The main topic of his talks with the new Government was the handover to Iraqi forces which was scheduled to begin in July and a timetable for drawing down the number of British troops in the south. The Iraqi police and army were still not ready ‘to take over security fully’, said their new Prime Minister. ‘We will start in the provinces and do them in turn.’4
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the British were self-congratulatory about their handling of the four southern provinces and thought it made a flattering contrast with the disastrous engagements by the Americans in the rest of Iraq. By the summer of 2006, Basra was less secure than at any time since the toppling of Saddam. The threats had grown more lethal, not least because of Iranian aid to Shia fighters, who were using mines and rockets with increasing sophistication and deadliness. At the beginning of the month of Blair’s visit, five British service personnel were killed when their Lynx helicopter was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. The casualties included Flight Lieutenant Sarah-Jayne Mulvihill, the first British servicewoman to die in action in Iraq.
Moqtada Sadr, a radical Shia cleric, stood at the head of the Mehdi army, a paramilitary force which was conducting increasingly aggressive attacks on British forces. By the end of the month, a state of emergency was declared in Basra. The level of British forces had been cut from 46,000 at the time of the invasion in spring 2003 to just 8,000 by 2006. That was sorely short of the numbers required to cope with an increasingly disaffected Shia population and the rising threat from militias and criminal gangs. Operation Sinbad, in the autumn of 2006, was the last serious British effort to impose order and authority in Basra. Blair craved an exit from Iraq which he could hail as a success, but he was not prepared to provide the means that might have achieved that outcome. Major General Richard Shirreff was the last British commander to make an attempt to try to break the power of the Mehdi army and the other paramilitary groups. His requests for a surge of military support were turned down by London. Despite the mounting British casualties, no reinforcements were sent. Sending more troops clashed with Blair’s political imperative to try to give a sense of progress in Iraq, illusory though that was.
By 2006, the Chiefs of Staff despaired of Iraq as unwinnable. ‘The intensity of the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia was not forecast,’ says General Sir Mike Jackson. ‘Nobody forecast it would be as dire as it turned out to be.’5 In August, he was succeeded as head of the army by General Sir Richard Dannatt, who promptly warned that the army was ‘running hot’ and could ‘break’ if it was not soon withdrawn. Rather than look to create a liberal democracy as ‘an exemplar for the region’ they should settle for ‘a lower ambition’ and ‘get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems’.6 When Dannatt went boldly public with these views, Blair was ‘furious’, but felt too weak to risk sacking a serving general who openly challenged his political masters.7
Britain’s ‘main effort’ changed focus to Afghanistan, a switch prompted by a mixture of fatalism about Iraq and fright that Afghanistan was also spiralling into chaos. Just as in Iraq, there had been a woeful lack of postwar planning in Afghanistan. After the toppling of Mullah Omar’s diabolical regime in 2001, there were elections and some other dividends. Millions of girls could now go to school. But Hamid Karzai’s government was tenuous and the international presence far too slight to cope with the scale of the security challenge. Drug traffickers continued to ply their trade and warlords to control large swathes of the country. Though the whole of NATO made a commitment to Afghanistan, many of its European members were not willing to send personnel in meaningful numbers. The Germans took responsibility for training a new Afghan police force. Berlin sent a grand total of seventeen officers to carry out the task. The Taliban were given the space to become resurgent. As Iraq looked increasingly hopeless, Blair became agitated that Afghanistan was sliding away as well.8 His concern meshed with the feeling of General Dannatt and other senior officers who lobbied for more concentration on Afghanistan. Jonathan Powell says: ‘The army wanted to have a nice, straightforward fight against the Taliban that they thought they could win.’9
