Blair accused of using British troops to shore up Bush’s election campaign

TONY BLAIR has agreed this week to move British forces closer to trouble spots near Baghdad so that George W Bush would not have to commit more US troops to Iraq in the closing days of his re-election campaign.

The British prime minister of course denies that he has agreed to the move to satisfy American political motives. However, trust in Blair in Britain is so low at the moment that few are prepared to believe him.

The redeployment of the British forces is just one more cameo in the peculiar story which has been the British involvement in this Iraq war. History will look back with increasing incredulity at the war. There will be hundreds of history books and TV programmes trying to explain how the United States, within two years of the attack on the World Trade Center, came to divert its considerable international prestige and military resources to fight a war there.

Even more curious to future historians will be how Great Britain came to line up beside the US in this endeavour. They will wonder how it came to pass that the most successful and significant British Labour prime minister ever came to involve his country, against popular opinion, in an Iraq war led and initiated by the neo-cons of the US Republican party.

The historians may ask whether it would have been different if the Conservative Party had been in government in Britain in 2003 when Bush came looking for support to go to war in Iraq. On the initial evidence, they may be drawn to conclude that it would have made no difference. The then leader of the Conservatives, Ian Duncan Smith, roundly supported Tony Blair’s Iraq war strategy. The same was the case with the Conservatives’ current leader, Michael Howard.

Although now critical of the Blair government’s handling of the war, Howard was an enthusiastic supporter of the decision to go to war in March 2003.

But interestingly, all the most senior surviving former Conservative cabinet members (which the exception of Margaret Thatcher) have been strongly and openly opposed to this Iraq war.

In an extraordinary programme last Sunday on ITV, Jonathan Dimbelby interposed extended interviews with three veterans of the Major and Thatcher Conservative governments - Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clark. The three Tory heavyweights delivered a powerful broadside against Blair’s handling of the crisis in the Middle East.

Michael Heseltine is the most significant and colourful of the three. He was nearly prime minister twice. He took on Margaret Thatcher only to be defeated by John Major in the race to succeed her. A few years later, in 1995, the then weakened prime minister Major made the flamboyant Heseltine his deputy in an effort to shore up his government.

Last Sunday when asked if Blair had lied about the war, the now Lord Heseltine was characteristically blunt.

“I think he has lied,” he said. “We were told that there was a threat. We were told there were weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction; there was no threat.”

Lord Heseltine dismissed as “semantics” Mr Blair’s insistence that he honestly believed intelligence that has since turned out to be faulty.

Blair, he said, was “trapped” into going to war by his desire to stand by his American allies.

DOUGLAS HURD was British Foreign Secretary during the Balkan crisis and of course during the 1991 Gulf War when he and John Major put together an international coalition with George Bush senior to build and fund a military expedition to evict Saddam from Kuwait.

As is befitting his diplomatic training, the now Lord Hurd stopped short of accusing Blair of deliberately lying about the justification for the Iraq war.

“I don’t think he deliberately lied,” Hurd argued, “because I think he’s one of those people who deceived himself first.

“He persuaded himself that it was not necessary to ask all the awkward questions about the war: It was simply necessary to take up and echo and repeat the arguments that President Bush was making.”

Kenneth Clark is a former chancellor of the exchequer. He is another failed contender for the Conservative leadership and is still a member of the House of Commons. Clarke too accused Blair of lying and described as “absurd” Mr Blair’s claims that the redeployment of 850 Black Watch troops to US areas in Iraq was a military decision.

For Lord Heseltine, this week’s redeployment could be seen as nothing else but a move designed to help Mr Bush ahead of the US presidential elections.

A former Defence Secretary himself, Heseltine argued that the redeployment was far too big to be a purely operational matter, as the Government has suggested, and Helseltine denounced the redeployment as “militarily extraordinarily ill-judged.” Lord Hurd also had no doubt that the redeployment was a “highly political decision”.

On Sunday, John Major joined the criticism, saying it would be “many, many years” before British troops were able to leave Iraq. “We are not near the beginning of the end yet,” he told BBC1’s Breakfast with Frost.

These heavyweights of the Thatcher and Major administration cannot be dismissed as grandees engaging in a purely partisan attack on Blair’s war strategy. They are not doing it purely as Conservative politicians. In fact, the Heseltine-Hurd-Clarke attack goes far beyond the official position of Michael Howard’s current Conservative front bench.

Neither is it a question of the Tory heavyweights enjoying the benefit of hindsight - Hurd, Clarke and Heseltine all loudly opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq last year.

And of course, the British Conservatives are not the only party in which experienced foreign policy voices were and still are vocally opposed to the Iraq war. At the moment I’m reading the memoir of the former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, which is aptly called The Point of Departure.

Cook resigned from the Blair Government in 2003 in opposition to the decision, without domestic or international support, to go to war in Iraq.

Cook’s incredible political diary sets out in detail how, in the months leading up to the war, he struggled inside the cabinet and in the internal forums of the Labour party to make the argument against the Iraq war before finally being forced to quit the government. What is most striking is that Cook made the argument in terms remarkably similar to those of Heseltine, Hurd and Clarke.

One sentence from Robin Cook’s resignation speech in March 2003 echoes loudly more than 18 months later. Addressing the House of Commons on the motion to go to war on St Patrick’s Day 2003, Cook commented, “what has come to trouble me most over the past week is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.”

More than a year a half later, as the United States goes to the presidential election polls, Iraq is descending into further into terrorism and chaos.