American Ally

Con Coughlin

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062322029
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Proceso político

American Ally is the definitive account of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's support for the United States in the War on Terror. Drawing on his exclusive access to the key players at the White House and Downing Street, Con Coughlin explains what led Blair to risk his political career for a cause that he truly believed in. Just as Bob Woodward called on insiders to analyze George W. Bush in Bush at War, Coughlin now calls on his own experience and sources to offer a critical analysis and account of Tony Blair at war.

Here is an in-depth, probing look at the man who has become America's first ally in the post-9/11 world. Tony Blair's staunch support for the United States since 9/11 has confirmed his position as one of the most important and controversial world leaders of the twenty-first century. In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in London and with Iraq in turmoil, the relationship between Britain and the United States will be critical in determining how future international crises are resolved. American Ally is an essential read for those wishing to make an informed opinion.

PART ONE

One

THE MAKING OF AN ALLY

THE RESULT OF THE 1997 British election had yet to be declared, but in Washington, President Bill Clinton was excited at the prospect of the imminent victory of his young protégé Tony Blair. With the exit polls suggesting a landslide victory for the New Labour leader, Clinton was pacing the Oval Office wondering when he could telephone his congratulations. The State Department urged caution, pointing out that until the result was officially declared, John Major, the Conservative leader, was still technically Britain’s prime minister. Blair, meanwhile, sat in the living room of his house in the northern England constituency of Sedgefield, watching the results on the television with his wife, Cherie.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, called Blair to pass on the message that Clinton was trying to reach him but the State Department would not yet let him. Blair was flattered, but even though all the available information pointed to the biggest election victory in Labour’s history, he refused to believe it until the result was official. “What do they know?” Blair asked Cherie as they watched the predictions of the television pollsters.¹

The result was finally announced several hours later, and Blair was declared the winner with the biggest majority in British postwar politics. Clinton was delighted as the extent of Blair’s victory was confirmed to the White House. Clinton had struck up a close relationship with Blair, whom he regarded as a potential political ally, and members of Clinton’s successful 1996 campaign team had been brought to Blair’s Millbank election headquarters to assist the New Labour Party. Having finally been allowed to phone Blair personally to congratulate him, Clinton issued a glowing tribute to the American press. “I’m looking forward to working with Prime Minister Blair,” declared the American president. “He’s a very exciting man, a very able man. I like him very much.” Clinton’s enthusiastic response to Blair’s victory was echoed by Sidney Blumenthal, a senior White House aide, who declared: “At last the president has a little brother. Blair is the younger brother Clinton has been yearning for.”

This somewhat patronizing attitude toward the new British prime minister was just some of the widespread acclaim that greeted Blair’s arrival at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of Britain’s prime minister. It is unlikely though that anyone among the crowd that gathered outside 10 Downing Street to cheer Blair’s triumph thought they were witnessing the arrival of a man who was to become one of the most important and controversial wartime leaders in British history.

The election campaign that had swept Blair and his New Labour Party to power had been fought predominantly on domestic issues, such as improving the state of Britain’s woeful public services. This was reflected in the selection of the pop group D:Ream’s song “Things Can Only Get Better” as New Labour’s official campaign anthem. The British public, or rather the ever-diminishing percentage of the electorate that actually turned out to vote, wanted better hospitals, schools, and roads. To this end, they had voted Blair into power with an impregnable 179-seat majority in the House of Commons, while the Conservatives had suffered their worst electoral defeat since the Great Reform Act of 1832. After eighteen years of Conservative rule, Britain was ready for a change in direction, and that day appeared to herald the dawn of a new era in British politics.

Tony Blair was four days short of his forty-fourth birthday when he was elected prime minister on May 2, 1997. Born in Edinburgh in 1953, Blair spent most of his childhood in the northern former coal-mining city of Durham. At fourteen, he was sent to the prestigious Fettes College boarding school and from there went to Oxford to study law.

As a young man, Blair gave his contemporaries little indication that he would one day emerge as a leading figure in world politics. To his fellow students, the long-haired Blair, who was usually dressed as a hippie, seemed like a noisy and exuberant public schoolboy rebel who steered clear of the university’s intellectual establishment. At school, Blair had played Captain Stanhope, the lead part in R. C. Sheriff’s antiwar play Journey’s End, and at Oxford, he continued to pursue his thespian interests, playing Matt in a college production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Blair also maintained a keen interest in rock music. His favorite bands were the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Cream, and in his last year at university, he became the lead singer and bass guitarist of Ugly Rumours. Blair took to the stage in purple pants and a cut-off T-shirt and, according to his fellow band members, did a passable impression of Mick Jagger, “a bit of finger-wagging and punching the air.”² But despite his exposure to the decadent milieu of rock music, Blair, unlike many of his contemporaries, avoided drugs. In an interview many years later, when there was controversy over whether or not President Clinton had taken drugs at Oxford, Blair was asked if he had ever smoked dope. “No, I haven’t,” replied Blair. “But if I had, you can be sure I would have inhaled.”³

