[A-List] Judging Blair

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is not only God that will be Blair's judge over Iraq

His cravenly pro-US policy on the Middle East misunderstood Bush's real
agenda and resulted in catastrophic failure

Avi Shlaim
Monday May 14, 2007
The Guardian

Tony Blair's opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war
last summer precipitated his downfall. Now that he has announced the
date of his departure from Downing Street, his entire Middle East record
needs to be placed under an uncompromising lens.

Blair came to office with no experience of, and virtually no interest
in, foreign affairs, and ended by taking this country to war five times.
Blair boasts that his foreign policy was guided by the doctrine of
liberal interventionism. But the war in Iraq is the antithesis of
liberal intervention. It is an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war, a
war undertaken on a false prospectus and without sanction from the UN.

Blair's entire record in the Middle East is one of catastrophic failure.
He used to portray Britain as a bridge between the two sides of the
Atlantic. By siding with America against Europe on Iraq, however, he
helped to destroy the bridge. Preserving the special relationship with
America was the be all and end all of Blair's foreign policy. He
presumably supported the Bush administration over Iraq in the hope of
exercising influence on its policy. Yet there is no evidence that he
exercised influence on any significant policy issue. His support for the
neoconservative agenda on Iraq was uncritical and unconditional.

Blair failed to understand that America's really special relationship is
with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose
between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter. Blair's special
relationship with Bush was a one-way street: Blair made all the
concessions and got nothing tangible in return.

American policy towards the Middle East was doomed to failure from the
start, and the end result has been to saddle Britain with a share of the
responsibility for this failure. The premise behind American policy was
that Iraq was the main issue in Middle East politics and that regime
change in Baghdad would weaken the Palestinians and force them to accept
a settlement on Israel's terms. The road to Jerusalem, it was argued,
went through Baghdad. This premise was wrong. Iraq was a non-issue; it
did not pose a threat to any of its neighbours, and certainly not to
America or Britain. The real issue was Israel's occupation of the
Palestinian territories and America's support for Israel in its savage
colonial war against the Palestinian people.

When seeking the approval of the Commons for the war, Blair pledged that
after Iraq was disarmed, he and his American friends would seek a
solution to the Palestine problem. He has utterly failed to deliver on
this promise.

True, Blair was the driving force behind the "road map" that envisaged
the emergence of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by
the end of 2005. But Sharon wrecked the road map. In return for the
unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon exacted a written American
agreement to Israel's retention of the major settlement blocs on the
West Bank. Blair publicly endorsed the nefarious Sharon-Bush pact. This
was the most egregious British betrayal of the Palestinians since the
Balfour declaration of 1917.

Blair and Bush have also betrayed the Iraqi people. To begin with, there
was much brave rhetoric about bringing democracy to Iraq and turning it
into a model for the rest of the Arab world. But the rhetoric was empty.
The neoconservatives who drove American policy were interested in
overthrowing Saddam Hussein and in nothing else.

The allied invasion of Iraq was not an isolated episode but part of the
so-called global war on terror. But the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime
in Iraq only exacerbated the problem of terrorism. The invasion of Iraq
has given a powerful boost to al-Qaida and its confederates by damaging
Britain's reputation and radicalising its young Muslims. The London
bombs may not have been a direct result of the Iraq war - but they are
indisputably a part of the blowback.

What we have in Iraq today is chronic instability, an incipient civil
war, endemic violence and anarchy, an upsurge of terrorist activity of
every kind, and a national insurgency to which the allies have no
answer. The neocons did not bother to plan for postwar reconstruction.
Occupation was accompanied by devastation and destruction on a massive
scale and a civilian death toll estimated by one source at 655,000.

The allies pride themselves on having brought democracy to the Iraqi
people, but they have failed in the primary duty of any government: to
provide security for the civilian population. The upshot is that America
and its pillion passenger in the "war against terror" are now embroiled
in a vicious, protracted and unwinnable conflict.

Blair has the audacity to say that God will be his judge over the Iraq
war. This is a curious attitude for a democratic politician to adopt.
History will surely pass a harsh judgment on Blair. He has the worst
record on the Middle East of any British prime minister in the past
century, infinitely worse than that of Anthony Eden, who at least had
the decency to accept responsibility for the Suez debacle.

· Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at St Antony's
College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. 


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