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- The Observer,
- Sunday March 30 2003
Around us lie the scattered shards of international institutions taken for granted for more than half a century. The conflict in the Gulf has shattered them as comprehensively as if they had been targeted by a bunker-buster. The United Nations is an even more screaming contradiction in terms than at most points in its history. The longer and the bloodier is the combat, the more aggravated become the relations between the globe's leading powers, and the more keenly do smaller countries feel the pressure to take sides. The Russians call for a ceasefire, a demand which they know can only have the effect of angering the Americans. The French cannot bring themselves to say that they hope the coalition forces will win the war, with the same enraging effect on the United States. Even America and Britain, grim comrades in arms, cannot mask increasingly manifest differences of vision about the desired shape of the post-Saddam Middle East.
The continental drift between the United States and Europe has ruptured a European Union which looks like another risible oxymoron. The dream of a common foreign and defence policy is a fantasy for the foreseeable future.
Even more forebodingly, deep impulses have been unleashed on both sides of the Atlantic which will prolong international disorder beyond the duration of hostilities in the Gulf. There is one leader that you never hear saying that the world order needs putting back together. That leader is George W. Bush. For his White House, the war of Saddam is a demonstration to America and to the rest of the planet that the United States is the world order.
For the ascendant unilateralists in the Bush administration, the weakening of the UN and the EU is not to be mourned. For them, these are events to be celebrated. The resignation from a formal position within the Bush administration of Richard Perle, gleeful jigger on what he takes to be the Iraqi grave of the United Nations, only liberates him to make even more public expression of what animates the Bush presidency. Though the American unilateralists claim to have been failed by a Security Council that would not sanctify the war into Iraq, the truth is that they were delighted to be supplied with clinching evidence of their long-developed prejudices about the uselessness of the UN. For this tendency, currently very much in the ascendancy within the Bush administration, the only power with a U in its name that matters is the US of A. Its interests are antipathetic to rivals and constraints whether they come in the form of the UN or the EU.
Washington can tolerate, even be happy, with the Security Council renewing the authority of the Iraq oil-for-food programme. That fits with their view of a UN of much diminished means, a United Nations which is confined to distributing food and maybe health care, the UN as a glorified aid agency, Oxfam wrapped in a blue flag.
One reason that Tony Blair made his hastily-arranged trip to Washington - even at the risk of making himself look like a disappointed supplicant trying to gather crumbs of illusory comfort from under the table of George Bush - was to try to add British weight to the diminishing influences within the US administration which are still battling for America to take a more forward-looking and internationalist view of its interests.
There is a view that a conflict which is proving more difficult and protracted than the war-gamers anticipated will be a salutary lesson to the United States about the perils of unilateralism. The French, in particular, cannot resist drooling over the troubles and trials of the coalition forces. Not for the first time, they misread America. George Bush has just mobilised a further 120,000 American troops for the Gulf as well as sending Congress an invoice for another $70 billion to pay for the war. Even by the standards of her large resources, America is spending dearly in blood and treasure to extirpate the Saddam regime.
The higher the bill, the more reluctant the United States will be to pass the post-Saddam government of Iraq over to an internationally agreed administration. There are practical worries, shared by the British, for American wariness about involving the UN with any speed. The allies do not want to be placed in the position where a weak UN administration constrains their troops from intervening to protect themselves or the Iraqi people.
After his talks with George Bush, Tony Blair mildly remarked that American reluctance to involve the UN was 'understandable' because the 'US felt let down by its partners in the Security Council'. Translated from diplomatese into plain English, the Washington view can be crudely - but not, I think, inaccurately - summarised as follows: when American fighting men and women have done the dying (oh, yeah, and a few of you Brits too) why should the 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys', the vodka-guzzling double-dealers, the sausage-scoffing fellow travellers and the rest of the 'Axis of Weasel' get a bite at post-Saddam Iraq. Especially not the potentially juicy reconstruction contracts which the United States is already pre-banking as its war dividend.
This American stridency meets its mirror image in the French pout that the belligerents ought to pay for their own follies. I describe this posture as French for brevity, but the view is not confined to Paris. Chris Patten neatly summarised the attitude of much of the European Union about contributing towards the reconstruction of Iraq as, 'you broke it; you fix it'.
Piggy in the middle is Tony Blair, trying to make his peace with Europe even as he makes war alongside America. Despite it all, the Prime Minister persists in his characteristic belief that these widening and apparently irreconcilable differences can ultimately be melted away with himself as the principal dissolving agent.
He has to be correct that, when we get to the other side of this war, it won't just be Iraq that needs rebuilding from the foundations. World order will need to be put back together again, the complexity of the task being no excuse for ignoring its urgency. The alternative is an anarchy in international relations, a global swamp in which even the strongest will pay a steep penalty for the chaos. Though they cannot discern it yet, the Americans will ultimately find that a world without rules is a world which will be toxic even for the hyper-power.
Nor is the route to a safer world to be found in the vain ambition entertained most obviously by the French: to create an alliance of the angry, a coalition of the anti-Yankee. The only certain effect of that would be to impel America in a more extremely unilateralist direction.
The very grimness of the times demands from Tony Blair even more copious quantities of public optimism. A victory in Baghdad for the allies will be a defeat for him if emerges from this looking like the sucker who thought he could hitch a right-wing American presidency to his liberal interventionist values, only to find that he was the one being used.
To sustain Mr Blair's case that both Iraq and the world will be better places for his decision to join this war, the Prime Minister has to believe that Britain made a crucial difference - and he must persuade the British to believe that too.The ever-hopeful Tony Blair said at the end of last week: 'I personally think we will get our way through.' Exactly how is not at all bleedin' obvious.