Blair showed little active interest in politics at university, although fellow students recall he was an avid supporter of the Labour Party. But while at Oxford, he acquired the deep religious conviction that was to lay the foundations for the moral certainty that would dictate his conduct in later life. In 1972, he befriended Peter Thomson, an Australian Anglican priest, an older student who had a profound influence on Blair’s personal development. As a result of many lengthy late-night discussions with Thomson about moral philosophy, Blair became a practicing Christian, and it was as a result of his Christianity that he became actively involved in the Labour Party. As Blair conceded after he had become Labour leader in 1995, “my Christianity and my politics came together at the same time.”

After university, Blair followed in the footsteps of his father, Leo, and his elder brother, Bill, and trained as a barrister. His Christian beliefs made him a committed socialist who was particularly concerned about inequality, and he formally joined the Labour Party in 1975, whereas most people of his class and background would generally have joined the Conservatives. As Blair himself later remarked, “With my class background, if all I wanted to do was to exercise power, I could and would—let’s be blunt about this—have joined another party.”⁴

After standing unsuccessfully for the Labour Party in a by-election, he finally won the northern England seat of Sedgefield in the 1983 general election at age thirty. Blair was rapidly promoted through the Labour ranks, and in 1992 became the opposition spokesman for home affairs, such as the penal system and immigration. He married Cherie Booth, another young barrister, in 1980, and the couple had four children. Euan, the eldest, was born in January 1984, followed by Nicholas in December 1985, Kathryn in March 1988, and Leo in May 2000. In 1994, after the sudden death of the Labour leader John Smith from a heart attack, Blair became Labour’s leader.

Blair’s youth and vitality, together with the arrival of his wife and young family at Downing Street, inevitably drew comparisons with John F. Kennedy, who had been the same age as Blair when he entered the White House. The last time a British prime minister of such a young age had occupied Downing Street was under Lord Liverpool in 1812, when Britain was in a battle for survival in the Napoleonic wars.

Europe still remained a vexed issue for British politicians in 1997, and one of the main campaign issues had concerned the extent of Britain’s involvement with the European Union. Although Blair himself was pro-European and keen to have Britain become a member of the Europe-wide single currency that was due to come into effect in January 1999, he realized that it remained a divisive issue with the British electorate. Apart from Europe, international issues, such as the Atlantic alliance, the civil war in the Balkans, resolution of the long-running dispute with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Britain’s role in confronting rogue regimes and Islamic terrorists, did not feature. Most postwar British elections had concentrated almost exclusively on domestic issues, and the 1997 election campaign was firmly set in that pattern.

The new British prime minister reflected the nation’s more parochial concerns when he gave his victory address on the steps of Downing Street before hosting a celebratory family lunch. Having paid tribute to his predecessor, John Major, Blair set out his immediate objectives for the newly elected government. New Labour, he promised, would provide Britain with a world-class education system; it would modernize the nation’s health-care provision; and it would create a competitive economy. His sole reference as to how he would conduct his foreign policy was a rather vapid statement that he would give Britain “strength and confidence in leadership both at home and abroad, particularly in Europe.” The only hint of Blair’s underlying leadership qualities he had given throughout the entire electoral campaign was at a speech he gave in Manchester just two weeks before polling day. “Century upon century it has been the destiny of Britain to lead other nations,” he declared. “We are a leader of nations or nothing.”⁵ This was the language of a man who would soon be responsible for leading his country to war five times in the next six years.

At this stage in his political development, Blair had not given much thought either to being a wartime leader or to countering the threat posed by rogue states and the rising tide of Islamic terrorism. His primary goal leading to the election had been to get New Labour elected to power after eighteen long years in opposition, and then for the party to stay in power for as long as possible. The only international issue on which he had made any firm pronouncement concerned Europe, where he had changed from supporting the traditional 1980s Labour hostility to the policies articulated by the European Union to becoming an active cheerleader for closer political and economic integration with the European mainland. His experience with international political communities was limited to his many visits to the United States to meet with members of the Clinton administration, but these meetings were more to advance his own domestic electoral prospects than to seek a deeper understanding of world affairs.

