by Blair, Tony
So ‘Yo, Blair’ was a joke; but unfortunately only I got it!
Anyway, that was a pinprick. The other thing was the discussion of Lebanon. What was interesting was that, behind all the usual statements and resolutions and press conferences, there was a common belief that Hezbollah had it coming, and if Israel took them out, so much the better.
Of course, what then happened is also familiar. After Israel retaliated with force, Hezbollah hit back with rockets. The inevitable visual paradigm of such a battle is: superior ‘Western’ force, with superior weaponry, causes devastation. Within days, the international angst transfers from the provocation to the retaliation. Suddenly Israel is the aggressor. The damage done is truly shocking. But then force employed in that way always is. The alternative is not clear. Do too little and the provokers are emboldened. In Israel, the worry was that it was all too little. In Britain, as elsewhere with the exception of the US, the reaction was: it’s far too much.
By its nature, such action is not effective, if by ‘effective’ one means the enemy is defeated. That’s the point about this modern warfare. Hezbollah were and are an urban guerrilla movement. They target civilians deliberately. Their weapons are poorer, so they kill relatively few. They assume the posture of the plucky underdogs. Israel is a government with a well-armed and well-trained army and air force. They do not target civilians. But their only ultimate weapon, in a civilian setting where the guerrilla movement is located, is deterrence. Therefore they use their force to try to deter further attacks. Inevitably, large numbers of civilians are killed. They quickly assume the mantle of oppressors.
International opinion, at first understanding the provocation, rapidly became dismayed at the nightly scenes of carnage of innocent Lebanese casualties. Dismay pretty sharply then turned to condemnation.
There then came about a choice in politics which did me real and lasting damage. European opinion quickly solidified around the demand that the Israelis should stop. Unilaterally. Even if Hezbollah continued with their rockets. US opinion was in a totally different place, with over 60 per cent of Americans supporting the Israeli action.
I felt it was wrong that there should be a unilateral cessation. It should be on both sides, and we couldn’t expect Israel to stop unless the rockets stopped. But that was not how it seemed to most people. They felt we were simply indifferent to the bloodshed. I thought the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was in a really tricky position. I knew if I were him I would regard it as impossible to stop unless Hezbollah did too; or unless they were beaten; or, which is what finally occurred, Lebanon took enough pain that Hezbollah would not feel they could do it again. It was a ghastly method of deterrence and horrible for Lebanon. But I could see it from his and Israel’s position.
Underneath it all, of course, was the state of the Israel/Palestine peace process. With that stalled, all manner of bad things were going to happen. With that moving, each tunnel – in a region full of dark tunnels – suddenly acquired some light at the end of it. In my mind, it all came back to the same problem, of which the Israel/Arab conflict was the manifestation, not the cause. Israel/Palestine is used as a potent source of friction and war because of religious difference.
The occupation of Palestinian land may be an injustice, depending on your viewpoint, but this is a region with plenty of injustices. What transformed it into a threat to global security was that Jerusalem is sacred for Islam, the third most holy site because according to Islam the Prophet was transported there in a dream; the occupation of that land by Jews was an affront, an indignity and most of all a symbol of Islamic weakness. It invoked every dimension of Muslim victimhood from the Crusades onwards. It spoke of a religion disrespected and people oppressed because of it.
Gradually, but too gradually, with tentative steps when strong strides were required, there came to be the outline of a solution, which was really a compromise. Israel has its state; the state of Palestine comes into being. Jerusalem is divided, at least territorially. The holy sites are shared.
It would do as a solution – there isn’t another – but getting to it has begotten all sorts of other obstacles. So a really quite simple answer has come to have a quite horrendously complex process to achieve it. The result is occasional breakthroughs, punctuated by long periods of regression or drift. When it moves forward, everything else looks better; when it doesn’t, as I say, bad things happen. The conflict in Lebanon was just another example.
The war went on longer than it should. The alienation of Israel from the international community – and this time international opinion, not governments – became worse. As one of the few people ready to understand their point of view, I suffered accordingly.
In September 2006 I visited Beirut. I had talked constantly to the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, throughout. He was a thoroughly decent man, but absolutely caught between dislike of Hezbollah and the impossibility of doing anything other than verbally lacerating the Israeli action. I landed at the airport in a military plane and drove in from the airport with as heavy a security detail as I had ever had. Unsurprisingly, I was not popular with many Lebanese people. But, as ever, the key political leaders understood the complexity of the situation and understood, above all, that for Hezbollah to have emerged victorious would have been disastrous for Lebanon’s future. We met in his office in the old part of town and, even being preoccupied as I was with the politics, I thought how beautiful it was, how rich in the history of the region, of its religions, art and culture.
He was dignified and friendly. He had one straightforward message: there will never be peace unless Israel/Palestine is resolved. ‘With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing is,’ he said. I pledged again to do what I could to get the US president to refocus our efforts on it.
