- "Across British public opinion, George Bush is seen
as the global village idiot."
- -
- The British are usually undaunted by the prospect of
war, and Tony Blair is generally the most effective communicator of his
political generation. So you can appreciate the bafflement inside Downing
Street that the Prime Minister is finding it so difficult to convince his
country that he is right to mobilise military force against Saddam Hussein.
Mr Blair's advisers are frustrated, and increasingly bewildered, that all
his exertions of rhetoric and argument have not managed to swing public
opinion behind the case for disarming the Iraqi tyrant.
-
- If anything, the more he talks about dealing with Saddam,
the more anti-war sentiment seems to spread within his own Government and
across the country.
-
- There can be few people who don't know that Saddam Hussein
is a mass murderer who treats his own subjects with hideous cruelty and
would not hesitate to inflict the most appalling suffering on others.
-
- He has committed dreadful atrocities against internal
opponents and twice launched invasions - into Iran and Kuwait - of his
neighbours. There can be few people who aren't aware that the Iraqi despot
has a lusty appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction and he has
failed to account to the UN inspectors for the deadliest elements of his
arsenal.
-
- There must be few people who can't grasp that the UN
inspectors would not have got back into Iraq after a four-year Saddam-imposed
absence had he not been threatened with force.
-
- There are surely few people who can't follow Mr Blair's
logic when he warns that, unless checked, it is only a matter of time before
Saddam makes a marriage of hell with a terrorist group who would exult
in the capability of exploding a nuclear device in a major western conurbation
such as London.
-
- And there are surely few people who can't see that if
Saddam is allowed to emerge smiling from his latest trial of strength with
the democracies, then the message will resound around the world that the
West is not prepared to protect the freedom and security either of its
own people or those less able to defend themselves, encouraging every other
rogue state to follow a Saddamite vector.
-
- These are compelling arguments which have been vigorously
promulgated by the Prime Minister. So why is he having so little traction
on his country?
-
- Why can't he even convince a majority of his own Cabinet?
I think Mr Blair's essential difficulty can be summarised in three words:
George Walker Bush.
-
- "I've no hang-ups about removing Saddam. I've no
hang-ups about joining the United States in military action," one
impeccably loyal and Atlanticist Labour MP commented to me recently. "It's
following that cowboy which I find so hard to stomach."
-
- He speaks not just for many Labour MPs and activists,
but also for much of Britain. You'd expect the Left, especially those strands
of the Left whose thinking is still framed by the Vietnam War, to be repelled
by the idea of saddling up for a posse led by this very Right-wing American
President. What is striking is how George W Bush arouses so much anxiety
and antagonism across centrist and conservative Middle Britain. A former
Conservative Cabinet minister regards Bush as "like a child running
around with a grenade with the pin pulled out".
-
- Charles Kennedy has not adopted his anti-Dubya position
just because he thinks it's right; he also knows that it is popular with
many of the Tories he wants to woo over to the Liberal Democrats.
-
- Across British public opinion, George Bush is seen as
the global village idiot. This is a one-dimensional caricature of the man
- albeit a caricature that he has rather encouraged. The point is that
the cartoon cowboy image is now pretty indelibly stuck.
-
- The broad British view of George Bush is that he is Ronald
Reagan without the brains. One of the Prime Minister's own advisers on
foreign policy privately describes the American President as "cretinous".
-
- Americans may say - and they may be right - that there's
an element of a British superiority/ inferiority complex at work here.
-
- Having seen the United States replace us as the world's
dominant power, I suspect that we are fond of consoling ourselves with
the idea that the Americans put dimwits in the Oval Office.
-
- Being a Texan doesn't help. The American presidents who
are preferred by the British are avuncular war heroes like Eisenhower or
glamorous East Coasters like Kennedy or charismatic Anglophiles like Clinton.
-
- Sleaze-bag he may have been, but Bill Clinton had a feel
for the erogenous zones of the British, he knew that winning friends here
and elsewhere in Europe required a more sophisticated patter than the gunslinging
clichÈs of his successor.
-
- Remember how Clinton was mobbed at Labour's Blackpool
conference, recall how he wowed the crowd at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival.
You just can't see George W Bush understanding how to work the British.
Actually, you just can't see him at a literary festival, period. I've heard
several people close to the Prime Minister sigh wistfully that it would
all be so much easier if Clinton were still in the White House.
-
- People may be just about prepared to trust Mr Blair's
judgment on Iraq. What scares them is the man who they know to be calling
the real shots. Mr Blair has been exerting some influence, but the perception
persists that the Prime Minister is being sucked into conflict on the slipstream
of an American President driven by a thirst for oil and revenge on behalf
of his daddy.
-
- The view that the Prime Minister has over-estimated his
leverage over the White House reaches into the highest levels of Mr Blair's
Cabinet. One very senior minister told me just the other day that the Americans
"don't give a damn what we think". The minister almost spat out
his food as he spoke.
-
- If he wants to go to war in Iraq, Tony Blair's task is
not convincing Britain that Saddam Hussein is wicked. The bigger hurdle
is persuading the British that George W Bush isn't all bad.
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- http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/opinion/articles/2914770?version=1
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