[A-List] Britain/US split

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Once again New Labour insider Hugo Young flies some kites in order to
test which way the wind is blowing, as the debates currently occupying
certain corridors of UK state power find themselves in the spotlight.


Perhaps a Russian-British lobby against war on Iraq?

If Blair persists in speaking for Bush, his voice will get smaller and
smaller

Hugo Young
Tuesday February 19, 2002
The Guardian

The word that describes Tony Blair's attitude towards George Bush is
insouciant. He seems worried about almost nothing. The main thing is
that he remains inside the loop.

The two men talk often. They have most intimate and honest dealings,
according to a senior Downing Street insider. These conversations
underwrite the British claim never yet to have been taken by surprise,
in any phase of the campaign against terrorism. They leave Mr Blair very
sure of Britain's relations with the US, which have been marked by
concerted action as well as words: a lot less crucial than Pakistan's
but, as usual, more important than that of any other European.

Mr Blair also accepts the shift that has smoothly taken place in
Washington's analysis, carrying the anti-terror targeting far beyond
al-Qaida and into the countries that are producing weapons of mass
destruction, or WMD. From global networks to an axis of national evils,
in one easy slide. Not all EU member states are so ready to agree with
this, though none of them, apparently, has conveyed as much to the prime
minister's office. He feels comfortable on all sides. The stories of
transatlantic rifts, in his opinion, are exaggerated. The possibility
that the most painful rift might cleave through his own person, as he
becomes less a bridge than an illusion linking America to Europe, does
not arise.

Behind the scenes, in the ceaseless turmoil of diplomatic activity
between London and Washington, things are a little more complicated. The
unevenness of leverage is showing, starting in Afghanistan itself, where
the British-led peacekeeping force is desperately short of manpower.
Though Mr Blair was pleased that, after Christmas, the US offered more
resources to rebuild Afghanistan than it had done before, peacekeeping
work by soldiers is another matter. A senior British diplomat was sent
to Washington last week to press Secretary Rumsfeld to provide an
American element for this work, but got an adamantly dusty reply. There
will be no US peacekeepers, he was told.

There are also disagreements over Iran, which for the US is becoming a
more immediate source of rage than Iraq. Iran's nuclear supplies from
Russia, Iran's alleged arms deliveries to the Palestinians, Iran's
double-talk about not assisting al-Qaida operatives on the run have all
fired up indignation in Washington, which has not helped Britain's
self-appointed role as cultivator of the moderate politicians against
the extremist clerics inside the Iranian power elite. Jack Straw, the
hapless exponent of that policy, does not carry much clout with any of
the US leadership.

The big challenge, however, is certainly Iraq, the main WMD state, where
the escalation of American threats to act is meeting continued British
wishful thinking that such action will not happen any time soon. Every
relevant politician and official I've heard from in London says the same
neat thing: that they will be shown a plan if an invasion is to happen,
and have so far not been shown one. The closest they've got to it is the
intelligence that several plans have been presented to the president, by
the Pentagon and the CIA, and he has rejected all of them, mainly on the
grounds that he doesn't yet believe there are indigenous forces on the
Iraqi ground who can do the job the Northern Alliance did as US proxies
in the takeover of Kabul.

This is a highly relevant point. The stoking-up of the case for
regime-change in Baghdad has begun to make it seem inevitable that an
attack will be launched. The American press resounds with battle-plans.
Colin Powell seems to have come off the fence. The momentum builds. And
yet, without credible oppositionist forces in place, the strategy risks
getting muddled and therefore very dangerous.

For Bush, moreover, the stakes in Iraq will be much higher than they
have been against al-Qaida, where the uncaptured Osama bin Laden, once
the apex of all targets, has been shuffled into pretended irrelevance
somewhere in Pakistan. Any attack against Iraq that allows Saddam
Hussein to be spirited into the mountains will be deemed a calamitous
failure. If the attack succeeded, Bush might prepare for glorious
coronation to a second term in 2004. But this time there has to be no
ambiguity. If an invasion was seen to fail, whether by Saddam surviving
or through the creation of an irresolvable mess in Iraq and the Middle
East, the voters of America would destroy the president as soon as they
had the chance. This is not a risk he will lightly take, even on the
back of his unremitting oratory since Kabul fell.

My reading of Mr Blair is that he fervently hopes that such hard-headed
assessments of political survival prevail. Parts of London, maybe
including himself, see an Iraqi invasion as a fearful distraction from
the defeat of global terror networks, a task that requires, above all,
intelligence collaboration from many Islamic states that would be far
more opposed than Europe to an invasion plan. Meanwhile, Mr Blair does
have options, improbable though it may be that he sees them this way.

One is to edge towards making common cause with continental Europe, and
especially with Vladimir Putin, the other great leader whom he once set
out specially to cultivate. Putin is taken for granted by the Americans
almost as condescendingly as are the British. Neither Britain nor Russia
has yet got much out of the concessions they've made in support of
Washington's post-September 11 demands. They benefit, of course, from
the necessary dismantling of al-Qaida that the US has achieved. But so
far they've been treated like reliable puppets, and Putin, for one, is
showing signs that he has had enough.

His delivery of a firm warning to Washington against attacking Iraq is
something other Europeans may want to latch on to, though so far they
have been relatively discreet. He's not obliged to tolerate forever the
US bases he allowed into the Russian sphere of influence in Uzbekistan
and Tajikistan. Assembling a united, pragmatic case against a violent,
destabilising attempt to depose Saddam is work that the British and
Russian leaders are well placed to do. If Mr Blair were to express even
one-tenth of Chris Patten's anguished critique of Washington, he could
have twice the influence.

He disagrees. If he did that, he thinks, he would be dealt out of the
game. So he will doubtless cling to the second option, which is to
accept, without any abrupt attempt to shape it, whatever Washington
decides on. The bottom line of British policy has invariably been drawn
against the wall where British imagination is permanently imprisoned.
Any deviation from that, conventional wisdom says, would create an
earthquake in international relations.

None the less, the Blair insouciance must surely be getting flakier.
Though it may dictate the need for compliance in exchange for all those
special one-to-one conversations, this looks like carrying a price.
Instead of being Europe's voice in America and America's in Europe,
Britain runs the risk some day soon of having a small voice, and smaller
audience in either place.

Full article at:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/attacks/comment/0,1320,652646,00.html

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx