The unspeakable
Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this:
‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys to Washington. He went there first with Gordon Brown in January 1993……’
Which is wrong, of course. As was reported in The Observer, Blair first went to Washington in 1986([1]) and returned from his six week freebie a convinced supporter of the nuclear deterrent. (He had been a member of CND.) Blair also went on US freebies in 1988 and 1991. At best, getting these fairly basic biographical facts about Blair wrong is just sloppy work by a highly paid columnist. Whatever the reason, Kettle’s omission of Blair’s early American trips expresses the British political journalist’s standard disregard for, and thus ignorance of, British politicians’ political hinterlands; and this enables Kettle to ignore the relationship between the American state and the leaders of a major leftish party which, less than 25 years ago, was anti-American and formally committed to leaving NATO.
On p.51 of the previous issue of Lobster I referred briefly to the recent paper by Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Searching for the Successor Generation: Public Diplomacy, the US Embassy’s International Visitor Program and the Labour Party in the 1980s’.([2]) I made only a passing reference to this then because it arrived just as I was finishing that issue. The information in this paper on the involvement of the US London embassy in Labour Party politics, with Peter Mandelson prominent, ought to be front-page news. But that is unlikely to happen (even if the British media were made aware of the information). Some of the British media wouldn’t use it because it would embarrass both Blair and the Americans; some because it would embarrass the Americans (even though they have made the information public).
The unprintable
Even when the police investigation into Lord Levy’s fund-raising activities for the Labour Party overlapped with the Israeli assault on Lebanon, to my knowledge none of the major British media, looking at Blair’s support for the Israelis, thought it relevant to mention that his successful capture of the Labour Party owed much to the money provided by Lord Levy: money which came, we are told, from British Jews; and that this arrangement, which enabled Blair to be financially independent of the Labour Party’s resources and thus to all intents and purposes beyond their control was facilitated by Gideon Meir, then with the Israeli embassy in London.([3])
The triumph of politicians
([4])
On both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has demonstrated the primacy of politicians. We saw opposition to the attack on Iraq from sections of the Anglo-American military, intelligence agencies and diplomats, accompanied by the biggest campaign of leaks of classified information I can remember. Yet nothing happened. British participation in the invasion was not prevented. The politicians saw off the protests which were not terribly serious, in the end. There were some resignations here, notably Clare Short and Robin Cook; none of note that I recall in America. No Labour MPs resigned the whip over what they believe to be an illegal war. (So what would it take?) In 1983 when Lobster began, one of the ideas behind it was the suspicion that the spooks were a kind of ‘secret government’. The invasion of Iraq demonstrated very clearly that political power in the US and UK resides in the little groups around the prime minister and the president. The dissenting spooks and diplomats huffed and puffed and completely failed to bring the house down.
La lotta continua
Serving and retired British diplomats, the people who see the damage to British interests done by the alliance with America, have continued their campaign against support for the policies of the neo-cons round George W. Bush. Former British ambassador Craig Murray described in detail the way the British state followed the American line in its dealings with Uzbekistan and has posted on a website ([5])the sections of his book which the Foreign Office apparently wanted excised. More striking yet was ‘Mr Blair should recognise his errors and go’ in The Financial Times by no less a figure than Sir Roderick Braithwaite, former senior ambassador, foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister John Major and former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Braithwaite’s article included these comments:
‘A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud’s. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency’s box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent……. he has manipulated public opinion, sent our soldiers into distant lands for ill-conceived purposes, misused the intelligence agencies to serve his ends and reduced the Foreign Office to a demoralised cipher because it keeps reminding him of inconvenient facts.'([6])
Braithwaite’s extraordinary attack was delivered on the same day as and thus, I presume, was co-ordinated with the leaking of the final report by the outgoing British ambassador to Baghdad who warned: ‘The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.'([7])
Eventually Sir David Manning, current UK ambassador to the US but previously Blair’s personal advisor on foreign affairs, helped get Blair to modify slightly his policy of blanket support for the Israelis’ assault on Lebanon. News of Manning’s role, like the Baghdad ambassador’s letter, was then leaked to the media.([8])
Farewell Jack
Manning’s reported intervention came at the end of a period when Blair’s support for the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East had begun to embarrass sections of the London media, normally cheerleaders for ‘the special relationship’. Patience Wheatcroft wrote of ‘the craven kow-towing of the British Government to the Americans’ in MI6’s house journal, The Sunday Telegraph (9 July 2006). What that ‘kow-towing’ looks like was illustrated in ‘Blair beefed up his Iran speech to please Bush’ (Sunday Telegraph 28 May 2006) in which Toby Harnden and Patrick Hennessy reported:
‘Tony Blair made significant changes to one of his most important foreign policy speeches after bowing to American objections….The Prime Minister changed key passages on possible action against Iran, climate change, and a proposed shake-up of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Objections by President George W Bush’s inner circle played a key role in the alterations…….British sources have revealed.’