I met several members of the government, some Muslim, some Christian, some Druze. All were grateful that someone had come to see them. Their message was extraordinarily poignant: their country was on the brink, it had to be saved; but its fate depended on resolving the power struggle of the region as a whole. A couple of them said that their colleagues had been assassinated over the past years, almost picked off one by one, and they said, without a hint of self-pity, that this might be their fate too, but nonetheless the spirit of the people was good and would prevail in time. At our press conference there was an organised disruption, and as always, of course, that took the news.
As I sat with Siniora, I realised that my own political problem was now very acute; terminal, in fact. At points I had wondered why I didn’t just cave in and condemn Israel and call for them to stop unilaterally. The Israelis would have understood it, and it would have been the proverbial safety valve for the fierce political criticism.
But I had by now come to see the entire conventional approach in dealing with this problem as itself part of the problem. And by the way, what was the problem? That was a good first question. To most people, in July 2006, looking at the news it was the Israel/Lebanon conflict. I didn’t see it like that. I defined the problem as the wider struggle between the strain of religious extremism in Islam and the rest of us. To me, Lebanon was embroiled in something far bigger and more portentous than a temporary fight with Israel. Indeed, I thought the whole issue of Israel part of the broader picture.
Of course, I could see that Israel’s action was at one level disproportionate. I could see the unreasonableness of certain Israeli positions. I could see the manifest injustice suffered by the Palestinians. But I had concluded that none of this got to the root of the matter, which was in this deeper, wider struggle that affected the whole of the Middle East and the religion of Islam. So what was holding peace back? The Shebaa Farms? Not seriously. A dispute about the 1967 borders or land swaps between Israelis and Palestinians? Come off it. Halfway reasonable people could find a way through these issues in a day if they wanted to – if the elements operating on this wider struggle permitted them to.
To me, you can’t understand Hezbollah unless y
ou understand the role of Iran; or understand Lebanon unless you understand Syria; or understand Hamas unless you understand the role of both; or understand either country in its present state unless you understand the history not just of the region but of the religion, how it saw itself, how it had developed its own narrative, how it saw its own predicament. And here, just as in Iraq or Afghanistan, there were competing strains of modernity and atavism. As a result, the solution to me lay in neither the sole use of hard power nor the sole use of soft power but in the combination of the two.
As I explained earlier, this had been my recurrent theme from September 2001 onwards. I supported the tough military stance of the US: what else could we have done after thousands of innocent people died on September 11? When terror became the weapon of choice of al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed elements in Iraq, or of the Taliban in Afghanistan, I believed strongly we had to fight it, not yield to it.
However, I always argued that force alone could not win the struggle for us. Alongside it, there had to be an equally vigorous and determined push for peace, notably between Israel and Palestine and, for reconciliation, a reaching out across the religious and cultural divide to unite people of goodwill, whatever their faith, in an embrace of a modern, coexistent world.
The harshness of the military struggle, its inevitable mistakes and mishaps, had driven a wedge in world opinion. There were those who basically believed Bush himself was the problem, and those who thought soft power a naive distraction. Over time, the latter became distinctly overtaken by the former. An entire school of thought – with consequences that reverberate, and in my view in a damaging way – evolved a position that essentially said: to succeed, be the ‘not Bush’. Do the opposite to him and we’ll do fine. It’s a dangerous and diverting myth.
I was, therefore, in a word, squeezed. But by then I felt truly uneasy compromising on it. If I had condemned Israel, it would have been more than dishonest; it would have undermined the world view I had come to hold passionately. So I didn’t, but I could feel the PLP move more or less en masse to a querulous position. People were getting it in the ear on the doorstep and were feeling they should be agreeing with the complainant, not the leader. But I had my determination to comfort me, and by and large it did (which is, I suppose, what always happens to leaders when the final hubris overwhelms them).
Once Parliament stopped sitting, there were usually a few days before we were due to begin the summer holiday. Normally I spent them down at Chequers, enjoying some thinking time and being with the family. I would sit out in my jeans and T-shirt, doing papers, strumming my guitar, sloping off for a run in the woods, taking my wine outside after dinner and breathing in the night air. The staff down there were friendly, and – I know it sounds a bit pathetic – also unchallenging, there just to help. Of course prime ministers should be challenged, but sometimes you just feel that for one evening nobody is going to bend your ear, nobody is strategising with you, nobody is making you rise to the occasion; nobody is doing anything very much, except asking what you’d like for dinner.
Somehow the human spirit always finds ways to adapt. I don’t mean that having a tough time as prime minister ever remotely compares with the truly tough times many people suffer, and suffer heroically. I just mean that in a position of leadership, normal human being though you are, you discover under pressure that extraordinary inner instinct to survive. It may be unpleasant, but you still have to get up in the morning, dress, eat, drink, breathe. You have to go on living. You have to find meaning in doing so. To me, by then, the only meaning was in being true to myself. I might be in a minority of one, but it would be a one I believed in.
