Think of It This Way, Tony: At Least America Will Miss You
By James Traub
Washingtonpost, June 24, 2007
The people of Britain will shed few tears when Tony Blair steps down as prime minister on Wednesday. But Americans will miss him deeply, the way we do the star of a beloved TV drama that the networks finally cancel. Not since Mikhail Gorbachev has the leader of a great power so utterly outlived his welcome at home while remaining the apple of the American eye.
Why the crush? Just read Blair's speech before Parliament on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion of Iraq. A million Britons had marched in protest the month before; the leaders of Blair's own Labor Party believed that he was making a terrible mistake, and in some cases had publicly said so. And Blair stood in the well of the House of Commons and warned that our equivocation was emboldening our enemies: "That is why this indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity; when in fact, pushed to the limit, we will act."
Blair's argument was predicated on his certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His speech, in short, was wrong. The British public, which lost patience with Blair years ago, believes that he led them into war in 2003 on a lie. A more charitable, and perhaps less dispassionate, conclusion is that he acted on a conviction that he would not permit troubling evidence to undermine. The same may be true of George W. Bush. I'm guessing, though, that a great many Americans who would never give Bush the benefit of the doubt would do so for Blair. And perhaps that's because of the way they feel about Bush: Our leader was the naif, the showboat, the callow cowboy; theirs was his photographic positive -- steadfast, worldly, eloquent.
And what eloquence! No doubt Americans are too easily impressed by genuine oratory because our own political life is so gassy with the fake, bloated variety. Bush seems to veer between two radically different rhetorical modes: the swelling biblical or Lincolnesque cadences (so obviously, if often splendidly, scripted for him) and the taciturn Texas county sheriff. His language has almost always seemed too big or too small. Blair, by contrast, always found the words that fit even the most solemn moment, as when he united the British people after the death of Princess Diana -- "the people's princess," as he memorably called her. Or in the speech last month announcing his resignation: "Believe one thing if nothing else. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right." After a thousand years of great oratory, Britons may have developed an immunity to such stirring formulations; Americans sure haven't.
I could go on about the particulars of Blair's speaking style: the punchy sentences, the strategic repetition, the homey expressions ("hand on heart") that the British themselves often rolled their eyes at. But all this is technique, which any bright schoolboy could pick up were he so inclined. Blair is worth caring for because of what he stood for.
In April 1999, Blair gave a speech in Chicago framing what he called "a new doctrine of international community." NATO had been bombing Kosovo for the previous month without breaking the will of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In Chicago, Blair said flatly, "We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand."
Kosovo was the interventionist plank of that new doctrine. Blair called for sustained reform of the system of global finance, a new push on free trade, reform of the decision-making apparatus of the U.N. Security Council and NATO, progress on global warming and a reduction of Third World debt. And, returning to Kosovo, he insisted that the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states must give way in the face of genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Blair soon demonstrated that he took his own doctrine seriously. In May 2000, when a murderous rebel force in Sierra Leone kidnapped 500 U.N. peacekeepers and threatened renewed warfare, Britain answered a desperate call for help from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan by sending an air and naval force that intimidated the rebels and persuaded them to release the peacekeepers. Here, in miniature, was the decisive combination of military force with moral force that world publics had been hungering for since the 1990s nightmares of Rwanda and Bosnia.
At the time, Blair's doctrine of international community sounded less like a visionary scheme than a hopeful summation of an emerging consensus. In retrospect, it represents a might-have-been that's almost too painful to contemplate -- for the world, not just for Blair. Certainly the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, derailed some elements of this optimistic agenda: Humanitarian intervention came to seem like an unaffordable luxury once we had to use force in self-defense. But ultimately, it was the election of Bush, and Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, that doomed Blair's new paradigm -- and Blair himself. But the British leader cannot put all the blame on his American counterpart, who scarcely made a secret of his bellicose worldview.
Remember how, when the two leaders first met, Bush announced that they used the same brand of toothpaste? This detail, at once lame and unnerving, made you think: Poor Tony must really be missing his old pal Bill Clinton. But no: Blair and Bush hit it off in a way that baffled and vexed people on both sides of the Atlantic who admired the one and scorned the other.
Various explanations have been offered: Both were "conviction politicians" who recognized in the other a man whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay. Blair was determined to stamp out the virus of anti-Americanism in the Labor Party. Most plausibly, the British prime minister understood that the new world he sought could not be brought into being without the Americans. (Or maybe it was the toothpaste.) Certainly Blair believed that the United States needed an interlocutor to help deal with an increasingly hostile and suspicious Western Europe, and he fashioned this role for himself. The terrible irony is that a man willing to risk his political career for the sake of his convictions came to be seen as Bush's lapdog.
The insult seemed unfair at the time and still does today. Blair pressed Bush to route Iraq policy through the Security Council, and he succeeded. Blair was willing to let U.N. weapons inspections continue, but the Bush administration was not. By that time, Blair could scarcely have withdrawn his support. He believed that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped. More than that, he believed that forcibly disarming the Iraqi dictator was wholly of a piece with the decision to confront Milosevic, another tyrant who posed a threat to his own people and to the West. The 2001 terrorist attacks may have transformed (or created) Bush's worldview, but they only fortified Blair's.
But once the prime minister threw in his lot with the Americans, he was trapped. Blair wanted to give the United Nations a central role in running postwar Iraq, as it had in Afghanistan, but Bush refused. Blair sent one of his most seasoned diplomats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, to Baghdad to try to work out a political settlement among Iraq's squabbling leaders, but L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, ignored him. What is tragic (or perhaps ludicrous) about Blair's situation is that he had placed his fate in the hands of a man who did not share his views. He should have realized it. Perhaps he did.
It has been a long downward spiral for a leader who once seemed a protean figure in British political history. The transformation that Blair had to work to make Labor the overwhelming majority party in England was vastly more wrenching than the operation Clinton carried out on the Democrats. Even the harshest British obituaries -- which is to say, the ones from the left -- concede that today's England is more open, more tolerant, more self-confident and more just than the one Blair inherited. But they blame him for promising much and accomplishing little in the reform of public services, for shamelessly hobnobbing with the rich, for ruling by fiat, for surrendering to the dark arts of spin and above all for lying -- and not only about Iraq. For those of us across the ocean, this is a little bit like hearing that the boss you so admire is a monster at home. They would know, of course; but it's still hard to believe.
Tony Blair leaves office under a cloud darker even than the one that shadowed Bill Clinton. His sad trajectory brings to mind Lyndon B. Johnson, another greatly gifted and even brave leader brought low by a ruinous war from which he could not extricate himself. Blair is still young and energetic, unlike Johnson when he left office, and has many years in which to redeem himself. The news that the Bush administration may tap him to serve as a special envoy to the Middle East suggests that opportunities for redemption could come sooner than imagined. Blair himself has said that he hopes to advance the liberal internationalist credo for which he once served as standard-bearer. But he will have to face the fact that nothing has undermined that credo so much as the war he fought in its name.
Washingtonpost, June 24, 2007
The people of Britain will shed few tears when Tony Blair steps down as prime minister on Wednesday. But Americans will miss him deeply, the way we do the star of a beloved TV drama that the networks finally cancel. Not since Mikhail Gorbachev has the leader of a great power so utterly outlived his welcome at home while remaining the apple of the American eye.
Why the crush? Just read Blair's speech before Parliament on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion of Iraq. A million Britons had marched in protest the month before; the leaders of Blair's own Labor Party believed that he was making a terrible mistake, and in some cases had publicly said so. And Blair stood in the well of the House of Commons and warned that our equivocation was emboldening our enemies: "That is why this indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity; when in fact, pushed to the limit, we will act."
Blair's argument was predicated on his certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His speech, in short, was wrong. The British public, which lost patience with Blair years ago, believes that he led them into war in 2003 on a lie. A more charitable, and perhaps less dispassionate, conclusion is that he acted on a conviction that he would not permit troubling evidence to undermine. The same may be true of George W. Bush. I'm guessing, though, that a great many Americans who would never give Bush the benefit of the doubt would do so for Blair. And perhaps that's because of the way they feel about Bush: Our leader was the naif, the showboat, the callow cowboy; theirs was his photographic positive -- steadfast, worldly, eloquent.
And what eloquence! No doubt Americans are too easily impressed by genuine oratory because our own political life is so gassy with the fake, bloated variety. Bush seems to veer between two radically different rhetorical modes: the swelling biblical or Lincolnesque cadences (so obviously, if often splendidly, scripted for him) and the taciturn Texas county sheriff. His language has almost always seemed too big or too small. Blair, by contrast, always found the words that fit even the most solemn moment, as when he united the British people after the death of Princess Diana -- "the people's princess," as he memorably called her. Or in the speech last month announcing his resignation: "Believe one thing if nothing else. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right." After a thousand years of great oratory, Britons may have developed an immunity to such stirring formulations; Americans sure haven't.
I could go on about the particulars of Blair's speaking style: the punchy sentences, the strategic repetition, the homey expressions ("hand on heart") that the British themselves often rolled their eyes at. But all this is technique, which any bright schoolboy could pick up were he so inclined. Blair is worth caring for because of what he stood for.
