British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Camp David summit with United States President George W Bush at the end of the month could be the last time they look each other in the eye before plunging their alliance into a new war with Iraq.
It will be a tense scene. The United Nations weapons inspectors will just have presented their report. If, against expectations, they provide persuasive evidence of clandestine Iraqi efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction, the die will be cast and the fast-gathering, US-led force in the Gulf will rumble towards invasion.
However, if no ”smoking gun” is found in the Iraqi sand, as seems more likely, this encounter will be an essential test of repeated United Kingdom government claims that the prime minister really does wield influence over the world’s superpower. To prove it, Blair will have to fend off the dogs of war for a few weeks longer.
There are powerful voices inside Bush’s administration who view the inspections as a farce choreographed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and by the end of the month will be calling for them to be cut short so that battle can commence.
As one British official closely involved with the transatlantic relationship admitted: ”They will press their argument very, very hard.”
Blair will be pushing in the other direction. He believes that if the inspectors are given the time and space to pursue their search, helped by hints from the world’s intelligence services, they will ultimately find proof of Iraqi cheating sufficient to convince the whole Security Council.
By then it might be possible to argue that Saddam can be disarmed by peaceful means or that at the least, the US and Britain could then lead a global coalition bearing the UN stamp into the Gulf once more, rather than charge ahead with only each other and a handful of American client-states for company.
The Bush-Blair summit will expose the core of the prime minister’s foreign policy, a compact with the Bush administration by which Britain has thrown in its lot with the US in the hope of affecting the juggernaut’s course.
But how much has Blair given away on his side of this Faustian bargain — and how much clout has he won for Britain in return? The Guardian has put that question to a range of senior politicians, Iraq experts and military personnel on both sides of the Atlantic, and found some unexpected answers. One of the most outspoken responses came from a senior US officer who recently retired but who played an important role in planning any upcoming assault on Iraq.
He did so despite misgivings — common among the Pentagon’s top brass — that the Bush administration has chosen the wrong enemy at the wrong time. He described Iraq as ”a fifth-grade power of no great consequence”.
In this veteran officer’s eyes, the British government’s enthusiasm has helped accelerate the drift towards an unnecessary war. ”Generally speaking, Blair’s support has allowed this to go the way that it has. Had the UK taken the position of the French and the Germans, there would be much greater solidarity against military action. My friends in the UK military are just as troubled as I am,” he said.
He conceded the argument frequently made by officials in London that by seriously preparing for war, Britain might salvage peace, by triggering a coup in Baghdad or forcing the Iraqi leader to disarm genuinely. But he believes the hawks driving military strategy have no such intentions.
Britain has long harboured dreams of riding the American tiger and whispering into its ear. British concern to nurture the ”special relationship” with the US has been an obsession in Downing Street since Winston Churchill first started writing long letters to Franklin D Roosevelt in 1940.
But Blair’s relationship with a right-wing populist from Texas so soon after his intimacy with Bill Clinton is one of the more improbable manifestations of the genre. Their styles appear very different, yet insiders on both sides agree the trust is real.
Blair’s words reach a sympathetic ear by all accounts. Warren Hoge, London bureau chief of The New York Times, says: ”George Bush is a very visceral politician who likes or dislikes people almost immediately. He liked Tony Blair.”
Nevertheless, all this warm feeling does not add up to a meaningful sway over policy. ”We don’t like to trumpet about our successes, or boast about our influence because it would be the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said one aide in the Blair camp.
Less discreet British officials point to a string of diplomatic tussles in which they say Blair and the cause of caution came out the victors. The key moment came on a beautiful September day in Maryland last year, when the prime minister and his entourage arrived by helicopter at Camp David to be met by Bush and his surly deputy, Dick Cheney.
Despite hostile questioning by the hawkish Cheney, according to this account, Blair capped months of steady British pressure and secured an agreement from the president to pursue the campaign against Saddam through the UN.
The British were also on the winning side in the next battle, over whether Bush should ask for a new UN resolution in his September 12 address to the General Assembly four day later.
In the long debates over the wording of that resolution, the hawks wanted a clause that could start a war over the merest discrepancy or omission in Saddam’s accounting for banned weapon stockpiles. British diplomats balked at such a hair trigger and insisted that only a consistent pattern of misbehaviour could be called a ”material breach”.
The trouble with judging these bouts of diplomatic tug-of-war is that Britain was pulling on the same team as some formidable American heavyweights, including Secretary of State Colin Powell. Who is to say what difference, if any, Blair made.
In Bush at War, Bob Woodward’s detailed account of the Bush administration since September 11 2001, Blair wins few mentions. At no point in the book, built on exhaustive interviews with key administration players, is Britain portrayed as playing a decisive role. Instead, Bush’s conversion to the merits of the UN takes place at a dinner with Powell, and it is Powell who shepherds the president to the UN lectern under continuous fire from administration hawks.
But the fact that Powell plays such a heroic, single-handed role may have something to do with the fact that Woodward depended greatly on the secretary’s version of events for his book. Blair was not interviewed.
Moreover, when Powell tells his president: ”It’s nice to say we can do it unilaterally … except you can’t”, he implicitly points to the mere possibility of British withdrawal from the war party, if the UN route is not tried, as being disastrous to the US cause.
So it seems there is some truth in the suggestion that for an administration that is frequently deadlocked in argument, Britain can sometimes tip the scales.
In the words of one British official, ”we can be the swing vote”. British significance is not so much grounded in the armoured division, the special forces and few bombers the country is sending to the battlefield, but in its iconic role as America’s steadfast lieutenant.
Opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of the American public approves of a war in Iraq only if the US does not go it alone. A survey this week by the Knight-Ridder newspaper group found 83% supported a war with allies and UN support. Only a third favoured unilateral military action.
Andrew Kohut, who monitors shifting US opinions at the Pew Research Centre, said that allied backing had been paramount to public support for the last 18 months: ”And the American public has the highest expectation of British support as our closest ally.”
However, if Britain’s influence depends on a threat of withdrawal, it lasts only as long as that threat is credible. The paradox is that were Britain to express its readiness to support Washington ”right or wrong”, no matter what the UN inspectors find, Blair would lose his bargaining clout.
This is not the case, a Downing Street official insisted. ”We are not committed to anything and we will not be forced to do anything,” he said.
Ivo Daalder, a strategic analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, has his doubts. ”Blair is listened to in the Oval Office in the way that no other leader in the world is listened to,” Daalder said. ”But it’s also clear the Brits do not have a veto on American actions.”
He added: ”We don’t know the point at which Blair says no, so the dynamic of this relationship is very interesting. In fact, winning previous arguments puts Blair in a weaker position, because Bush can say: ‘I’ve listened to you up to now. Now you listen to me …’ There’s an assumption in the American debate that when the US goes to war Britain will be there.” — Â