Blair Falls Short, According to Sir Christopher Meyer

I’m not a big fan of Tony Blair. Many conservatives are, be it for his steadfast loyalty to President Bush or his determination on Iraq. But for much of his time as PM, Blair has shown himself to be a progressive “modernizing” idealist; too willing to give short shrift to the British constitution and, as Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador to the US, points out, too impatient to lend his voice, with much significance, to the American dominated war plan for Iraq.

The interesting thing about this interview is that it is decidedly NOT anti-American. Sir Christopher speaks very highly of Bush as a man and as a leader, remaining critical of his own government under Blair’s watch; Blair’s seeming inability to speak forcefully for British expertise in drawing up a war plan. Having served both Conservative and New Labour Prime Ministers, Sir Christopher’s arrows fly not from any throwback British arrogance vis a vis America, but rather from his practical experience in British government and his unique locus between Bush and Blair in the run up to war—a war he still endorses today.

Here are excerpts:

His status:

… Sir Christopher is not just another former ambassador but a man close to the heart of Republican America.

As British ambassador to Washington from 1997 to February 2003, he was the man who introduced a wary Tony Blair to Mr Bush. He led the way towards the unexpected mating of New Labour with the American right, a relationship that eventually took Britain to war in Iraq.

He did not just arrange meetings between the two leaders but spoke up at them. He was a confidant of both sides, with regular private meetings with everyone in the White House from vice-president Dick Cheney and his aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, now being prosecuted in Washington, to the president himself.

He reinvented what it meant to be Britain’s ambassador to Washington, a dominant figure in the capital’s social life as well as in politics.

The situation in Iraq:

He supported the war but is far from happy about the handling of the aftermath. “I don’t believe the enterprise is doomed necessarily, though, God, it does not look good,” he says in an interview with the Guardian marking the publication of his memoirs, DC Confidential. “A lot of people think what we are going to end up with is precisely what we didn’t want.”

Blair as a meek leader but staunch idealist:

He looks at the breakdown of Iraq now with the detachment of an outsider - but one with a unique insight into how the war came about and what could have been done differently.

He contrasts Mr Blair’s meek approach with Lady Thatcher’s dealings with the White House. Mr Blair behaved very differently from what Sir Christopher calls “the Thatcher style”. He saw it first-hand on many of her trips abroad.

“Thatcher had no hesitation on the phone, or surging into the Oval office to blaze away if she thought Reagan was doing something stupid. And she did on a number of occasions and sometimes it was extremely effective and certainly did not damage the relationship at all. I think Tony Blair and Downing Street were reluctant to perform in that way,” he says.

And for all his rhetorical strengths, Mr Blair was surprisingly weak on detail. He faced a president who was sharper than Europeans generally assume. There were “moments of great power and strength exerted by Blair, usually in the rhetorical framing of issues. But we see, how can I put it, less attention to detail than some of these issues demanded.”

Lady Thatcher took pride in knowing more detail than her officials. “That is why it was terrifying to be summoned into her presence because if you did not know your stuff, she would expose you. There was never that danger with Tony Blair.”

The jury is still out on Iraq:

But he accepts that the task of rebuilding may now be impossible. “There is no doubt that the presence of American and British troops to a degree motivates the insurgency. So this is agonising for Bush and I think it is agonising for Blair, all of us really.” He also dismisses the prime minister’s claim that the war has not exposed Britain to terrorist attacks. “There is plenty of evidence around at the moment that home-grown terrorism was partly radicalised and fuelled by what is going on in Iraq,” he says. “There is no way we can credibly get up and say it has nothing to do with it. Don’t tell me that being in Iraq has got nothing to do with it. Of course, it does. The issue is it is part of the price we have to pay and should be paying for the removal of Saddam Hussein and at the moment the jury is out.”

He never expected to have such doubts at this stage. “I was a war supporter. I still think it was the right thing to do to bring Saddam to heel.”

On WMD and why Iraq is a political war:

The US Iraq survey team, sent in after the war, failed to find any WMD after one of the most intensive hunts in history. Sir Christopher suggests they could have been “spirited out of the country into Syria or maybe even Iran. That is a possibility”. To the Americans, though, Sir Christopher says, the war was always about regime change, not WMD. “One of the things that came to me when writing was how political the war was. This wasn’t just a war, it was a political war.” The US, he says, wanted to “replace a bad government with a good government”. It was, he says, the “neo-con vision”.

None of this is news to those in the know but maybe, rather, interesting confirmation.

I have often wondered, given the relative success of the Brit’s at managing colonies, why, then, has there not been more success on the ground in Iraq. Now this experience may not have offered much of a relief given the endless raging factionalism of the Middle East. But given British history running Palestine, one would expect that the British Foreign Office could, with the right political leadership, be a helpful voice on getting Iraq right. (There’s also the mantra of Victor Davis Hanson to consider, that the successes on the ground in Iraq are under reported by a largely defeatest media.)

Anyone else interested in talking about the difference British input could have made on Iraq? Or what difference it has made? Or maybe, more generally, the differences in British and American administration in Iraq, successes and failures? I don’t know much about this, so hopefully some of you do.