In April 1999, Blair gave a speech in Chicago framing what he called "a new doctrine of international community." NATO had been bombing Kosovo for the previous month without breaking the will of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In Chicago, Blair said flatly, "We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand."
Kosovo was the interventionist plank of that new doctrine. Blair called for sustained reform of the system of global finance, a new push on free trade, reform of the decision-making apparatus of the U.N. Security Council and NATO, progress on global warming and a reduction of Third World debt. And, returning to Kosovo, he insisted that the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states must give way in the face of genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Blair soon demonstrated that he took his own doctrine seriously. In May 2000, when a murderous rebel force in Sierra Leone kidnapped 500 U.N. peacekeepers and threatened renewed warfare, Britain answered a desperate call for help from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan by sending an air and naval force that intimidated the rebels and persuaded them to release the peacekeepers. Here, in miniature, was the decisive combination of military force with moral force that world publics had been hungering for since the 1990s nightmares of Rwanda and Bosnia.
At the time, Blair's doctrine of international community sounded less like a visionary scheme than a hopeful summation of an emerging consensus. In retrospect, it represents a might-have-been that's almost too painful to contemplate -- for the world, not just for Blair. Certainly the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, derailed some elements of this optimistic agenda: Humanitarian intervention came to seem like an unaffordable luxury once we had to use force in self-defense. But ultimately, it was the election of Bush, and Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, that doomed Blair's new paradigm -- and Blair himself. But the British leader cannot put all the blame on his American counterpart, who scarcely made a secret of his bellicose worldview.
Remember how, when the two leaders first met, Bush announced that they used the same brand of toothpaste? This detail, at once lame and unnerving, made you think: Poor Tony must really be missing his old pal Bill Clinton. But no: Blair and Bush hit it off in a way that baffled and vexed people on both sides of the Atlantic who admired the one and scorned the other.
Various explanations have been offered: Both were "conviction politicians" who recognized in the other a man whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay. Blair was determined to stamp out the virus of anti-Americanism in the Labor Party. Most plausibly, the British prime minister understood that the new world he sought could not be brought into being without the Americans. (Or maybe it was the toothpaste.) Certainly Blair believed that the United States needed an interlocutor to help deal with an increasingly hostile and suspicious Western Europe, and he fashioned this role for himself. The terrible irony is that a man willing to risk his political career for the sake of his convictions came to be seen as Bush's lapdog.
The insult seemed unfair at the time and still does today. Blair pressed Bush to route Iraq policy through the Security Council, and he succeeded. Blair was willing to let U.N. weapons inspections continue, but the Bush administration was not. By that time, Blair could scarcely have withdrawn his support. He believed that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped. More than that, he believed that forcibly disarming the Iraqi dictator was wholly of a piece with the decision to confront Milosevic, another tyrant who posed a threat to his own people and to the West. The 2001 terrorist attacks may have transformed (or created) Bush's worldview, but they only fortified Blair's.
But once the prime minister threw in his lot with the Americans, he was trapped. Blair wanted to give the United Nations a central role in running postwar Iraq, as it had in Afghanistan, but Bush refused. Blair sent one of his most seasoned diplomats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, to Baghdad to try to work out a political settlement among Iraq's squabbling leaders, but L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, ignored him. What is tragic (or perhaps ludicrous) about Blair's situation is that he had placed his fate in the hands of a man who did not share his views. He should have realized it. Perhaps he did.
It has been a long downward spiral for a leader who once seemed a protean figure in British political history. The transformation that Blair had to work to make Labor the overwhelming majority party in England was vastly more wrenching than the operation Clinton carried out on the Democrats. Even the harshest British obituaries -- which is to say, the ones from the left -- concede that today's England is more open, more tolerant, more self-confident and more just than the one Blair inherited. But they blame him for promising much and accomplishing little in the reform of public services, for shamelessly hobnobbing with the rich, for ruling by fiat, for surrendering to the dark arts of spin and above all for lying -- and not only about Iraq. For those of us across the ocean, this is a little bit like hearing that the boss you so admire is a monster at home. They would know, of course; but it's still hard to believe.
Tony Blair leaves office under a cloud darker even than the one that shadowed Bill Clinton. His sad trajectory brings to mind Lyndon B. Johnson, another greatly gifted and even brave leader brought low by a ruinous war from which he could not extricate himself. Blair is still young and energetic, unlike Johnson when he left office, and has many years in which to redeem himself. The news that the Bush administration may tap him to serve as a special envoy to the Middle East suggests that opportunities for redemption could come sooner than imagined. Blair himself has said that he hopes to advance the liberal internationalist credo for which he once served as standard-bearer. But he will have to face the fact that nothing has undermined that credo so much as the war he fought in its name.
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