[A-List] UK state: strategic dilemma

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The essentially conservative "Tim Ash" here expresses what must be the hope
of a sizeable fraction of UK state and capital -- those who originally
backed Blair in 1997, plus those who have "seen the light" thanks to the
Bush administration's recklessness. I reckon Ash belongs in the latter camp,
given his previous involvement with the right wing Hoover Institution at
Stanford University and regular appearances on the US-sponsored conference
circuit.

-----

The French connection

With Iraq in chaos, we need a new entente cordiale and President Kerry in
the White House

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday April 15, 2004
The Guardian

"Madam secretary, this will work in practice but will it work in theory?"
The reported remark of a senior French official to the then American
secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, sums up what both the Americans and
the British like to think of as a profound difference between French and
Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking. But here's a curious role-reversal to mark the
100th anniversary of the entente cordiale between France and Britain: on the
Iraq war, Blair was right in theory, but Chirac was right in practice.

Given everything that has not been found in Iraq (weapons of mass
destruction) and everything that has been found or provoked there (an
unfolding disaster, inflaming anti-western feeling throughout the Muslim
world), who can seriously doubt it? Blair proceeded from general principles
that were largely sound to a conclusion that turned out in practice to be
wrong; Chirac, from a dubious theoretical premise to the pragmatically
correct conclusion.

Blair was - and still is - right to warn that there's a real danger from the
confluence of international terrorism, rogue or failed states and weapons of
mass destruction, and right to say that Europe and America have to work
together to combat it. Chirac was led by the wrong and ultimately futile
notion that a French-led Europe should use this issue to rally a worldwide
coalition of the unwilling against the United States. But he was foxily
sceptical about the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and
justifiably fearful of the consequences of an invasion in Iraq itself, the
wider Middle East, and among Muslims in Europe.

As it looks today, it would have been better if we had kept Saddam's Iraq
boxed in, with a fiercely intrusive international regime of inspections and
overflights, while encouraging internal forces for democratisation in Iran
and Saudi Arabia, and continuing the slow grind towards peace between
Israelis and Palestinians. Not better for most Iraqis, probably; let's
acknowledge that. But better for the war against terrorism; better for the
Middle East; better for Europe; and, yes, better for the United States. The
invasion of Iraq was, as Talleyrand remarked in another context, "worse than
a crime; it was a mistake".

To be sure, a year in history is a short time. This has been a terrible
Easter week for Iraq, Bush and Blair. If things gradually improve in Iraq,
the final balance sheet may look slightly more positive. Whatever we think
of the rights or wrongs of the conflict, we must still hope that future
historians will see the Iraq war as the crab-like beginning of a democratic
transformation of the wider Middle East. However, that hope looks
increasingly faint. What does now seem more likely is that future historians
will regard it as the war that cost President George Bush the second term it
was meant to secure. Especially if he gives many more press conferences.
Bush has delivered some rather good set-piece speeches in his time, and
delivered them quite well, but I defy anyone to have watched his rambling,
blustering, inaccurate defence of his Iraq policy to the press on Tuesday
and come away thinking he knows what he's doing.

As a chastened, though still outwardly defiant, Tony Blair flies to see this
rattled president in Washington, he needs to do some clear private thinking.
Here are a few morsels for his in-flight meal. For starters, the escalation
of moralistic wartime rhetoric, as in his recent article in the Observer, is
not the best response to the mess we're in. Bush may have to reach for the
Churchillian hyperbole, with an election to fight this November, but Blair
does not. A cooler sobriety, an acknowledgement that things have not gone as
planned, would be much appreciated - in Britain, in continental Europe, but
also by many worried Americans. This would be a better starting-point for
his message that France should now be as interested as Britain in saving
Iraq from the descent into anarchy.

Then for the main course: it's now in the best interests of Britain, Europe
and America that senator John Kerry should be the next president of the
United States. Obviously, Blair can't dissociate himself from his own recent
past, nor can he endorse either candidate. Indeed, prudence dictates that he
should hedge his bets. But I have never understood the argument that because
Bush and Blair "did" Iraq together, they are now politically married for
evermore. A cool analysis suggests that, with the possible exception of
trade policy, Kerry is a much better transatlantic partner for the kind of
liberal internationalism which Blair represents. He should, therefore, do
everything he can to ensure that he is not in any way recruited or suborned
to be a cheerleader to the Bush campaign.

Abandoning the excesses of moralistic "war on terror" rhetoric is one way he
can avoid that danger. Another, quixotic though this may sound, is to put in
some good public words for the French. For one of the minor nationalist
absurdities of the Republican campaign is that John Kerry is being targeted
for speaking French. The Republican house majority leader begins his
speeches: "Hi, or, as John Kerry might say, bonjour ". "Monsieur Kerry" or
"Jean Cheri" has even been accused by Bush's commerce secretary of looking
French. Quel horreur! Of course, making jokes about the French is an old
Anglo-Saxon pastime, to which Americans were for a long time actually much
less susceptible than the English. Yet today, a French-speaking American
president is precisely what Britain needs, what Europe needs, and, in fact,
what America itself needs, to repair the damage done by the blundering
unilateralism of the Bush administration.

No one will seriously expect Blair to acknowledge publicly that Chirac was
right and he was wrong over Iraq: not in principle, that is, but in
practice. However, he might try to use his unique popularity in the United
States to curb a very Anglo-Saxon nationalist prejudice which is threatening
to sway the outcome of the world's most important election - if only just a
soupçon - the wrong way.

And so to dessert. Beyond the ceremonial, the mutual lifestyle celebration,
and the Queen speaking her terribly English French, what future for a new
entente cordiale between France and Britain? The answer should be: a great
deal. It's difficult to think of a single issue on which Europe can make
much of a difference in the world unless these two countries reach an
understanding. On several, they represent two extreme positions within
Europe. And on many, the right position for Europe to take is somewhere in
between those of London and Paris. That has been true for most of the nearly
two years of the Iraq crisis, during which so much else of greater value
could have been done. It's true, most importantly, of our relations with the
United States. Only a stronger Europe can speak as a serious partner to the
hyperpower.

So paradoxically, as he flies to Washington, the British prime minister
should lie back and think of France.