Blair: Middle East strategy is not working

It is very rare these days for Tony Blair to ever say anything that I can agree with him on, so let's savour the moment.

Tony Blair called for a fundamental reappraisal of British and US foreign policy yesterday, admitting that excessive emphasis on military power and failure to address the Palestinian issue had left the west losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East.

Mr Blair said it was necessary "to change dramatically the focus of our policy", admitting: "In the short term we are not winning."

It says something for where we find ourselves that a statement of such an obvious fact should seem so refreshing. And yet, with the Bush White House seeming willing to endorse any Israeli outrage no matter how severe, peace between Israel and Palestine has never seemed further away.

And this remains the one issue that is more likely to fuel terrorism than any other.

Only a few short months ago, peace in the region seemed nearer that it had in twenty years. Olmert had been elected to withdraw from the Occupied Territories and Hamas had finally agreed to recognise Israel. Then the Israelis shelled a Gaza beach, Hamas called off it's ceasefire, and we find ourselves back where we started.

So Blair is right to ask that we reappraise where we now find ourselves.

"Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade and, in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win, and this is a battle we must win."

The simple truth is that the way to successfully fight terrorism is to fight it's causes, and the cause of most of the anger directed towards us comes from the disgraceful way the Israelis have treated the Palestinians and the continued occupation of their lands and the absence of their statehood.

The problem is that the current White House has no real interest in addressing this issue and when people like Rumsfeld talk of "the so called occupied territories" he makes perfectly clear who the US favours in this dispute.

However, whilst Blair recognising the problem is to be welcomed, it still falls a long way short of doing something about it.

By aligning himself so closely to Bush's foreign policy Blair was supposedly garnering influence that could be used at some future date. However, to date, there is no example of Blair ever exerting even the remotest influence over this White House; indeed, at times, he has seemed little more than their carrier pigeon spouting their arguments almost verbatim.

The need to sort out the Israeli/Palestine dispute should be the most important issue facing any politician today. However, in order to do so Blair will have to be willing to do more than make a few speeches on the subject. He needs to publicly confront Bush's indifference to the subject and use the goodwill he has built up with the American's to some positive effect.

Blair is searching for a legacy to remove the epithet "Iraq" from his gravestone. I have no great faith that he would ever succeed in making this White House take some affirmative action towards securing an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is imperative that he at least try.

However, when further on in his speech he says...

He also said the battle in Lebanon had been started by Hizbullah provocation, and was intended "to create chaos, division and bloodshed and to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression, but those who responded to it".

...I feel like losing the will to live. Once again, Blair spouts the Israeli narrative, and Olmert's war of choice becomes something that was foisted upon him. Nasrallah has already admitted that he did not foresee the Israeli response being of such magnitude, and yet Blair has erased that from the story line.

Blair is right to recognise that we are losing the battle, but he should also realise that it is mindset's like his own - constantly demanding that we all follow a narrative that we know to be false - that remain part of the problem rather than the solution.

Blair went on to say:

"We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values."

Truth is also a value, Tony. And the Israeli/Palestine dispute will never be sorted until we stop seeing the events through a US/Israeli prism.

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Tags: Blair, Middle East, west, losing, Israel, Palestine,