History will judge Blair as a defender of Bush's agenda above Britain's

The prime minister's role has been to find excuses for America. His European ambitions have been thwarted

Chris Patten
Monday September 19, 2005
The Guardian

One of the government departments most affected by the accumulation of power in No 10 has been the Foreign Office. The appointment of a senior foreign policy adviser to the prime minister is not new; what has been novel is the number of such advisers at the prime minister's right hand and their direct role in overseeing foreign policy on the key issues. For a prime minister with no previous experience of foreign policy, and with an excessive regard for his own "feel" for the subject, this is unwise and dangerous. It cannot have been helpful, in the build-up to the Iraq war and in its aftermath, that the prime minister was divorced from the informed scepticism that the Foreign Office would have brought to a discussion of the available policy options. Certainly making policy over the heads of the state department and the Foreign Office has not been conspicuously successful.

Blair's principal aims in foreign and security policy are admirable. He wants a strong alliance with the US, the only superpower, which he hopes Britain can influence in the way that it exercises its global leadership. He wishes to see a strengthened UN, which can provide legitimacy for international intervention in the affairs of sovereign states to protect the human rights of their citizens and to deal with real threats to the security of our own. He would like Britain to take a leading role in the affairs of the EU, and to lay to rest our ambivalence about membership of the union. How has the Iraq war advanced these goals?

Blair committed Britain and British soldiers to the American side in Iraq because he believed that it would be perilous for us, indeed for all America's allies, to leave our friend to fight alone. Without Britain could America have invaded? It probably would have done so, but the enterprise would have been more politically hazardous and it is possible that British hesitation would have encouraged doubts in the American establishment.

Choking off our own grave doubts, the sort that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, evidently put to Blair at the eleventh hour, did Washington no favours. Is it really the role of a good friend to suppress real anxieties rather than express them candidly? Supporting the Bush invasion of Iraq is probably the worst service we have paid America.

So what influence did we buy for ourselves by going along with this ill-judged adventure? From the Crawford meeting in the spring of 2002, Blair had given Bush and his senior advisers to understand that, whatever happened, if there was fighting we would be shoulder to shoulder with them. What influence did we ever exercise over substance as opposed to process - over the prosecution of the war or the government of Iraq when the war was formally over, with the "mission accomplished" but the fatalities about to mount?

It is revealing that whatever the disastrous mistakes made by the occupying power in Iraq - the purging of Ba'athists, the employment of the sort of military overkill tactics used by the Israeli Defence Forces, the Grozny-isation of Falluja and other towns - no one has pointed the finger of blame at the British. No one holds Britain to account because no one thinks for a nanosecond that Britain is implicated in the decisions. Britain is there as part of the feudal host, not as a serious decision-sharing partner.

We have been assured that we have been influential in persuading Bush and his colleagues to become more involved in pushing forward the peace process in the Middle East. Conceivably, one day this will be true. But in the years when I saw close-up the process deliberately driven into a layby, Britain's principal role was to find excuses for American inaction, not reasons for prodding Washington into doing something.

Blair is right to argue, as others do, that the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 no longer provides an adequate basis for international law. That treaty, which brought to an end the Thirty Years war and inaugurated the modern European state system, also concluded that one state should only take up arms against another and intervene in its affairs if it were itself to be attacked by that state. That is plainly no longer sufficient as a central assumption in international law.

Blair feels strongly that there should be an international consensus, rooted in the practices and principles of the UN, which can legitimise armed intervention in cases such as Rwanda, Kosovo and Afghanistan, where other efforts to prevent a crisis fail. His views on intervention were set out in a speech in Chicago in 1999 where he laid out five main considerations that could justify our intervention to prevent "threats to international peace and security". Were we sure of our case? Had we exhausted all diplomatic options? Were there military options that would be undertaken prudently? Were we prepared to stick things out for the long term? Were our national interests involved?

Did Blair think that these tests were met in the case of Iraq? The problem about going to war in a democracy on the sort of grounds to which the Blair doctrine refers, the attempt to pre-empt danger, is that it depends crucially on trust. Has Iraq made it more or less likely that when the pre-emptive use of force is required in future, voters in Britain and other democracies will support it? Do voters feel they were told the truth about Iraq? Were they told the truth? Have the invasion and occupation increased the dangers of terrorist attack on free and independent states? One of the principal concerns about Blair's policy on Iraq is that it makes it more difficult to put in place a policy of pre-emptive intervention with the backing of international law and of public opinion in democratic societies.

Blair is clearly committed to Britain playing a strong role in Europe. He has worked hard with France to develop a more effective European defence capability, which has fluttered the dovecotes in Washington. While Americans want Europe to do more for itself in the field of security, they are reluctant to see the development of capacity leading to any decoupling from a chain of command that they control themselves. Blair is right to worry that at the moment Europe dwells in the worst of all worlds: our pretensions worry the Americans without giving us much additional ability to work with them to make the world safer.

Unfortunately, Blair's European ambitions have been thwarted in Iraq. Maybe he could have been more effective in bridging the Atlantic - representing Europe to America and America to Europe. But it would have taken a clearer and more outspoken determination to speak up for European doubts from time to time. Did Blair ever speak out against American attacks on "the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of Europe"? Did he try to explain the strength of public opinion in Europe - far more united in hostility to the Iraq adventure than governments ever were?

Even members of his own party clearly doubt whether the British engagement in Iraq would have developed in the same way without him. Would a Brown-led government - whatever Brown would have said loyally on the hustings in 2005 - have gone to war for the same reasons? Now we must hope and work for a peaceful democratic future for Iraq. We can at least support Blair in that. But we cannot forget the journey that brought us here.

A victim of his own interpretation of the "special relationship", Blair is all too likely to be judged by history as a leader who was braver in defending Bush's agenda in Iraq than he was in standing up for his own, and Britain's, strategic objectives in Europe.

© Chris Patten 2005.

· This is an edited extract from Not Quite the Diplomat by Chris Patten, published by Penguin, £20. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call the Guardian book service on 0870-836 0875