Tony Blair, meanwhile, consoles himself that British opposition to intervention in Syria has nothing to do with abiding outrage over his duplicity but springs from public consternation about the Iraq war’s unhappy aftermath. What he seems incapable of grasping is that his advocacy is now wholly counter-productive. The more he champions his favorite causes — Western interventionism, unconditional UK loyalty to the US — the more he brings them into disrepute. In spite of himself, this war-fixated, slavishly pro-American British politician has helped restore his country’s self-respect while becoming for all practical purposes Britain’s ambassador for peace.
