18 July 2004	Sunday	29 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

LONDON: What now? Downing Street is loudly reforming its procedures with a fitting show of contrition, but all the while Blair people observe that the more tsunamis the prime minister surfs, the more secure he seems.

The idea that a profoundly conventional top civil servant like Lord Butler or a dyed-in-the-wool judge like Lord Hutton would ever unseat an elected prime minister was always far- fetched. And quite right too. In the UK, neither civil service nor judiciary are trained to usurp a democratically elected prime minister. If it is time for a prime minister to go, then his cabinet, his party or the electorate are the ones to wield the knife. So far, there is not much sign of it on any of those fronts.

What's new after Butler? Nothing's changed. There never was anything much for him to discover because everything that matters was known long ago.

The facts stay exactly as they always were. There were no WMDs, and Blair did it for reasons that were always transparently clear: he was holding tight to the Americans. He did what all British prime ministers would probably have done under the crude pressure of these neocons in the White House. Over Vietnam Harold Wilson never faced quite the same relentless with-us-or-against-us, gun-to-the-head final choice from Lyndon Johnson's more nuanced regime. It explains, but doesn't excuse, Blair. George Bush's arrival should have spelled the end of any possible continuing "special relationship" mirage.

What matters is what lessons are learned? Certainly nothing to be found in Lord Butler's report on inter-departmental etiquette. Frankly, who cares what British intelligence (such as it is) does or says to government? If Blair hyped up the evidence, isn't that what politicians do on every policy they urge upon their people, as if the right and wrong path were always black and white? There is much myth-making about the proper behaviour of prime ministers, theirofficials, the secret services and cabinet government. Was the golden age of prime ministerial propriety Margaret Thatcher's handbag or Harold Wilson's kitchen cabinet? Or foxy Harold Macmillan,? But all this is flim-flam.

Iraq exposed the true disaster of 60 years of British postwar diplomacy. Ever since Churchill, Britain has played fantasy- diplomacy over its imaginary special relationship with America. Call it the bridge, the pivot or the poodle, it has fuelled an unreality that has done us expensive damage. In Iraq it all came crashing down

It's 40 years since Dean Acheson's astute remark that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role, a phrase dog-eared with use yet ignored by all governments. If not an empire ourselves let's cling to the one superpower, like an embarrassing and faintly comic poor relation, grateful to be used a little now and then. Generations of very clever Foreign Office eminences have devoted their meagre resources to just one futile aim - punching above our weight on the world stage. It's the diplomatic version of distressed gentlefolk keeping up appearances, making ourselves ridiculous and obnoxious to our real equals, the other Europeans. Plush embassies keep up the show, punching away - but for what?

So we have our unusable and decrepit nuclear weapons for show, like a moth-eaten old Rolls on bricks in the garage. It keeps us our unearned seat on the Security Council alongside France, both contributing to the UN's increasingly dysfunctional structure and rule-book, adding to its incredibility as the world's law-keeper. We spend more than all Europe except France on defence we can't afford. Average wages in western Europe are far higher than ours, their standard of living better, yet we brag about our brief recent economic growth while conveniently forgetting how far behind we remain. Won the war, lost the peace is still true.

The myth of British power should finally have died in Baghdad - isolated from Europe, reviled in most of the world, still posturing absurdly as it breathed its last. Only no one in government has noticed. Thinkers and academics (notably Timothy Garton Ash) are considering the aftermath of this great British diplomatic catastrophe, but not the politicians. There is no great national convention called to think again about who we are, where we belong and what is our destiny. If ever there was a time to persuade people our future is in Europe, it's now in the ashes of the Iraq blunder.

It's a fine thing for Tories to call for the head of Tony Blair; one said on Wednesday even if they had known the full lack of intelligence on WMDs, "we would still have voted for the war". You bet they would. Historically, it's largely they who led us there, from Churchill's first turning his back on the nascent EU, to Thatcher, to their stirring up of Europhobia at every turn.

The Tragedy is that Blair too was steeped in the two great fallacies that have warped British foreign policy for 60 years - the special relationship and Britain's delusions of global grandeur.

Who dares get up and declare once and for all that the empire has no clothes? The lesson of Iraq - that should have been learned in Suez - is that we must give up punching at any weight, beyond peacekeeping contributions to UN and European forces. So any person or party planning to unseat Blair for this Iraq debacle must offer a new foreign policy vision that could never lead us there again.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.