[A-List] Britain/US split: special relationship

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

A touch of farce on bumpy road to war

Washington diary Julian Borger

Julian Borger

A line of five gleaming black minivans sped through the Maryland back
roads last Saturday afternoon, taking American and British journalists
to the presidential retreat at Camp David to witness the Bush-Blair "war
summit" on Iraq.

Driven by silent, gum-chewing drivers in grey suits, black ties and
sunglasses, the dark-windowed motorcade glided over hills and through
forests in dramatically close formation in a nonchalant display of White
House panache and professionalism.

At least that was the way it looked, until a day-tripper driving ahead
of us suddenly decided to stop and pull over to admire the view,
triggering a chain reaction as one van after another smashed into the
vehicle in front. In the blink of an eye, a slick press operation had
been reduced to a multiple pile-up, amid a cloud of steam hissing from
buckled radiators and a trail of worrying metaphors.

Here we were, Americans and Britons together, carving our way towards a
lofty objective but travelling too fast and too close, our hubris
exposed as slapstick by a single unforeseen incident. On this occasion
only the pride of the taciturn drivers was injured. The journalists all
piled into relief vehicles and made it to Camp David in time to see the
prime minister's helicopter touch down and the two men shake hands and
grin.

A war in Iraq will be quite another matter, yet each side in this
"special relationship" seems to be egging the other on to move faster,
while the Blair government has been careful to ensure that scarcely a
chink of light has escaped between Iraq policies in London and
Washington.

Both Bush and Blair have breezed ahead of public opinion, although Blair
far more so than the US president. At least a majority of Americans
think a war on Saddam Hussein would probably be justified. They would
just like the president to jump through a few more hoops - consulting
the UN and Congress, for example - before sending in American sons and
daughters.

The British don't think there are grounds for a war at all. Blair's
affirmation that Britain should be ready to pay a "blood price" for
friendship with Washington seemed to send a shudder through the
collective national spine (though he did not use the expression himself
but rather agreed with an interviewer who had phrased his question that
way).

The transatlantic relationship is an echo chamber reverberating with
historical resonance, but the echo on this occasion was all the more
unsettling. The last time a "blood price" was raised, it was by Lyndon
Johnson's defence secretary, Robert McNamara, who was trying to cajole
Harold Wilson into committing British troops to Vietnam. Wilson
demurred, and looks a wiser man for having done so.

The "special relationship" was not worth British blood shed in a bad
cause. And naturally the awkward liaison survived in the long term, even
scaling new heights with the Reagan-Thatcher and Clinton-Blair Atlantic
trysts.

So why is Blair prepared to go where Wilson refused to tread, in the
face of stiff resistance from the public and his own party? One reason
is that he genuinely seems to believe the cause is just. Both the prime
minister and the US president keep Bibles by their beds, and both
believe they are fighting evil in its purest form.

Blair promises to make believers out of the rest of us with his dossier
on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, but everything that has been
leaked so far about that document suggests it will add little clarity to
a murky picture.

The sense of conviction is underpinned by a certain degree of political
advantage. The British Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, has been
quick to seize on any hint of a policy gap between Blair and Washington.
By keeping close to Bush, the prime minister dampens a possible rallying
cry for Tory revival. But now, of course, the danger comes from within
and he has to watch for knives being unsheathed at the Labour party
conference later this month.
The third argument for keeping the relationship special is the idea
that, through the alliance, Britain can wield greater power than a
small, damp European island has any reason to aspire to. In other words,
we Brits can continue to be the Greeks to the Americans' Romans, as
Harold Macmillan once condescendingly suggested.

The real question hanging over Camp David last weekend was whether there
was any justification for that fond hope. Blair committed troops quickly
and wholeheartedly to the Afghan campaign, and imagined that Bush was on
board for the rest of his envisaged ride - a remaking of Afghanistan and
the rest of the third world with a new deal for foreign aid and trade.

It has not come to pass. Bush seemed to warm to the whole
"nation-building thing" for as long as it took to oust the Taliban, and
then quickly became fixated on the next target in the war on terror.
Scurrying to keep up on the new road, Blair now casts the Iraq campaign
as a fresh opportunity to make a better world. But there is little
evidence that Bush will be any more interested in post-Saddam Iraq than
in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The hard reality underlying the US-British "special relationship" is
that it has been very special to successive British governments and of
sporadic interest to postwar American presidents.

When the British embassy tried to book a room at Andrews Air Force base
for the prime minister to brief the lobby correspondents, the officer in
charge simply refused. It would just create a precedent, the colonel
argued,allowing anyone to barge in and take over parts of the base. "But
this is your closest ally," the British embassy official insisted.
"Right now, we're your only ally." It made no difference. Only a call to
the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, saved Blair from having to
hold his press conference in a corridor or on the runway.

We do not know yet if Blair's investment in Bush has paid dividends this
time. The answer to that question will probably emerge in the corridors
of the UN, where it will quickly become clear whether the US is
genuinely interested in a security council consensus on new weapons
inspections or whether it is merely going through the motions of
multilateralism while putting its troops in place.

If it turns out to be the latter case, then the only thing special about
this relationship will be its absurd lack of symmetry.

The Guardian Weekly 12-9-2002, page 6