Blair's defence of special relationship with US has hollow ring

As he nears the end of his time in office, Tony Blair is beginning to sound almost delusional as he attempts to justify his track record as it relates to Britain's "Special Relationship" with the United States.

An unrepentant Mr Blair told MPs the relationship had given Britain more clout at the world's top table during his 10 years in power and insisted that it had resulted directly in progress on climate change, the Middle East and Africa.

Just what progress Blair thinks has been achieved on "climate change, the Middle East and Africa" that justifies the kind of relationship that has caused the destruction of his political credibility, he fails to elaborate upon.

Don't get me wrong. I am not some rabid anti-American who thinks Britain should cut off all ties with the United States. I am, however, deeply sceptical about Blair's position where he argued that the US could not be left isolated. Why, when George Bush's government were pursuing totally isolationist policies, was it so vital that Britain offer them the fig leaf of internationalism?

Why were we not allowing Bush to be seen as the international pariah that he was? Many Americans, I am sure, swallowed Bush's lies because Blair was also parroting them. Had he chosen not to do so, many Americans might have woken up far sooner to just how extreme Bush's regime was. Indeed, the shameful portrayal of the French and Germans as Saddam's stooges would not have been possible without Britain siding with an American policy that we now know was based on falsehoods.

A good friend, as Harold Wilson proved, does not offer automatic support. Wilson refused to allow British troops to aid the US in Vietnam and the Special Relationship did not suffer.

Blair was not a good friend. Of course, I don't pretend to myself for an instant that Blair's withdrawing of support would have prevented the Iraq war. It would not have. It would however, have made many Americans uneasy that even friends like Britain did not share Bush's messianic vision of Saddam and his WMD. Sometimes, as we all know from personal experience, the job of a good friend is to say no and protect us from our worst excesses.

Nor did Blair gain anything like the influence that he is now claiming. He was told - and he held it aloft like a banner before the Iraq war - that the road to a Palestinian state lay through Baghdad.

Yet, since the fall of Saddam, Bush has paid almost no attention to the plight of the Palestinians.

So what actual influence does Blair think he has had? He spouts this nonsense even whilst admitting that the Special Relationship has harmed him personally:

"I am the person who above all can give evidence as to the difficulty and sometimes the political penalty you pay for a close relationship with the US, but we shouldn't give that up in any set of circumstances," he said. Mr Blair told the Liaison Committee of senior MPs that the links were an advantage rather than a problem for Britain in the Middle East. "The relationship with America is what opens lots of doors everywhere, including the Middle East. For better or worse, this country for the last 10 years has been right at the heart of every single major international agenda - whether it is terrorism, climate change, Africa, whatever it is," he said.

This is highly delusional. The recent Chatham House Report found that Blair had failed to influence Bush's policy in any way and advised that no future British PM would ever again be able to offer such unconditional support:

The root failure of Tony Blair’s foreign policy has been its inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice – military, political and financial – that the United Kingdom has made.

Tony Blair’s successor(s) will not be able to offer unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy and a rebalancing of the UK’s foreign policy between the US and Europe will have to take place.

Indeed, even Kendall Myers, a senior State Department analyst, has stated:

That for all Britain’s attempts to influence US policy in recent years, “we typically ignore them and take no notice — it’s a sad business”.

He added that he felt “a little ashamed” at Mr Bush’s treatment of the Prime Minister, who had invested so much of his political capital in standing shoulder to shoulder with America after 9/11.

Speaking at an academic forum in Washington on Tuesday night, he answered a question from The Times, saying: “It was a done deal from the beginning, it was a one-sided relationship that was entered into with open eyes . . . there was nothing. There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity.”

Myers speaks a truth that Blair is anxious to ignore. There has been no payback for Britain's unstinting support. There is no Palestinian state. There is no deal on climate change. There is, quite simply, not a single thing that Blair can point at and say, "We wouldn't have this, had we not supported the Americans".

I am not for a moment saying that one assists an ally merely for what one can get out of the deal. Indeed, I believe that one should intervene in certain situations simply because it is the morally right thing to do. However, it is Blair who is claiming that his support for the US has produced tangible advantages, advantages that the rest of us simply cannot see and that Blair himself seems to find impossible to name. The advantages that he has named, on "climate change, the Middle East and Africa", are laughable as they simply do not exist.

Labour MP's have reacted with scorn to Blair's latest pronouncement:

Peter Kilfoyle, a former defence minister, said: "It is delusional. It could be self-justification. It is a special relationship in one sense - it is one-way traffic. In the depths of night, he must realise how very wrong he has judged where Britain's national interests lie."

Alan Simpson, the MP for Nottingham South, said: "This is the politics of dangerous self-delusion. Even the White House laughs at the notion that Britain has influence over American foreign policy. The only door Bush opens at the moment is the one marked 'exit.' He [Mr Blair] has clearly entered the David Icke phase of his political career."

American readers will be unfamiliar with David Icke. He was a respected British sports commentator who, during a TV interview with Terry Wogan, announced that he was the son of God and that the Earth was run by a group of reptilian humanoids.

This, obviously, made him the subject of public ridicule. However, as TV editors refused to allow him on television to espouse his theory, the more convinced Icke became about the conspiracy to silence him.

In a similar fashion Blair has always regarded Old Labour as dinosaurs. The more we oppose him, the more convinced Blair becomes about the rightness of his cause.

And inevitably, like Icke, he now is saying things that are manifestly untrue. And the more we scoff, the more convinced he will become that he is right.

It's a sad ending to what should have been a brilliant political career. And it's all come about because of his relationship with George Bush. But that's a reality that Blair will never accept. However, if he thinks any of his successors will repeat his folly - as he is insisting that they must - then he's even madder than Icke is.

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tag: Bush, Blair, special relationship, United States, United Kingdom, Iraq, war on terror, most right wing administration ever