That summer, just before we were due to go abroad, with Lebanon still in full nightmarish violence, I realised I should delay the holiday. I was mainly in Downing Street as we tried to put together the UN resolution that would end the conflict. I had been in two minds as to whether to delay. I was very reluctant ever to do so, knowing that if you weren’t careful the holiday just didn’t happen, and after all there were modern means of communication. In the end, I stayed in London until it was clear the resolution was going through.
By the time I boarded the plane for St Lucia I was exhausted, and looking forward to being out on a boat in the middle of a warm sea, with a warm wind at my back. It was my last summer holiday as prime minister.
TWENTY
ENDGAME
On the flight I reflected deeply on the politics of what happened in Lebanon and on my own reaction to it. Ruth Turner, head of government relations, had been seeing members of the PLP. These were not necessarily the uber-loyalists but the people it would be risky to lose, people like Peter Hain, John Denham and Karen Buck. They were mainstream PLP people with links to the left as well as the right of the party, and they certainly had their finger on the party pulse.
They were more frank with her than they would have been with me. They disagreed with the position on Lebanon, but that wasn’t their real point. They thought my reaction indicated a profound loss of touch, a failure of instinct, a decoupling of me and public opinion that they thought dangerous, and more than that, out of character.
I had always been known as the politician with the sure touch, the one who could express the public’s thoughts and therefore shape them, the one who would sniff the scent of popular opinion and follow it with a certain intuition. They felt I had lost this ability; and with it, what made me who I was. At one level, they considered the loss a disaster politically. At another level, they just couldn’t comprehend it.
The difficulty I had in response gave me much pause for thought as I settled into the eight-hour flight. It wasn’t that I didn’t get public opinion on Lebanon, nor that I couldn’t have articulated it. My difficulty was I didn’t agree with it. I agreed totally that the deaths of so many innocent civilians, especially children, were completely wrong and unacceptable. The human tragedy of such action appalled me. I thought of how many families would mourn, how much bitterness would be generated, and how if you were an ordinary Lebanese caught up in this nightmare, you would just want to rage against the world.
But I also worried about the risk of a Hezbollah ‘victory’, of a situation where they could calculate the provocation, pull Israel into retaliation and emerge as winners. I felt a unilateral cessation gave them that. I felt anything which left them in any doubt as to the calculation of risk next time round was a real and possible future threat. They had to understand that if they tried doing it again, there was a price to be paid that the people of Lebanon would not allow them to pay, at least not with the lives of their civilians.
For me, the analysis could not be confined to the conflict itself, but it had to encompass the potential for future conflict. Ending the conflict on terms that deterred Hezbollah in the future could save lives. It only gave us some political time and space, and here again I wanted to step in with a major soft-power initiative to resolve the Shebaa Farms question, and of course to revive the Israel/Palestine peace process. My isolated ‘third-way’ position had few buyers, but I believed strongly that just because we were shocked at the TV footage of the consequences of war, this could not blind us to the consequences of peace on the wrong terms.
So it wasn’t that I couldn’t guess which way the wind was blowing; it was that I distrusted a policy of following the prevailing wind. Ten years before, new to office, alive as if wired up to every current of popular imagination, I would have made a different choice. Now, seized as I was of an analysis born not of Opposition’s need to connect, but of government’s duty to govern, I had evolved. I was not a changed person, but I was a changed leader. I could see as plain as a pikestaff the problem this gave me, but I had come to a view that, above all on this issue of security, I should do what I intuitively thought right, not what I intuitively guessed was popular.
As we came in to land at St Lucia, I reflected: had I changed, or was I just obstinate? Was it leadership, or just vanity? Having got us into Iraq, was it belief that
sustained me, or just the fact I had nowhere else to go? How honest are we ever with ourselves? How hard it is to disentangle our motives from our anxieties, our convictions from our pride.
On the third day of our holiday there was a major security scare when a plot to blow up a number of airliners flying between the UK and the US was foiled at an advanced stage. The plotters had intended to detonate peroxide-based liquid explosives, which is the reason why there are still restrictions on taking liquids on to planes. Naturally it sparked a massive tightening of airport security arrangements.
That day and for the next days, there was a series of conference calls between me, Transport Minister Douglas Alexander and John Reid, the Home Secretary. After the initial panic, my strong desire was to minimise disruption. There then followed a routine set of exchanges between us all, with me, as ever, being on the passenger-convenience side and them very much on the risk-averse side. To be fair, John got it absolutely, but to begin with thought we had to be extremely cautious. Douglas could see awful headlines about us ignoring ‘expert’ advice. I believed that once the panic died down we would do real damage to Heathrow if we went over the top; and the tendency of the system always was to go over the top. So they insisted that business people couldn’t carry suit carriers, everything had to go in the hold, perfume was a risk, everything was a risk. After much expostulating by me and much earache for the others, which they endured patiently, we came to a sort of modus vivendi, though it was months before common sense returned to its proper place.