[A-List] Europe/US rivalry: Iraq

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

This good cop, bad cop routine is working - so far

Together, Blair's cheerleading and Chirac's criticism are taming Bush

Hugo Young
Tuesday October 22, 2002
The Guardian

Since this column went into temporary suspension on September 11 last, the
prospect of war over Iraq has grown a bit more distant, thanks to the
opposite stances taken by two national leaders. Tony Blair and Jacques
Chirac have each made vibrant contributions. There is no European foreign
policy; in fact there are three or four different Iraq positions among EU
member states. But Blair and Chirac have achieved a synthesis of influence.
Had they been colluding, which has been only intermittently the case, we
could call this the soft-cop/hard-cop routine. It may well come to nothing,
in face of the resistance of the third leader, George Bush. But the British
way and the French way have parallel, not contradictory, importance.

Blair is the soft and faithful ally. It becomes clearer why he finds Bush
easier to deal with than his old soulmate, Bill Clinton. This claim sounded
weird when it first seeped out of Downing Street. But the moral simplicities
Bush applies to the state of the world are like our leader's own. Whereas
Clinton was sinuous and ambivalent - in other words, a realist - Bush is as
bold as Blair in the lines he draws between good and evil states, and in his
righteous determination to move against the evil ones. Not only is Saddam
Hussein atrociously evil, today's Anglos and Americans agree he must be
destroyed.

For Blair this is a calculated as well as instinctive position. His mantra
is: show total fidelity to Washington in public, or sacrifice all influence
there in public and in private. For the last year he has excelled himself,
delivering onslaughts against Saddam, and making brazenly unproven claims of
linkage between Iraq and al-Qaida terrorism, with more fluency and power
than Bush can ever find. No enemies on the right: that has been Blair's
watchword in this matter, even though he's praying that the solutions of the
hard right, the unilateralist Pentagon right, are never ventured.

So far, though, he has not wasted his opportunities to avert this. That's to
his credit. It makes the case for his public cheerleading. Ever since Bush
came in, he has had a twin-track strategy, to be supportive in general, but
resistant in particular. If it hadn't been for Blair, Bush would never have
agreed to the Nato-Russia council, which was put together over the near-dead
body of Donald Rumsfeld. If it hadn't been for Blair, it's doubtful whether
Bush would have begun to understand the importance of having a strand of
nation-building - thin and cheap, but not yet abandoned - in his policy for
Afghanistan. And it's certain that Blair supplied a crucial push at the
right time, early in September, that took Bush to the UN and deepened
presidential awareness that the cost of ignoring the international community
would probably be to make an Iraq war self-destructive.

Without that, we would not be where we are today, listening to a seismic UN
security council wrangle over the words of an anti-Iraq resolu tion. All EU
governments whose opinion I've been able to gather agree that Blair has
played a crucial role here. Far from sneering at his relationship with Bush,
they privately see it as the last best hope for sanity. They wholly welcome
the fact that one European voice gets a hearing in Washington. Which is
where the French come in.

Unless Blair had helped open the door, France would have had no opportunity
to start rearranging the international house. Chirac, emboldened by his new
strength at home, became the critical figure, more so than Russia and
certainly more than China, in taming the American demand for a UN carte
blanche for war. This is a Gaullist assertion of French importance, but also
a serious attempt to refine the international order as Bush and the Pentagon
would like to shape it.

Washington has proved somewhat amenable to Chirac as well as Blair. We see
that public fealty is not the only route to influence. Each nation to its
history and tradition. The final text is still unagreed, but clearly will
not include the automatic resort to force, in the event of Saddam blocking
the inspectors, that Washington first de manded. As long as France, having
enraged the Americans with her nit-picking, knows when to quit arguing, the
episode will go down as a major success for French diplomacy. It may be
true, as Jack Straw keeps saying, that Iraq would not have budged on
inspectors without the threat of war. But it's also true that a UN, rather
than purely US, outcome will essentially be the result of French
persistence, as a result of which the world may be marginally safer.

That depends on what now happens. Internationalism, aka the UN, remains at
risk from two eventualities. The US might still wreck the UN by treating the
inspection process with total cynicism, and insisting on its right to attack
Iraq anyway: its spokesmen never fail to hint at this possibility, with
Straw chorusing alongside. Equally, the UN could wreck itself by continuing,
even in the face of Iraqi obstruction, to resist the military response that
is at least implicit in the compromise for which France has been pressing.
Each side, the Anglo-Americans and Arabic-Europeans, has to tread the most
delicate line. There is not a one-way street to disaster accessible by the
Americans alone.

Where the parallelism between Blair and Chirac breaks down, however, is in
the event of their shared objective failing. If Bush decides to attack
without UN approval, the damage caused to Britain will be more telling than
the anger aroused in Chirac and the French. It would present Blair with the
worst domestic political crisis of his prime ministership. He would have
been driven helplessly towards a war another leader had determined to start,
the morality of which was lost on much of his own party and perhaps a
majority of the British people but he himself had come wholly to believe in.
Chirac, by contrast, would be laughing all the way to the bank where oil,
trade and the affection of the Arab world are stored.

Both leaders have proved that Washington can be influenced for good; and
Washington, to its credit, has judged, contrary to the instincts of
vice-president Cheney and the loudest Pentagon civilians, that the spectacle
of making some concessions can do it no harm. Domestic American politics,
which is anti-terrorism but not all pro-war, is pushing the White House to
appear more reasonable. To that extent, it seems to have climbed down.

But Blair has every reason to fear Bush climbing back up again. However
compliant his rhetoric, the prime minister knows as well as anyone that
attacking Iraq is more likely to increase than diminish the threat from
al-Qaida. He talks a moral game, but is aware of the political costs it will
entail when he loses control of it. He would intensely prefer Iraq not to
happen, at least not yet. So would Chirac. The difference is that Chirac can
afford to make that clear, whereas Blair has left no retreat from
participating in an all-out invasion that could lead to several
catastrophes.