[A-List] UK state: strategic dilemma

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

While europhobes applaud the Swedes for rejecting eurozone membership,
europhile Hugo Young rings alarm bells that really ought to be the concern
of those supposedly concerned to protect the "sovereignty" of the "United
Kingdom". Whatever you think of Young or his position, the fundamental
dishonesty of the eurosceptics, including people like John Laughland, is
laid bare by Young's absolutely correct exposition of the transatlantic
"relationship" today. Forget his use of hyperbole -- Thatcher was pushed
precisely because she did take her eye off the ball. But the message is
clear and essentially true.

Jack Straw's position in all this is interesting. A clear marker has been
laid down, enabling him to extricate himself from the wreckage that is
surely the fate of this utterly tawdry administration.

-----

Under Blair, Britain has ceased to be a sovereign state

At last we see the consequences of our country's abject thrall to the US

Hugo Young
Tuesday September 16, 2003
The Guardian

Secret intelligence, we have certainly learned, is not a science. For some
people this is a grave disillusionment. Brought up on fictionalised versions
of an impenetrable world, they perhaps imagined it had access to
super-secret stuff that quite transcended the vague banalities they could
read in the press. It came from deep within, couched with an exactitude the
rest of us were not meant to know about. New prime ministers, first entering
this secret world, have attested to their fascination and, in the beginning,
their ready credulity. I suspect that Tony Blair was one of these.

I'm prepared to believe that he published September's dossier of claims
against Saddam Hussein for good reasons. He wanted to admit the voters to
some of the secret intelligence. The trouble is that it had lost its magic.
He deprived it of such precision as it ever had. From being the ice-cold
product of cautious analysts, it became political. Mr Blair became his own
chief intelligence analyst. And his attitude became the opposite of cool. It
was meant to serve a wholly political purpose.

On the one hand, we now know that senior intelligence people were
categorically advising in February that their assessment pointed towards
more terrorism not less if we went to war in Iraq. Blair simply rejected it.
On the other hand, when remonstrating with sceptics in private he pleads the
mind-blowing evidence that crosses his desk from many intelligence people at
home and abroad as if it were raw gospel truth. If you could only see it, he
says. If you knew what I do, you would never dream of challenging the need
to go to war to stop weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of
terrorists.

Intelligence, in other words, has become a flexible friend, a political
instrument. Its chief agent, John Scarlett, moreover, has become a crony of
No 10 rather than a distant and detached truth-teller. Among the many
corruptions this war has brought about, we can therefore say, is the
degradation of what was once advertised, and globally agreed, to be a jewel
in the Whitehall apparatus.
This happened for a prior reason, which is not new but deserves frequent
repetition. The intelligence, culminating in the dossier, had to fit a prior
decision. This has been the great over-arching fact about the war that Blair
will never admit but cannot convincingly deny. He was committed to war
months before he said he was. Of course, he wanted it buttered up. He wanted
a UN sanction. He fought might and main to push Bush in that direction. But
he was prepared to go to war without it.

He needed this skewed intelligence to make the case, and he didn't really
mind what he had to say to get it. He had made his commitment to Bush,
stating among other extraordinary things that it was Britain's national task
to prevent the US being isolated. But he was also in thrall to the mystic
chords of history. He could not contemplate breaking free of ties and
rituals that began with Churchill, and that both Downing Street and the
Ministry of Defence - the Foreign Office is somewhat wiser - have
cultivated, out of fear and expectation, for decades.

He was driven by something else, which none of his predecessors, not even
Margaret Thatcher, has succumbed to. Without exception they all kept their
eye on the British ball. They could all make a kind of case for a profitable
connection between the hard British national interest and occasional
benefits from the special relationship. For Blair, in his Bush-Iraq mode,
this has been a lot more theoretical: the theory of pre-emptive intervention
in a third country's affairs, for moral purposes, at the instigation of the
power whose hyperdom he cannot resist.

What does this mean? That we have ceased to be a sovereign nation. There's
been a tremendous amount of talk about sovereignty in recent years. It
became, and remains, the keynote issue at the heart of our European debate.
Something to do with sovereignty was clearly operative in the Swedes'
decisive rejection of the euro: more, many observers suspect, than the
minutiae of economic policy - important, in the Swedish case, though those
were. What it means to be an independent nation is a question that touches
the wellsprings of a people's being. Yet it is one that our leader, as
regards this war, has simply disguised from his people, egged on by
sufficient numbers of North American papers and journalists who seem to be
wholly delighted at the prospect of surrendering it.

I do not believe this obtuseness can last for ever. If there is one virtue
in the unfinished history of the Iraq war, it is that the British may
finally wake up to what the special relationship is doing to their
existence. Do I have to qualify that with assertions of my decades of
affection for America, my sense that very many Americans detest this war as
much as I do, even my optimism that if George Bush can be forced from office
a certain sanity will return to the world? Probably it has to be said.
Meanwhile, though, Mr Blair has to live with a bond he has willingly
created, which Jack Straw, we now learn, thanks to John Kampfner's
revelatory research, apparently made a hopeless attempt to save him from at
the eleventh hour.
The episode tells you once again that this is Blair's war and, except for
Bush, hardly anybody else's. There are two ways to see him.

The first is as the great deceiver. Driven by his own juices, compelled by
moral imperatives obliterating pragmatism, forced by those compulsions to
avoid levelling with his people, in the grip of a high belief in the need
for the intervention of good guys against bad guys in this new world where
the enemy is to be found everywhere and nowhere. Throttled by a history he
refuses to relinquish. This could yet, in certain circumstances, be the end
of him, if our one-man intelligence chief is found to have twisted truth,
for whatever good motive, too far.

There is another person emerging from this mist, though. This is a great
tragic figure. Tony Blair had such potential. He was a strong leader, a
visionary in his way, a figure surpassing all around him at home and on the
continent. His rhetorical power was unsurpassed, as was the readiness of
people to listen to him. He had their trust. He brought credibility back to
the political art.

It is now vanishing, though not before our open eyes. All this seems to be
happening below the radar screen of opinion polls. The country carries on at
least as semi-normal. Our boys are out there dying in a futile war, to which
there is no apparent end, certainly not one that we control. The leader goes
about his business, awaiting without too much trepidation, we may suppose, a
suitably ambiguous Hutton report. Yet something big is happening. This
concerns not merely him and whether he survives, but our country and what
becomes of it in abject thrall to Bush and his gang.