Harnden and Hennessy commented:
‘It is only too characteristic of the one-sided relationship between the British and American governments since Mr Blair was elected. Mr Bush always has warm words for Mr Blair, and for good reason: the British Prime Minister has given the American President everything he could possibly want.'([9])
Among the things the Americans wanted was Jack Straw’s removal as foreign secretary. In The Times William Rees-Mogg gave one version: that it was the result of Straw’s comment that it would be ‘nuts’ to bomb Iran.([10]) Irwin Steltzer, one of Rupert Murdoch’s emissaries to the American empire, gave another version: that Straw was fired because the American administration got nervous about the significant number of Muslim voters in Straw’s constituency.([11]) Whatever the cause, that Straw was fired as a result of American displeasure has been denied only by the US government.([12])
Failure is an orphan
Jack Straw was dumped in May this year; and that now looks like the high water mark of Blair’s support for the neo-cons. Since the Israeli assault on Lebanon in the summer the traditional themes of Anglo-American foreign policy politics have been re-emerging as the US State Department (and the British FCO) began trying to recapture some of the bureaucratic territory lost to the neo-cons. Sir David Manning, HMG’s man in Washington, told Blair that ‘he must bolster the position of Dr Rice and moderates at the State Department.’ Two weeks later Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, said the situation in Iraq was ‘dire’ and blamed the shambles on those round Bush who had ‘failed to follow the lead of Secretary [of State, Colin] Powell. The State Department had put in a huge amount of effort to ensure there was a proper civilian administration.'([13])
Some of the most senior British military, Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former head of Britain’s armed forces, and General Sir Richard Dannatt, current head of the Army, made public statements that attacked all the main planks of Tony Blair’s support for US policy and thus, by extension, US policy.([14]) Tony Blair pretended to agree with Dannatt’s remarks, which may have looked like a smart PR move at the time but left him looking ridiculous.
It was left to Paddy Ashdown to point out that Dannatt’s comments were contrary to the conventions of British political life. Ashdown called it ‘a clear constitutional breach’; but where’s this constitution, Paddy?([15] )
The authors of the article reporting Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge’s comments wrote:
‘Inge’s intervention…… reflects the growing dismay among senior military officers and civil servants involved in defence and foreign affairs, that in the critical areas of Afghanistan and Iraq Britain lacked clear foreign and defence policies separate from the US.’
This talk among our foreign policy managers of moving away from America is something new and it is ironic that the author of this damage to the political relationship with America has been Tony Blair, the most enthusiastically pro-American Prime Minister in my lifetime.
As much as the attempts to find an Iraq exit strategy which broke into public view in October, the blame game underway tells us that the neo-cons’ period is ending. And no matter how hard the neo-cons and wider Republican Party try to deny it, the parallels with Vietnam are unavoidable and politically damaging. That the architects of the neo-con policies are from the group which worked so hard for so many years to overcome the ‘the Vietnam syndrome’, which they saw inhibiting American foreign policy, is another delicious irony.
Or am I counting chickens? As US foreign policy is a branch of US domestic politics and patriotism is the first not the last refuge of the scoundrel, some on the left have been warning that the risk of further US military action is still there, especially now the Republicans are in electoral trouble. ([16]) There are detailed presentations on the Net of a massive American military build-up in the Middle East([17]) and it is just conceivable that the beleaguered Republicans will try pressing the terrorism/patriotism button once again in the Middle East.([18])
Welcome to Cameronia
The final nail in the coffin of UK support for the neo-cons’ adventures was driven in by Conservative Party leader David Cameron. On the 2006 anniversary of 9-11, Cameron spoke to the British American Project (BAP). He produced the expected homilies about the US and the UK, the special relationship, democracy and terrorism; rejected anti-Americanism (but felt it necessary to refer to it);but explicitly rejected the neo-conservative foreign policies of Bush and Blair, and restated the traditional FCO ‘realist’ view of British foreign policy.([19]) Tony Blair has managed to make the FCO look sensible, even progressive.