Clinton’s friendship with Blair developed after he became Labour leader in 1994. Blair did not formally meet Clinton until November 1995, when the American president, en route to Ireland, stopped in London to attend a dinner hosted by the American ambassador, Admiral William Crowe. Links between Blair’s Labour Party and Clinton’s Democrats were already well established. Philip Gould, Blair’s chief pollster, had stayed at Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, during Clinton’s 1992 election campaign and had befriended Stanley Greenberg, one of the candidate’s key aides. The previous April, Labour had suffered its fourth successive electoral defeat and Gould wanted to see if there was anything to be learned from Clinton’s campaign strategy. Gould returned from Little Rock brimming with enthusiasm for the professionalism of the Clinton campaign and its policies. Gould encouraged Blair to travel to Washington to see for himself the Clinton phenomenon, and in January 1993, he flew to the United States with Gordon Brown, another up-and-coming proponent of reforming the Labour Party to make it electable.

Blair knew little about America. He had visited the United States just once previously, in 1982, when he traveled to Tennessee to represent a client in a legal dispute. Blair and Brown were regarded as too junior to be granted an audience with the incumbent American president, but they were introduced to a number of key Clinton aides who were important to Clinton’s successful election. Brown and Blair were struck by the similarities in what Clinton had achieved in broadening the appeal of the Democrats in the United States with what they needed to do to revive their own party in Britain. Under Clinton, the Democrats had sought to move away from their reputation as the party of “tax and spend” and as being soft on core issues such as welfare, crime, and defense. Blair understood that Clinton’s appeal to what he called “the forgotten middle class” could be replicated in Britain. Labour needed to reassert its reputation for fiscal probity and social responsibility if it was to stand any chance of gaining power. Apart from policy issues, the other important lesson that Blair learned from Clinton’s electoral success was the need for his party to display unity and discipline. This meant being aided by a highly sophisticated operation to deal with the demands of the twenty-four-hour cycle of the international news media.

By the time Blair and Clinton met, Blair had adopted many of Clinton’s policies and strategies, to the extent of rebranding his party as New Labour, a direct imitation of Clinton’s New Democrats. Blair’s open admiration for Clinton was reciprocated, and in April 1996, Blair was invited to Washington, where he received the warmest reception granted to a British opposition leader since Winston Churchill made his famous “iron curtain” speech in 1946. At a dinner held at the British Embassy, Blair charmed the assembled guests with his self-assuredness and charisma. The next day, he was given an hour with Clinton in the Oval Office. The New York Times reported that Clinton “welcomed Blair to the White House with the kind of exuberance (and the attendant flood of words) that he seldom lavished on overseas guests.”⁶ Blair and Clinton spent more than an hour discussing issues that mainly related to Blair’s election campaign—such as the problems of financing welfare reform without raising taxes, and the continuing attempts to find a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland. “They hit it off straight away,” said one of Blair’s aides who accompanied him on the trip. “They shared a lot of common ground, and there was a lot of mutual admiration. There was also a meeting of minds on the big political issues.”⁷

It was not just Clinton whom Blair charmed during the visit. In a whirlwind forty-eight hours of meetings in Washington and New York, he met the UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali and chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, spoke in New York at a breakfast meeting hosted by Henry Kissinger, and addressed the New York Chamber of Commerce, where he assured the audience that his pro-European outlook would not get in the way of his respect for the Atlantic alliance. He consolidated his profile with the American media by addressing the National Press Club and by giving interviews to the major American television networks. He also had a private meeting with Hillary Clinton that was organized by Sidney Blumenthal, a key Clinton aide who was already billing Blair as Britain’s new prime minister. The first lady and Blair spent thirty minutes discussing politics and public policy in their respective countries. She later wrote: “I instantly felt a connection.”⁸

Clinton’s open support and encouragement for Blair certainly did the Labour leader’s election prospects no harm, and the next time the two men met was after Blair had secured his landslide election victory. But Blair’s relationship with Clinton at this stage was very much confined to learning how to turn the American president’s proven electoral success to his own advantage. It did not go unnoticed by seasoned Washington observers and Clinton’s political opponents that Blair’s primary focus was almost exclusively the campaign and election issues rather than the nitty-gritty of policy, particularly foreign policy.

In view of the pivotal role that Blair would later play in leading the war on terror, it was, perhaps, surprising that he appeared to display so little interest in Clinton’s approach to foreign policy issues, particularly the threat posed by international terrorism to Western security. Perhaps Blair was being naive, or perhaps he was just playing smart, calculating that it was not in his interests to challenge Clinton in an area where he was in no position, at least for the time being, to exert influence. “The bottom line was that Blair knew nothing about foreign policy,” said one of Blair’s close advisors. “Frankly, it is not an issue that wins elections. We thought it was something we could sort out once he got elected. That was always the primary objective.”⁹

Relations between Clinton and Blair’s immediate predecessor as prime minister, John Major, who had succeeded Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister in November 1990, had never been particularly warm. They got off to a bad start after it was claimed that Major’s Conservative Party had been trying to dig up, on behalf of American Republicans, information rega...