| Review of: | American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror by Con Coughlin |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Richard Briand |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 78, Issue 1, Pages 182-196 |
Book Reviews: Blair and Bush
As one wag remarked at the 2004 Labour party conference, had any protesters really wanted to embarrass Tony Blair, they would have waited until the end of his speech and then played back on a tape recorder, 'Hi, I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message.'
The book's first particular strength lies in the vivid portrayal (assisted by extensive inside contacts repeatedly listed as 'private interview') of relationships between the key players. It is particularly perceptive about how the relationships within the Bush administration affected its relations with the Blair government. The switch of planning for post-war Iraq from the State Department to the Pentagon was, for instance, particularly unwelcome to the Blair government, given the non-relationship between Rumsfeld and Hoon. The 'diffident' Hoon was 'overwhelmed by Rumsfeld's personality'. Jack Straw's good relationship with Colin Powell had, meanwhile, already counted for less when Powell was so sidelined that he had to ring Straw in London to find out what was happening in Washington. Coughlin is in little doubt that Straw's predecessor, Robin Cook, was removed as Foreign Secretary in June 2001 because of his disagreements with the Bush administration over Kyoto and National Missile Defense (NMD).
Coughlin offers a shrewd analysis of the neo-conservatives within the Bush administration, arguing convincingly that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush were not among their number. He also shrewdly charts the evolving relationship between the US neo-conservatives and Tony Blair, in which initial admiration for Blair's insistence on ground troops for Kosovo changed into deep suspicion towards his enthusiasm for a Middle East peace initiative and a Palestinian state. This was something to which many neo-conservatives, with their strong links to Likud, were ideologically opposed.
Such suspicions would not have been allayed by Blair's willingness to speak to people regarded as out of bounds by the Bush administration. Coughlin, however, interprets Bush's statement 'You actually talk to those guys?', after the Prime Minister revealed a post-9/11 conversation with President Khatami, as one of awe rather than disgust. When it came to Arafat, though, awe was replaced with exasperation. A source within the Bush administration says that it believed Blair was 'hopelessly optimistic' about the Road Map, and that Bush went along with it purely to humour Blair.
While a recurring theme of the book is Blair's failure to achieve his objective to act as a bridge-builder between the USA and Europe, Coughlin argues convincingly that the Prime Minister had great success in acting as one between Bush and Putin. If Cheney and Rumsfeld were wary towards the ex-KGB officer, Blair persuaded Bush that it was worth giving Putin a hearing. While Russia opposed the Iraq war, it dropped its opposition to NMD, and enabled intelligence cooperation and the use of its bases during the invasion of Afghanistan.
As Coughlin usefully reminds us, the UK and the USA disagreed with France and Germany over how to deal with Iraq even while Clinton was president. Relations between Blair and Clinton were not, however, without their own tensions. The President's reluctance to commit ground troops in the Kosovo conflict left Blair feeling that while Clinton would remain a friend, he would never rely on him again. There were also tensions over Northern Ireland. Like the preceding Major administration, many officials in the Blair government felt that Clinton and his administration were unduly sympathetic to Sinn Fein. They felt that Clinton's contacts with the Unionist community's political representatives were 'non-existent' (a sentiment that overlooks Clinton's efforts to involve not just the Ulster Unionists, but also the political parties linked to the Loyalist paramilitaries). Clinton helped, but was not crucial, officials assert. They go, in fact, so far as to suggest that Blair's success in securing the Belfast Agreement was even in spite of the Clinton administration's involvement.
The second particular strength of the book is its account, again helped by an apparent wealth of inside contacts, of the intelligence controversies surrounding the Iraq war. For many readers, Coughlin's understated and terse style will make his verdict on Blair's (mis)handling of the intelligence all the more damning. The author notes that the Prime Minister raised the possibility 'that Saddam's WMD could be given to terrorist groups to attack the West, even though the intelligence reports he received from SIS made no mention of Saddam cooperating with terror groups on WMD'. In any case, 'Saddam was far too obsessed with power' to share any WMD capability with others', and his regime's links with Al Qaeda were 'tenuous at best'. That said, Coughlin also provides devastating evidence of the complacency in British intelligence circles about what they regarded as an 'over-hyped' threat from Al Qaeda in the run-up to 9/11. Coughlin's sources within UK intelligence are, meanwhile, scathing about Colin Powell's presentation to the UN.
Any criticisms of
Such shortcomings are, however, easily outweighed by the book's merits.