At the end of January 2006, John Reid, the Defence Secretary, announced a significant amplification of the size of the British force. ‘We cannot risk Afghanistan again becoming a sanctuary for terrorists,’ he declared to MPs. He also made the point that 90 per cent of the heroin that went into ‘the veins of the young people’ of Britain came from Afghanistan. An extra 3,700 troops were added to the 2,000 already committed. More than half of them were mobilised to the southern province of Helmand. The Defence Secretary offered MPs the reassurance that he was deploying ‘this potent force to protect and deter’. Their mission was to guard ‘provincial reconstruction teams’. They were not intended ‘to wage war; that is not our aim,’ Reid said cheerfully: ‘We would be perfectly happy if they returned without firing a shot.’10 As it turned out, millions of rounds were fired in the first year of the deployment alone. Within months of Reid’s statement, the mission was changing drastically as the Taliban responded with unanticipated ferocity. As early as that September, General David Richards, the British commander of the NATO forces, was warning: ‘We need to realise that we could actually fail here.’11 On a daily basis, the fighting became much more intense than in Iraq. The British army was drawn into the most protracted ground combat conducted by them since 1945, but without clear political and strategic goals that pointed to an eventual exit. That autumn, fourteen British servicemen were killed when their Nimrod crashed in Afghanistan, the largest loss of life in a single military incident since the Falkands War. A devastating official report subsequently blamed the Ministry of Defence for sacrificing essential safety for the sake of saving money.12 The lack of adequate equipment in Afghanistan, and the needless casualties that resulted, became a growing issue of political controversy and shame. To the horror of senior officers, Gordon Brown chose this period to put a squeeze on defence expenditure. ‘The Chancellor became really unpleasant’13 towards the armed forces’ budgets in 2006, the very year that the Prime Minister was committing more troops to Afghanistan and security was deteriorating in southern Iraq.
The dysfunctional relationship and clashing priorities of Blair and Brown meant that they did not ensure that military commitments were backed with the necessary resources. As a result, soldiers were put in harm’s way without adequate protection or support.
Soon after his trip to Baghdad, Blair flew to America, where support for the Iraq war was also collapsing. George Bush’s approval ratings, once higher than those of FDR after Pearl Harbor, were plunging. They would not reach bottom until he was as unpopular as Richard Nixon when he was forced to resign over Watergate. The disintegration of support for Bush was accelerated by his utterly inept response to Hurricane Katrina and the inundation of New Orleans. The White House wondered in advance of Blair’s visit whether the Prime Minister might now like to be formally presented with the Congressional Gold Medal that he was awarded in the deceptively euphoric aftermath of the fall of Saddam. Number 10 had then viewed the medal as a stupendous accolade; three years later, it was too toxic to touch. There was horror among the Prime Minister’s officials at the thought of TV pictures of Bush hanging a medal around the neck of Blair.14 Every time the White House raised the subject of the medal, Jonathan Powell ‘just played the Americans along’, telling them the timing was not quite right. Washington did not try to press the medal with great vigour. ‘The antennae of their people were pretty acute. They knew it was a problem for us.’15
The air was heavy with failure when the two leaders held a joint news conference in the White House Rose Garden. A third-term Prime Minister with draining authority stood next to a second-term President in steep decline. They sought comfort by clinging to each other. ‘Don’t count him out,’ Bush said of Blair. ‘I want him to be here as long as I’m President.’16 American newspapers which had previously lauded Blair for his eloquence now fou
nd him ‘dismayed and tongue-tied’.17
Both men felt compelled to do some penance for the mistakes made in Iraq. Bush conceded there were ‘setbacks and missteps’. That was a wild underestimate of the catastrophic failures in Iraq, but a greater acknowledgement of error than before. Blair publicly admitted for the first time that it had been a mistake to abolish the Iraqi army and purge the administrators. Yet both men were still fundamentally unapologetic about the enterprise. Blair declared: ‘For all the hardships and challenges in the past few years, I shall always think that it was a cause worth fighting for.’18
He persisted with his theory of interventionism despite the practical experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq. The next day at Georgetown University, he delivered a speech drafted from scratch on the flight across the Atlantic. It was a defiant attempt to re-argue the case for intervention in which he cited the killings in Darfur as well as Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the oppression of Saddam and the Taliban. Yet even Blair had to acknowledge that this idealistic cause was massively compromised by the experience of Iraq. He conceded, in a companion speech of this period, that the war was widely seen as the ‘wreckage’ of his world view. So it was. Many of the American neo-cons were recanting, as were some British interventionists. They had lost their religion in the bloody sands of Iraq. Blair regretted that ‘a doctrine of benign inactivity’ had become ‘the majority view of a large part of Western opinion’.
