Blair`s Ten at Ten

18^th May 2007

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

Finally UK Prime Minister Tony Blair announced 27 June as the day when he will hand over the premiership to a new leader of the British Labour Party who has to be appointed in the meantime. In all probability, he will hand over to his neighbour at No. 11, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.

This is as good a time as any for Blair to leave. Even though still 53 years old, he has under his belt a record of three successive election victories and leadership of the UK for an interrupted period of 10 years during which the country enjoyed remarkable growth, increased prosperity, strong public finances and very low unemployment.

On the international scene, he has established himself as an influential international leader with substantial achievements including the process of brokering peace in the Balkans and the liberalisation from oppressive regimes in Serbia and Albania, the hopefully permanent truce and abandonment of armed struggle by the IRA with regard to Northern Ireland, and the organisation of efforts to increase aid and debt forgiveness to the poorest countries, particularly those in Africa. He will be remembered for the staunch support he gave for the enlargement of the EU by the inclusion of 10 former communist eastern countries together with Cyprus and Malta.

Within the UK Labour Party, although despised by those on the extreme left who consider Blair as not being one of them and dislike him for positioning the party almost on the right side of centre, he will always be regarded as the leader who finally managed to engineer the necessary institutional changes that made the party electable after an eternity of 18 years in opposition spent under four different leaders, and who for 10 years made Labour the natural party for governing Britain.

One of the characteristics of quality leaders is their ability to identify the right time to exit. Leaders of lesser quality tend to hold on to power thinking themselves indispensable and increasingly suffering from the law of diminishing returns. In a working democracy, 10 years and three election victories are probably the limit a leader can aspire to spend in position before fatigue sets upon the public’s perception of his image.

By going at this time in spite of his young age, Blair is avoiding the probable humiliation of defeat at the next election by a fresher leader of the Conservative Party who appears to be doing a Blair-like job in bringing his fossilised party back to the mainstream of British politics.

All this creditable performance is however tarnished by the only issue where Blair did not act like himself. The disaster of the war on Iraq will forever act as a negative counter-weight to Blair’s other achievement and greatly reduces the value of the patrimony he leaves behind.

Why America and Britain went to war in Iraq is a question still inadequately answered more than four years after the event. Was it really all about the weapons of mass destruction? Or was there a grand plan to remake the Middle East in the misguided belief that the evil regime of Saddam can be replaced by a beacon of working democracy which will serve as a model for other regimes in the region, so that democracy will gradually propagate throughout the Middle East till it becomes a sort of little America in the sand?

Or was the invasion and occupation Iraq stimulated by the desire to control oil security in the region? Or was it just that after the 11 September 2001 event that hurt US pride, America needed a massive demonstration of its power to repair its hurt ego?

With such flimsy and confusing reasons for going to war, why did a normally-objective Blair allow himself to be poodled into irrational subjectivity by President Bush, and his entourage of neo-conservative warmongers like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and agree to go to a war without clear objectives and without an exit strategy?

That is a question which is hard to find a convincing answer for. Clair Short, a former Secretary of State for International Development and a keen Blair supporter in the Cabinet had to resign in May 2003 after Blair went to war in what she calls an honourable deception.

In her book An Honourable Deception? – New Labour, Iraq and the Misuse of Power, Short argues that Blair had committed himself with his Cabinet not to go to war without a clear and specific mandate from the United Nations. She argued that if Blair had stuck to his guns it would have been almost impossible for Bush to go it alone and Blair could have saved himself, America and the world from a disaster of gigantic proportions.

Blair still unconvincingly argues that Britain has an obligation to stand by its natural and long-term ally, and almost suggests that it is nearly impossible and certainly inadvisable for Britain to let America go it alone, something that Germany and France found no compunction in doing.

As always it is the fullness of time that will best judge Blair’s rightful place in history.