[PEN-L:36158] Blair counterspins about crisis summit

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Blair landed in the US just in time for Martha Kearney, one of the astute
BBC Newsnight team to get off the plane and tell the programme about her
interview with him. Blair makes a point of taking journalists on plane
journeys with him to flatter them with a personal briefing. (Probably
they take turns to sit beside him.)

Tonight he was comfortingly smoothing down the story. The main point of
the meeting was about the success of the war, and to have an
opportunity for private reflections - interesting term. Contrary to the
impressions Blair gave in the House of Comons yesterday, there would not
be a big set piece about what is going to happen in Iraq after allied
victory. It is necessary to have realistic expectations. It is really a
matter of timing. Iraq post victory will be US administered. Although
they want UN humanitarian aid, it is not realistic to expect it to be UN
administered. But the Brits would argue there should be a
transition to UN administration. 

So Blair's intimate mid-Atlantic briefing with Martha smoothed it over
just enough, leaving just enough for the astute reporter to say that
there will be "some fairly strong discussion behind the scenes at
Camp David" about post victory Iraq.

So there is spin and counterspin. But what is really going on? We do not
know. The Brits are clearly the people who have set this up so soon after
the start of the war, although they planted the first reports in the USA.
This is the cover for Blair to tell Bush if he needs to, that the war is
going disastrously. Perhaps he does not think so. But it is possible it
has crossed his mind. It has crossed our minds and we do not have the
briefings available to him. 

At the very least we know tonight that the hegemons have had to accept a
major change of strategy. the northern front is to be kept relatively
quiet, and the attack on Baghdad may be substantially delayed:- 

There has clearly been a deal with the Turkish Chiefs of Staff announcing
that Turkey will not send more troops into Kurdistan. Zerberi for the
Kurdistan Democratic Party has welcomed this, and announced that there
will be a liason committee of the Kurds the Turks and the Americans,
presumably to limit the scope of the northern front, like ensuring that
the Kurds do not occupy Kirkuk and Mosul and are nice to the Turkomans,
whom a US general has just met. A mere few thousand US troops have been
parachuted into Northern Iraq, and Zerberi commented that "this war
has to be won by humans not by technology". Meanwhile the US 4th
Division is being hyped up as wonderful and is being sent to the southern
front, having been blocked from going in through Turkey. The point is
that its 30,000 troops cannot be fully operational for two weeks.
Is the victorious and unbloody assault on Baghdad to be delayed for 2
weeks??? 

And while it is delayed, how are the invaders going to prevent more
harrassment of their extended lines, like those that have caused deaths
in Nasiriyah and further north which drew the Third Division into
counterattacking in Najaf when it was trying to thrust ahead to Karbala.
So HQ has announced emphatically that the strategy is to push ahead
without diverting too many troops to deal with minor guerrila attacks.
Can it afford to do that for two weeks? 

There is a crazy report tonight London time about columns of Iraqi tanks
racing south through the sandstorms from Baghdad and again from Basra.
The garbled reporting from embedded reporters just suggests this is
meaningless and they are going to be slaughtered by air power. But
perhaps they are not. Perhaps they have turned quickly to harrass the
extended invading lines. As far as the southernmost front is concerned,
we Brits have been told that the column has been racing for the Al Fao
peninsula but got dispersed on the way. In another bulletin an embedded
reporter let slip that the British soldiers (ineffectually) besieging
Basra are now exhausted. It is more likely that the Iraqi tanks have
turned right to attack the exposed British front to the west of Basra on
which one of their tanks blew (blue) up another of their tanks in
confusion a couple of nights ago.

So even if Blair does not yet realise that the hegemons are likely to
lose this war altogether, the urgent summit is for a rethink of the war
strategy as well as the peace strategy in a fairly radical way. The brits
know what it is like to have an army of occupation for years in a hostile
territory sitting ducks for snipers, in northern Ireland.



There is another agenda under the spin and counterspin. Blair has
successfully recruited his labour critics to be allies, in his shift of
position back to the middle of the Atlantic Oppostion to the war has been
silenced in Britain as a serious realistic news item in Britain since the
Commons vote but Tony Wright, MP came on Newsnight, to debate with an
American unilateralist about post war Iraq, in a well argued case which
exposed the underlying agenda. He managed to get in that those of us, he
said, who opposed the war, thought that the whole approach to the United
Nations was working through a charade because those around Bush do not
believe in the United Nations anyway. The question is whether
post-conflict Iraq is to be an American colony or a UN administered
territory, he said. He warned that in the coalition of the willing,
unless one section of the willing start being listened to in Washington
there will be serious consequences.

What is happening here is that Blair has actually finessed the left so
that they serve the role of increasing his bargaining position with Bush.
At the same time he straddles the major global conflict between a global
solution based on US hegemonism, and one based on an enhanced
international rule of law, in which the UK would like to have an
honourable role, above its natural weight in the world. 

It will all get smoothed over. But underneath at another level of reality
is probably a realisation which they will not say to each other, They
will not mention Somalia. 

No I do not think the left will need to be the fall guy if this war
fails. I think in the back of their mind it is already whether it is
going to be Bush or Blair, or both.

But we cannot prove that. Not until the memoirs come out. 

The global movement is not well coordinated enough to bring forward an
initiative to seize the agenda. It needs to call for a ceasefire now, get
a Uniting for Peace resolution through the UN, suggest that the
victorious hegemons would like a two week breathing space, and above all
call for direct negotiations by the UN with the current
administrations of Baghdad and Basra in return for the ceasefire,
therebey getting humanitarian aid in quickly but outflanking US
assumptions about US administration. Certainly the peace movement ought
to be having sophisticated discussion not about the principle of calling
for a ceasefire but about the timing of it. And with the massacre in
Baghdad IMO we are close to that opportune moment. 

As for the summit tonight, spin, counterspin, and hidden agenda one and
hidden agenda two, this unscheduled summit within 5 or so  days of
the start of the war is a crisis summit, until proved otherwise IMO,
however it is spun.

Chris Burford
London