He nevertheless remade the argument that ‘liberating oppressed people in distant lands’ was ‘not just an abstract moral duty but essential for our security’.19 The interventionist doctrine had never had a more passionate advocate than Tony Blair. He still clung to the high vision that brought his premiership low. He was both the best advocate of the case and its worst for he had been party to so many of the terrible mistakes in Iraq. One of the many tragedies of that war was that it discredited the very cause that he championed.
An insistent critique of his doctrine was that its application was highly partial and often hypocritical. Britain and America toppled tyrannies in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they tolerated and connived with dictatorships in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. When the vast majority of the Labour Party and many others beyond its ranks looked at the Middle East, the Palestinians numbered among the ‘oppressed people’ about whom Blair spoke. That summer, the Israel–Palestine conflict erupted more violently than at any time during his premiership. Hezbollah, the extreme Islamist group who were resourced by the Syrians and Iranians, had been repeatedly firing rockets into Israel and organising suicide bombings. On 12 July, Hezbollah crossed over the border from Lebanon to kidnap two Israeli soldiers and kill eight others. The next day, the Israelis sent troops into Lebanon on a retaliatory expedition.
The chances of arresting an escalation were even lower than usual in this combustible region. The recent elections to the Palestinian parliament were a defeat for Fatah and a victory for the uncompromising militants of Hamas, a party which did not accept Israel’s right to exist. The result was an absolute shock to both London and Washington.20 The Israelis were led by an untested and insecure Prime Minister. Ehud Olmert had taken over less than four months earlier after Ariel Sharon was struck down by a massive stroke.
Omert was anxious to prove his mettle to both Israel’s voters and its enemies. He blundered into an atrociously planned onslaught. The Israelis unleashed large-scale air, artillery and ground attacks on targets in Lebanon. Most of the world agreed with Jacques Chirac that this response was totally disproportionate. At a meeting of the UN Security Council on 14 July, America and Britain stood alone in opposing a call for an immediate ceasefire. Their line was that the provocateurs were Hezbollah not Israel. There was some traction in Blair’s argument that the crisis needed a serious, widely backed UN resolution rather than politically expedient gestures and sound-bites. But the refusal to call for a ceasefire was an invitation to Tel Aviv to ramp up the offensive. Once again Blair cast himself as the White House’s faithful echo when he contended that it was fruitless to demand a ceasefire from the Israelis without the disarmament of the militias in Lebanon.
The next day, the Prime Minister flew to Russia for the G8 Summit in St Petersburg. At the opening plenary, he approached Bush, already seated at the conference table and chewing on a bread roll.
‘Yo, Blair!’ drawled the Texan. ‘How are you doin’?’
The Prime Minister was neither fazed nor offended by this salutation. He was very familiar with the quirks of Bush and his frat boy habit of addressing friends by surname. What neither knew was that their conversation was not private. The microphone in front of Bush was live and picking up the entire exchange.
Bush thanked Blair for a recent birthday gift of a Burberry sweater.
‘Awfully thoughtful,’ smirked Bush. ‘Know you picked it out yourself.’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ Blair bantered back.
The Prime Minister then suggested himself as a peace-making envoy in the Lebanon crisis. ‘I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.’ Bush blanked him: ‘I think Condi is going to go pretty soon.’
Blair, incoherently stammering, responded: ‘That’s, that’s, that’s all that matters. But if you … you see it will take some time to get that together.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Bush through a mouthful of bread roll.
