January 9, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 5, 1423

LONDON: Tony Blair may be winning some of his battles with the Bush administration over Iraq, but he is certainly losing the political war on the home front.

The prime minister’s speech to British ambassadors in London on Tuesday was an implicit admission of this significant failure.

The fact that Mr Blair was willing to break with his own precedent of not acknowledging his differences with Washington in public by making such a speech was proof enough on its own.

But it came amid a cluster of other signals that the government is losing some of its previously united nerve for early military action against Saddam Hussein.

This week alone, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has said the odds against war are lengthening, has insisted (not entirely in accordance with the published facts) that Britain has always wanted a second United Nations resolution on Iraq and, in a written statement, has now held out the prospect of UN weapons inspectors going back into Iraq on a long-term basis.

None of these is the sign of a government that is beating the drum for the early conflict that some might otherwise infer was imminent from the defence secretary’s mobilisation announcement on Tuesday.

Geoff Hoon spent an hour in the House of Commons [the UK’s lower chamber] answering questions on those plans. Almost every question to him was either skeptical or critical. The skepticism came from all parties in the Commons, including a telling contribution from his Tory shadow Bernard Jenkin. But the contributions that mattered most to the government came from a succession of sane, moderate and not normally rebellious backbenchers on their own side.

Taken together, they demonstrated the increasing domestic constraints on the government over its Iraq policy.

Where is the national consensus over Iraq, asked the former UK Foreign Office minister Tony Lloyd. Where indeed? Certainly the cabinet is not speaking with one voice any longer, a point that was underlined by Mr Hoon’s reluctance on Monday night to back UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s judgment that war is now less likely that before.

To judge by the Commons session on Tuesday, the backbench consensus is in favour of continued aggressive diplomacy against Saddam through the UN, but stops well short of backing for early military action, even — perhaps — if the permanent members of the security council are in favour. Mr Hoon had the look of a man who knows that he can now only afford to push things so far.

This was also the background to Mr Blair’s speech. Mr Blair now seems to recognise that he has failed to persuade the British public to back the Americans over Iraq. That is a big admission. But his response was a speech which only partially addressed the issues. His big concession was to admit that people want the Americans to listen more to their concerns about the response to terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. That is true, but it is not the only thing. They also want to be able to trust the Americans.

That is where the great disjunction lies. The central issue that Mr Blair did not — perhaps cannot — address is that people here (in UK) do not have confidence in Mr Bush as a war leader. The US may be a force for good, as Mr Blair still claimed, but it is Mr Bush and his colleagues who are the problem.

It is the way that this administration acts on this issue, in these circumstances, that creates all the mistrust in Whitehall, in Westminster and in the country. It is a problem which Mr Blair fails to address. Until he does, his Iraq problems will not be solved, for Mr Blair will not be trusted on this issue either.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service