October 23, 2002	Wednesday	Sha’aban 16,1423

LONDON: The prospect of war over Iraq has grown a bit more distant over the last six weeks, thanks to the opposite stances taken by two national leaders. Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac have each made vibrant contributions. There is no European foreign policy; in fact there are three or four different Iraq positions among EU member states. But Mr Blair and Mr Chirac have achieved a synthesis of influence. Had they been colluding, which has been only intermittently the case, we could call this the soft-cop/hard-cop routine. It may well come to nothing, in face of the resistance of the third leader, George Bush. But the British way and the French way have parallel, not contradictory, importance.

Mr Blair is the soft and faithful ally. It becomes clearer why he finds Mr Bush easier to deal with than his old soul-mate, Bill Clinton. This claim sounded weird, when it first seeped out of Downing Street. But the moral simplicities Mr Bush applies to the state of the world are like our leader’s own. Whereas Mr Clinton was sinuous and ambivalent — in other words, a realist — Mr Bush is as bold as Mr Blair in the lines he draws between good and evil states, and in his righteous determination to move against the evil ones. Not only is Saddam Hussein atrociously evil, today’s Anglos and Americans agree he must be destroyed.

For Blair this is a calculated as well as instinctive position. His mantra is: show total fidelity to Washington in public, or sacrifice all influence there in public and in private. For the last year he has excelled himself, delivering onslaughts against Saddam, and making brazenly unproven claims of linkage between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorism, with more fluency and power than Bush can ever find. No enemies on the right: that has been Mr Blair’s watchword in this matter, even though he’s praying that the solutions of the hard right, the unilateralist Pentagon right, are never ventured.

So far, though, he has not wasted his opportunities to avert this. That’s to his credit. It makes the case for his public cheerleading. Ever since Mr Bush came in, he has had a twin-track strategy, to be supportive in general, but resistant in particular. If it hadn’t been for Mr Blair, Mr Bush would never have agreed to the Nato-Russia council, which was put together over the near-dead body of Donald Rumsfeld. If it hadn’t been for Mr Blair, it’s doubtful whether Mr Bush would have begun to understand the importance of having a strand of nation-building — thin and cheap, but not yet abandoned — in his policy for Afghanistan. And it’s certain that Mr Blair supplied a crucial push at the right time, early in September, that took Mr Bush to the UN and deepened presidential awareness that the cost of ignoring the international community would probably be to make an Iraq war self-destructive.

Without that, we would not be where we are today, listening to a seismic UN security council wrangle over the words of an anti-Iraq resolution. All EU governments whose opinion I’ve been able to gather agree that Mr Blair has played a crucial role here. Far from sneering at his relationship with Mr Bush, they privately see it as the last best hope for sanity. They wholly welcome the fact that one European voice gets a hearing in Washington. Which is where the French come in.

Unless Mr Blair had helped open the door, France would have had no opportunity to start rearranging the international house. Mr Chirac, emboldened by his new strength at home, became the critical figure, more so than Russia and certainly more than China, in taming the American demand for a UN carte blanche for war. This is a Gaullist assertion of French importance, but also a serious attempt to refine the international order as Mr Bush and the Pentagon would like to shape it.

Washington has proved somewhat amenable to Mr Chirac as well as Mr Blair. We see that public fealty is not the only route to influence. Each nation to its history and tradition. The final text is still unagreed, but clearly will not include the automatic resort to force, in the event of Saddam blocking the inspectors, that Washington first demanded.

As long as France, having enraged the Americans with her nit-picking, knows when to quit arguing, the episode will go down as a major success for French diplomacy. It may be true, as Jack Straw keeps saying, that Iraq would not have budged on inspectors without the threat of war. But it’s also true that a UN, rather than purely US, outcome will essentially be the result of French persistence, as a result of which the world may be marginally safer.

That depends on what happens. Internationalism, aka the UN, remains at risk from two eventualities. The US might still wreck the UN by treating the inspection process with cynicism, and insisting on its right to attack Iraq anyway: its spokesmen never fail to hint at this possibility, with Straw chorusing alongside. Equally, the UN could wreck itself by continuing, even in the face of Iraqi obstruction, to resist the military response that is at least implicit in the compromise for which France has been pressing. Each side, the Anglo-Americans and Arabic-Europeans, has to tread a delicate line. There is not a one-way street to disaster accessible by the Americans alone.

Where the parallelism between Mr Blair and Mr Chirac breaks down, however, is in the event of their shared objective failing. If Mr Bush decides to attack without UN approval, the damage caused to Britain will be more telling than the anger aroused in Mr Chirac and the French. It would present Mr Blair with the worst domestic political crisis of his prime ministership. He would have been driven helplessly towards a war another leader had determined to start, the morality of which was lost on much of his own party and perhaps a majority of the British people but he himself had come wholly to believe in. Mr Chirac, by contrast, would be laughing all the way to the bank where oil, trade and the affection of the Arab world are stored.

Both leaders have proved that Washington can be influenced for good; and Washington, to its credit, has judged, contrary to the instincts of Vice-president Cheney and the loudest Pentagon civilians, that the spectacle of making some concessions can do it no harm. Domestic American politics, which is anti-terrorism but not all pro-war, is pushing the White House to appear more reasonable. To that extent, it seems to have climbed down.

But Mr Blair has every reason to fear Mr Bush climbing back up again. However compliant his rhetoric, the prime minister knows as well as anyone that attacking Iraq is more likely to increase than diminish the threat from Al Qaeda. He talks a moral game, but is aware of the political costs it will entail when he loses control of it. He would intensely prefer Iraq not to happen, at least not yet. So would Mr Chirac. The difference is that Mr Chirac can afford to make that clear, whereas Mr Blair has left no retreat from participating in an all-out invasion that could lead to several catastrophes.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.