Blair tried again: ‘Well, it’s only if, I mean, you know, if she needs the ground prepared as it were. Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, whereas I can go out and just talk.’
Bush acted as if he had heard none of that. The President opined that the solution to the crisis was to get the Russians ‘to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over’.
After a few more exchanges, Blair squinted at the microphone. ‘Is this …?’ he asked and gave it a tap.21
When he asked his aides, they confirmed what he feared: the entire conversation had been overheard. ‘He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’22 There was nothing his media managers could do to limit the damage.23
The ‘Yo, Blair!’ was mercilessly mocked by the British press, among whom it was taken as confirmatory evidence that he was Bush’s poodle. Yet it was Bush’s ‘No, Blair’ when he vetoed a trip by the Prime Minister that was truly more revealing and humiliating. It was demeaning for Blair to be caught asking Bush’s permission to go to the Middle East. He was supposed to be the leader of a sovereign nation. This made him sound like a presidential underling asking for the boss’s permission to travel – which he did not get because the President was sending one of his other employees instead. Blair was cast as a supplicant and a spurned one.
‘I just cringed with embarrassment,’ said one of his closest allies in the Cabinet.24
The only fragment of consolation was that the live microphone also illustrated what Blair had been struggling with during all the years of trying to handle the White House. Bush was recorded complaining about the flying time from Washington to St Petersburg. He remarked to the Chinese President that it was all right for him ‘because this is your neighbourhood’. Bush expressed amazement when he was told that it actually took eight hours to fly from Beijing to St Petersburg.
The communiqué cobbled together at the end of the summit did nothing to defuse the conflict in Lebanon. The Israelis, encouraged by the G8’s failure to call for a ceasefire, intensified their military strikes. Beirut was repeatedly bombed. Large numbers of Israeli troops crossed the border. The blitz took hundreds of lives, among them thirty-seven children in a single attack. This onslaught was subsequently seen in Israel itself as a totally misconceived response that failed in its objective of crushing Hezbollah while alienating world opinion.
Blair stuck to the position, for which Bush was the only other advocate, that nothing would be achieved by calling for the Israelis to stop. On 18 July, appearing in the Commons before hostile MPs, Blair defended the
G8’s failure to call for an immediate cessation of the attacks and placed nearly all the blame on Hezbollah for ‘acts of extremism that were designed to provoke the very response that followed’.25
Downing Street was privately agitated about the death toll being inflicted on civilians. Nigel Sheinwald, Blair’s foreign affairs adviser, had a number of conversations with the Israeli Government, including Olmert himself, to press Britain’s concerns.26 Publicly, though, Blair sounded callously indifferent to the casualties because he would not condemn the Israeli attacks. He would not give an inch to the growing number of critics who saw him putting Britain slavishly in tow behind the Americans yet again. ‘If I call for a ceasefire, I play myself out of the game with the Israelis,’ he argued with Justin Forsyth and other dissenting aides.27 ‘All of us were telling him he was wrong – substantially as well as tactically.’28 He was also not prepared to put any daylight between himself and the White House. ‘It was Bush again really,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘He would not break with Bush.’29
To several confidants, it appeared to go even deeper than that: Blair agreed with the Bush policy of green-lighting the Israelis to try to destroy Hezbollah, despite the damage done to Lebanon and the low chances of achieving the objective.30 ‘Bush had persuaded Tony that it could be done very quickly,’ says Michael Levy, another ally who protested to Blair that he was taking the wrong position.31
Blair saw this crisis through the distorting lens of the struggle with Islamist fundamentalism. He had started to speak of an ‘arc of extremism’, an echo of Bush’s old ‘axis of evil’.32 He viewed the Lebanon conflict simplistically as another front in the struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda in Iraq and the regime in Iran. From his hardened perspective, a ceasefire would reward terrorist aggression; it would make Britain and America look weak in the eyes of Syria, Iran and the Iraqi insurgents; and it would do nothing to resolve the underlying sources of the conflict. ‘He just fitted it into his jigsaw, his great scheme of things,’
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