White House in step with march of the chickenhawks

Tony Blair promised to be "first and last" to stand with President George Bush after September 11 but his friends in the White House, banging the war drums more and more fervently, are making life difficult for the British Prime Minister.

While the Republican right caution Bush not to go it alone in a war with Iraq, the President's only guaranteed ally is finding himself increasingly squeezed by his colleagues, the unions and the Labour Party in the run up to the political conference season.

Blair, who seems to relish being at odds with his party anyway, would not be too damaged by that. But there is a bigger danger, which Lord Healey, the last Labour chancellor, warned of yesterday - and that is being out of step with public opinion, something Blair hates doing.

Healey feels that the prime minister risks losing the leadership of the Labour Party if he supports a US attack on Saddam Hussein. "I don't think he could survive overwhelming public and party opposition to British support for an American attack," said Healey in a grave prediction of what awaits Blair if he throws his lot in with the US.

Losing face is one thing but losing the leadership is something that Blair will not risk. He hopes that opposition to the war can be undercut by a mandate from the UN Security Council. Its backing would make Blair's position more tenable.

Until now Blair has neutered the argument in parliament by repeating his mantra, as he did again yesterday, that no decisions have been made but that doing nothing is not an option. As even the right-wing republicans in the US question the sanity of a war against Iraq, that plank is beginning to run out.

More than 150 MPs, the majority of the them Labour, have signed a motion urging caution, yet the prime minister is one of the few EU leaders to remain loyal to the US administration's desire for "regime change" in Iraq.

Of course what Blair says in public and what goes on behind the political veil are two different things. We glimpsed that last week when Foreign Secretary Jack Straw suggested that war was not the only route on the map of the Middle East. A tough timetable for weapons inspection and a UN security council resolution threatening war otherwise is what Britain is working for behind the scenes.

Blair, whose advice was echoed publicly by Bill Clinton yesterday, has urged Bush to seek the widest possible international support for military action. The clamour for war from within the White House makes consensus-building a difficult task though. In the Security Council Britain believes that China and Russia can be can be persuaded to abstain, rather than veto action, leaving only France, which now accepts a war as inevitable, to be won over.

That's if the US itself can be persuaded of the case for war. According to a new Time/CNN Poll, only 51% of Americans are now in favour of military action, down from 70% in December. Bush's own popularity ratings have plummeted too, but only from the abnormally high levels they were at post-September 11. Americans, fiercely loyal to the flag and to the office of the president, are unlikely to walk away from Bush.

But there is a push against war and it is coming from an unlikely quarter ... the Republican old guard. James Baker, a former Republican Secretary of State in the Bush senior administration, warned the president last week that acting unilaterally against Iraq was not wise counsel.

Baker, the man the Bush family sent to Florida to fight their side in the election recount debacle, is not so much hotwired to the Republican old-guard, he is the soldering iron that melds it together. For Baker to say that that the White House should only seek to intervene in Iraq with the backing of the United Nations Security Council is as close as you can get to a public dressing down of a political son by his father.

But the signs are that Bush Junior is willing to take advice from few people. No sooner had Baker issued his warning than the current vice-president Dick Cheney was making a belligerent speech to US war veterans calling Saddam Hussein a sworn enemy. The point, Cheney argued, was not getting weapons inspectors back into Iraq, it was getting Iraq to disarm and getting rid of Saddam.

President Bush is finding his resolve, it is reported, from the inspirational leadership of Winston Churchill. This significant clue to the direction of future US military policy appeared in a pay-off line in a press wire report on a tour of the president's Texas holiday home. It appears that between rounds of golf and tidying the lawn the president is reading Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime.

This has been dismissed as "Bush Reads A Book, World Awaits Result", however its significance comes not from any succour that Bush may take from Churchill's example of pushing his generals into war but in the fact that its author, Eliot A Cohen, is a former Pentagon official. Not only is Elliot a respected defence academic, he is a paid-up member of the Republican "chickenhawk" circle promoting military action against the Baghdad regime.

The chickenhawks, the cabal of right-wingers who never saw the far side of a military training ground, are the men now banging the drums for war in the White House. Among Bush's close advisers, only Colin Powell has a solid military record, which may go some way to explaining his reluctance for war. Donald Rumsfeld did serve as naval aviator but never saw action. President Bush missed Vietnam by serving in the Texas Air National Guard, defending the homeland after, it is assumed, his congressman father pulled the appropriate strings.

Dick Cheney avoided the draft first because he was a student, then because he was married. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, and his hawkish adviser Richard Perle were nowhere near a draft letter or a frontline either. Nor will either man be in the first wave of those who go into Iraq, as one sceptical Republican senator noted last week.

Bush, unlike Blair, has said that he welcomed a debate on what to do about Iraq. Blair, speaking yesterday, simply said that doing nothing about weapons of mass destruction is not an option.

Most conclude that what Blair thinks and whatever Britain contributes militarily have little significance in Washington. True, any military contribution would be symbolic, but as the US finds itself more and more isolated Britain's diplomatic posture becomes more important.

Yesterday Lord Healey pointed out that if the UK did not support an attack it was "very unlikely Bush would carry it out". For once the special relationship could have some significance. And Blair, when he sees Charles Kennedy's well-timed intervention on Iraq resonating against his own empty words, might come to realise that being open to debate is not such a bad thing.

Copyright 2002
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