[A-List] Blair's perfomance, and strategy?

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Blair's performance at yesterday's newsconference in front of all the
most searching journalists, has left the analysts baffled at his
confidence. It comes soon after his authoritative speech to assembled UK
ambassadors. He clearly specialises in handling an intellectual audience
as well as Bush appeals to a folksy audience in short sentences with
visually based images.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=368133

In background discussions really authoritative people
recently retired from the UK Foreign Office, and from the UK armed
forces, do not agree with his certainty of the appropriateness of war,
but think it is looking inevitable. 

What is happening? My best guess is that as the leader of New Labour,
which has made opportunism a science, Blair is operating at a meta level
of perceptions, and tactical psychological momentum. 

Recent televised background diplomatic analysis of the surrender of the
Yugoslav regime, has illustrated how Blair was a key figure in
maintaining the pressure on Milosevic at a time when the western
coalition would have splintered, by linking the military scenarios with
the assumption that the west could not afford to be seen to fail. The
French and the Russians, while thinking they were making their
contribution to history, also played their part in the surrender. 

Blair signalled yesterday that he did not expect the Security Council to
oppose a US-UK military attack. He probably deliberately said the
following, 

> ?The only qualification we have added . . . is
> if you did have a breach, went back to the UN, but someone put an
> unreasonable or unilateral block down on action. In those circumstances,
> we have said we can?t be in a position where we are confined in that
> way.?

This was not a pedantic footnote. It was part of the pressure to ensure
that countries like France would not leave themselves isolated from the
US when the crunch comes, by vetoing a US initiative, massaged by the
Brits. He may not entirely mind the apparently embarrassing headline in
today's Independent:

Defiant Blair says UN has no veto on war (see URL above)

The jury which will take the ultimate decision on the US invasion, is
therefore set up by Blair as being "what would be reasonable"
in the minds of the Security Council members, who are all vulnerable to
intense military, economic, and diplomatic pressure by the US hegemon,
lubricated by the UK. 

Blair can therefore afford to act extremely confidently, because he can
see the direction things are going in, even if he does not know the final
detailed outcome. 

His theoretical agenda is more thoroughly worked out than Bush's. It is
that the whole world must be stabilised not just against the threat of
terrorism, but much more widely the threat of chaos. He is not actually
in favour of one war after another for the next ten years against all the
"rogue states" to remove their weapons of mass destruction, but
sees Britain's role as indispensibly that of the USA's thinking right
hand man. In that sense he is even more the leader of the incoming new
global Empire, than is Bush, who plays to domestic US audiences, and is
focussed on the next presidential election.]

Even if Blair does not command the UK audience on breakfast tv this
morning, he commands the intellectual audience of the international
diplomatic community, and the international elite media. Partly because
he is a good actor, but mainly because he has a theory which is
essentially a flexible but determined strategy of global Empire. That
Empire is of the dominance of global finance capitalism, moderated by a
bit of social democracy, with the legal extension of bourgeois right to a
world policed by the massive armed forces of the USA, with a little help
from the Brits, and with the strategic committee of the IMF chaired by
Gordon Brown.

My best hypothesis this morning.

Chris Burford

London