More trouble for Tony Blair, this time a surprising Labour defeat in a special election (they call them by-elections in Britain) in what was thought to be a safe Labour district. A candidate from Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats, which opposed the Iraq War, won the seat.
A Reuters analysis explains:
On the face of it, a marginal reduction in Blair's huge 165-seat parliamentary majority looks inconsequential.
But timing is all. The political damage to Blair will be heavy at a time when opinion polls show most Britons no longer trust him and his annual Labour Party conference looms, with activists angry about a war they opposed.
Foreign policy is never the only issue in these things. But it played a significant role in this one.
I do feel sorry for Blair, up to a point. I had seen him as a very sympathetic figure, up until he backed the Iraq War and agreed to participate in the invasion without UN approval. And he's paid a heavy price for what he apparently saw - with more faith than judgment - as a moral imperative. His credibility is wrecked. He's lost one of his most key long-time advisers, Alistair Campbell. He runs a real risk of being outsted as Prime Minister by his own Labour Party.
It seems to me that Blair tried to play Britain's traditional role of being a bridge between the US and the other countries of Europe. The problem in this case is that he failed to understand just how drastic Bush and Rummy's foreign policy was breaking from previous Administrations. The European democracies expected to be America's allies. Bush and Rummy expected them to be something more like vassal states. In the end, Blair wound up being derided by critics at home as "America's poodle" and blowing his credibility with Europe, as well.
Blair is joining German Chancellor Schroeder and French President Chirac for a three-way summit this weekend. We'll see if they come up with any meaningful progress on the Iraq mess. With expectations low, they have a good chance of surprising everyone if they accomplish anything at all.
6 comments:
Bruce, thanks for including something from Britain. Alistair Campbell is far from being lost, he'll simply serve Blair in another role, like Peter Mandelson. And if you think Blair's credibility is wrecked you're not following Hutton. Compared with the BBC, Blair is doing very well in credibility. Andrew Gilligan has been called back to the Hutton Inquiry for the fourth time, this time to answer questions that he rewrote his interview notes with Dr. Kelly. David
David, it would be better for Blair if his credibility were a contestant in a zero-sum game with Andrew Gilligan. But the hearings have shown that, whoever said exactly which words to whom (Gilligan's problem), Blair's government hyped the intelligence beyond what the intelligence agencies were comfortable saying (Blair's problem). And even the more conservative intelligence estimates were grossly overestimating Iraq's WMDs (also Blair's problem).
Bruce
Bruce, The testimony of Britain's intelligence chiefs this week made clear that Britain's intelligence services believed there was strong evidence to suggest that Iraq did possess WMDs, including ones that could be deployed in forty-five minutes (in short-range artillery shells I believe). British intelligence told this to the Blair government, and the Blair government presented these facts to the public, without embellishment. (part one)
What the Blair government may or may not have known is that there were some dissenters within the British intelligence community who did not believe that Iraq possessed quite such threatening WMD capability as presented in the reports to the government. They were in a minority, and Dr. Kelly was one of them. (part two)
Gilligan exaggerated the extent of the dissenters divergence of views within the British intelligence community, and also made up the story that Alistair Campbell invented the forty-five minute claim. The BBC hierarchy, desperate to believe in any story that backed up their position that the Iraq war was wrong, didn't properly check Gilligan's claims.
The Hutton Inquiry will conclude that the BBC was engaged in a propaganda war with the Blair government. (part three)
As to the reality of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, only time will tell. But it certainly appeared to intelligence professionals in the UK that he did still possess them in the spring of this year, the Blair government didn't make it up for its own purposes. (part four) David
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