Notes
[1] Michael Elliot, ‘Lessons from an American journey’, The Observer 14 April 1996. Even if we interpret Kettle’s comment as meaning the first time that Blair went to America accompanied by Brown it is false.
[2] British Journal for Politics and International Relations, 2006, Vol. 8, pp.214-237.
[3] It is possible, of course, that the ‘Jewish businesmen’ story is just that, a story, that Blair received Israeli government money fronted by ‘businessmen’. Either way, as has been demonstrated in Bernard Donoughue’s Dairies of the 1974-76 Wilson government, reviewed in Lobster 49, Labour, Israel and British Jewish businessmen is not a new story.
Now that David Cameron looks like a possible winner, he is starting to attract Jewish donations. See Bernard Josephs and Leon Symons, ‘Team Cameron’s big Jewish backers’, The Jewish Chronicle,13 October 2006 at <www.thejc.com/ home.aspx?ParentId =m11s19s116&SecId=116&AId =46698&ATypeId=1>
Cameron’s (entirely conventional) views on Israel were given in answers to a questionnaire from Conservative Friends of Israel at <conservativehome.blogs.com/ toryleadership/ files/dc_answers_to _cfi_questions.pdf>
[4] A nod towards David Stockman’s, The Triumph of Politics (London: The Bodley Head, 1986). This is a seriously interesting picture of the real workings of American politics at the highest level. The triumph of politics over ideology in the title concerned the Reagan presidential campaign talk of fiscal prudence. Stockman was Reagan’s Budget Director and his incredulity at the tax cut the Reagan administration enacted without a matching cut in federal spending does him credit but makes him sound for a Congressman! astonishingly naive.
[5] Murray’s Website (frequently down) and a mirror of the documents are <www.craig murray.co.uk/> and <http://cryptome.org/murray-docs.htm>. I have written ‘apparently’ wanted excised because in the current situation it is possible that the FCO are entirely happy to have Murray’s comments made available but are unable to admit so publicly.
[6] <www.ft.com/cms/s/3a7a368c-224d-11db-bc00-0000779e2340.html>
[7] Reported on the BBC News Website of 3 August 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5240808.stm>.
[8] See Richard Beeston and Tom Baldwin, ‘New blow for Blair over his policy on Lebanon’, The Times 2 September 2006.
[9] Former US president Jimmy Carter noted Blair’s toeing of the US line. See John Preston and Melissa Kit, ‘Compliant and subservient: Jimmy Carter’s explosive critique of Tony Blair’, The Sunday Telegraph 27 August 2006.
[10] William Rees-Mogg, ‘How the US fired Jack Straw’, The Times 7 August 2006.
[11] This was discussed by John Williams, Straw’s press officer at the time of his ouster, in ‘The neocon claim that Jack Straw was dismissed because he is influenced by Muslims is terrifying’, The Guardian 9 August 2006. Williams did not deny that Straw had been fired by the Americans, merely that he didn’t believe it was because of the Muslim voters in Blackburn.
[12] See the letter to The Times on 19 August from Bryan G. Whitman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs.
[13] Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2006, ‘Straw says US mistakes have made situation in Iraq “dire.”‘
[14] Inge’s comments received much less publicity than those of Dannatt, presumably because he is no longer a serving officer. Inge’s comments were reported in Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont, ‘Britain “risking defeat in Afghanistan”‘, The Observer 22 October 2006.
[15] <http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1923370,00.html>
[16] Michael T. Klare was one in ‘Beware empires in decline’, in Foreign Policy in Focus at <www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3596>.
[17] See, for example Mahdi Darius, ‘The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean’ at <http://globalresearch.ca/>
[18] It was reported that Sir David Manning told Blair that he ‘feared that the [Israel-Hezbollah] conflict could grow and that hard-liners in the Bush Administration could push Israel to extend its campaign to Syria.’ See Beeston and Baldwin, note 8.
[19] The text is at <http://politics.guardian.co.uk/speeches/story/0,,1869970,00.html>. Cameron named Lord Charles Powell, formerly Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary and advisor on defence and foreign affairs and General Sir Charles Guthrie, formerly chief of the United Kingdom’s defence staff, as among the members of his Foreign Affairs Council.