LONDON: There is something building which could, be the undoing of Blair. It is the move to war against Iraq. A growing number of Labour MPs are becoming increasingly alarmed about Blair’s enthusiasm for President Bush’s war games. Shortly after the president’s “axis of evil” speech, citing North Korea, Iran and Iraq, the prime minister expressed his unease about the phrase to a group of backbench Labour MPs.
He no doubt wishes the president had put it differently. But there is still no sign that he is going to pick up the phone and say: ”Hold it, buddy.” Blair remains George Bush’s most steadfast ally. Yet the determination of the US administration to expand the war on terrorism to “get Saddam” is an embarrassing dismissal of Blair’s whole post-Sept 11 strategy. It is dangerous for the Middle East. And it is big enough to split Labour apart, causing a trauma for the prime minister, which is simply of a different scale from anything we have seen yet.
One effect of Sept 11 has been to educate many MPs and others in the realities of Middle East politics. There was a good deal of queasiness on the Labour benches about the war in Afghanistan. There will be a lot more if Blair tries to convince them that removing Saddam is a safer option than leaving the old villain in place.
Middle of the road, loyalist MPs, ministers and leading Liberal Democrats, all are speculating that for Blair to back President Bush in this, he may end up having to rely on the payroll vote and the Tories against a large proportion of his own backbenches. How large a proportion? Well, a BBC poll for On the Record of a hundred Labour backbenchers found just eight in favour of attacking Iraq, and 86 firmly against.
On those figures, with the Lib Dems and the nationalist parties on the “anti” side of the argument, it would be a majority-threatening divide. Of course, there does not have to be a Commons vote. Blair could, under executive prerogative, allow the use of British bases and even commit British forces to action against Iraq without any parliamentary approval. But even in these presidential times, that would be pushing his luck. It would provoke a crisis in the Labour party. Before it gets to that, Blair will use every ounce of his formidable persuasive skills to avoid the great split. The softening-up process is already under way - a rising tide of warnings about the huge, deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction being assembled by Saddam coupled with “revelations” about his deep involvement in global terrorism.
All this will sound odd to anyone with even a vague short-term memory. After desperate attempts by the best-funded intelligence agencies in the world to connect Baghdad to Al Qaeda, the evidence has, boringly, failed to turn up. For years now we have been told that the expensive RAF overflying of Iraq, and the controversial sanctions regime there were necessary to stop Saddam’s arms programme - a policy of containment and deterrence; now we learn that this apparently has not worked, which adds up to an impressive policy failure.
And then, remember that the great justification for Blair’s diplomatic whirlwind after Sept 11 was that he could exert influence on Washington and rein in the possibility of a wider conflict? All the Arab leaders he saw back then said they would support an attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban - but not one on nearer-at-hand Arab leaders. Will the prime minister discuss the “collateral damage” inevitable in the Middle East when he visits Washington in April? Does he think that George Bush cares?
A lot of Blair’s self-image has been tied up in the idea that he, uniquely, can influence Republican Washington as others (the French, the Germans, the Japanese - even the Russians) cannot. He was going to be Bush’s calmer cousin, loyal and friendly but above all listened to, the restraining hand.
But Bush already has a restraining hand in Colin Powell, and anyway seems rather more interested in his unrestrained, other hand: Donald Rumsfeld. The most ominous quote of the week so far came in Rumsfeld’s interview with the Daily Telegraph when, invited to discuss Saddam, the normally torrential secretary of defence said: “The focus on Iraq is something I find not helpful from my standpoint and I’m not in a position to discuss a lot of it. So I’ll pass.”
No doubt Bush would like Britain alongside him, but, as influential defence specialists such as Richard Perle are now saying publicly, the US is more than happy to go it alone, even at the expense of its alliances.
What happens then? The US assault will “work” militarily in the end because of the massive superiority of arms and technology. But this next military success may well be at the cost of the kind of social, economic and political destabilisation of the Arab world that Osama bin Laden - if he is still alive in some draughty central Asian cave - dreams of.
The Kurds would use their freedom to press again for a wider Kurdistan, threatening Turkey, which is already having cold feet about the Afghan operation. In the south, the Iranians would be likely to become embroiled in the Shia areas of southern Iraq. Saddam still has some scud missiles, which he might well lob at Israel, raising the possibility of nuclear retaliation if they were armed with chemical or biological weapons. The next generations of guerrillas and suicide bombers will grow older, and angrier. As one Labour MP put it: “No one gets security out of this.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.