Editorial»
The end of Bush and Blair’s friendship?
JAN 16 - The Hutton Inquiry report on the death of the British scientist David Kelly, dealing with Downing Street’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is scheduled to be released later this month. As the date approaches, the infatuation of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain with President George W. Bush seems to be waning. One cannot call the Blair-Bush relationship a love affair, because love affairs are reciprocal, and on George’s side this affair seems to have been a heartless flirtation. Tony was useful while he was useful; and now, as the Hank Snow song has it, George has moved on.
For Tony it was the real thing. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, his instructions to his government have been to stick tight to the United States in support of everything it does. This was justified politically as a measure of strategic realism: The United States is the superpower. As Winston Churchill said, Britain - if it has to choose - must choose the seas, not the European Continent. Blair’s commitment, nourished by speeches to the U.S. Congress and by weekends at Camp David, first began to falter on practical matters. Now, according to The Daily Mirror, “the diplomatic temperature is in the deep freeze.”
The latest blow suffered by Blair was self-inflicted, but had to do with the prime minister’s total support for Bush on the weapons issue. It came when Blair, during his New Year’s visit to his troops in Iraq, told them that U.S. forces looking for weapons had found laboratories “irrefutably proving” that weapons of mass destruction had existed. An unscrupulous but enterprising journalist quoted the statement to L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, without sourcing it, and Bremer called it ridiculous - “a red herring” probably invented by someone “who wanted to undermine the coalition.”
A fundamental problem has been that Washington never kept Blair’s government in the picture. U.S. policy was driven by highly unpredictable domestic political developments, and by parochial interests not readily comprehensible outside Washington. This put the British in the position of following without knowing where they were going. Blair also has had to take account of the annoyance of his military and political people in Iraq with American tactics in the guerrilla war.
The choice in December of still more massive shock-and-awe attacks on neighborhoods or tribal areas suspected of being the source of attacks reflected what the British military consider a notion that shows of force - and they were shows preceded by warnings - can intimidate a nationalist insurgence. Experience suggests the opposite. The British military is better at counterinsurgency, much more attentive to civilian interests and more apprehensive about the long-term consequences of what they do. Posted on: 2004-01-17 04:14
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