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Student Zone - Update Materials

Update 13: January 2007 - The Iraq Debacle

A consensus is now growing that the commitment to war in Iraq in 2003 has been the biggest policy failure of the Blair years, and the biggest foreign policy fiasco since at least the Suez affair in 1956. Two additions to that consensus have been provided since we visited the issue in June 2006 (see Update 10.3) . In the UK, Victor Bulmer Thomas, the departing Director of Chatham House, the most important ‘establishment’ foreign policy think tank, used the occasion of his retirement to describe Iraq as a ‘debacle’, and dismissed the notion that Mr Blair exercised any significant influence over the US in Middle East policy. An even more damaging evaluation, because from an even more ‘establishment’ source, came from the report of the Iraq Study Group, formally commissioned by the US Congress but in substance an initiative of the Bush Administration. The Group was chaired jointly by James Baker, who served as Secretary of State in the Administration of the present President’s father, and Lee Hamilton, a pillar of the Democratic Party security establishment. (The report of the group is downloadable at various sites, but most conveniently from the site of the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted the group, at www.usip.org/isg). The Report, partly because it is a complex and lengthy document, is capable of being read in different ways, and has indeed been read in different ways: to some as advocating withdrawal pretty straightforwardly, to others as involving a kind of ‘bunker’ solution in which American troops remain but are protected in fortified bunkers. But two conclusions of the Report do emerge with clarity: that the Administration’s strategy since the original victory of 2003 has been a failure; and that any solution demands the involvement in negotiations of Iran and Syria. The latter would reverse US policy, and would involve at least a substantial change in direction of UK policy. At the time of writing the fate of the Report is not known. All we can say with certainty is that it has intensified the debate inside the Bush Administration over how to reconstruct a policy which all agree is failing. Likewise it is hard to decode the terms of UK involvement in this debate, although the most likely conclusion is that in his dealings with the American Administration Mr Blair has pressed the Report’s argument for engagement with Iran and Syria, especially Syria. In December 2006 Mr Blair conducted a tour of Middle East capitals, a visit consistent with the ‘wider engagement’ stance.

The Prime Minister’s responses are conditioned by two key considerations. First, there remains no doubt that he remains convinced, whatever the setbacks, of the moral and prudential rightness of the original decision to invade Iraq; he is perhaps the last remaining leading figure in his Administration wholeheartedly to believe this. Second, he knows that he has only a few months left in office to rescue his reputation from the consequences of the fiascos since 2003. In achieving this second aim he is faced with considerable obstacles. Popular support for the war, always fragile, has collapsed, as we saw in our briefing 10.3 last summer. The UK’s close alliance with the US, and its military participation on the ground in Iraq, means that its ability to act in any kind of mediating role in the wider politics of the Middle East is gravely limited. And the knowledge within the UK, and even within his own Cabinet, that he has only a short time left in office means that his capacity to command support on this uniquely unpopular policy is also very low.

From the point of view of Mr Blair the prospects look bleak. But from the point of view of a Government seeking a way out of the policy fiasco of Iraq the Prime Minister’s departure presents an opportunity. The accession of any successor will provide a chance radically to reconsider policy. How far the Prime Minister’s most likely successor, Gordon Brown, will be prepared to do this is uncertain. In his broad sympathies Mr Brown is an ‘Atlanticist’: personally sympathetic to US culture (he usually holidays in New England) and in policy terms more attuned to American ideas of deregulated markets than to mainland European notions of regulated capitalism. On the specific policy of Iraq he has not deviated in public from support for the official line. It is also very unlikely that he has privately dissented, for on this unpopular policy, were Brown any kind of dissenter, the fact would undoubtedly have been leaked. Mr Brown does have a record of announcing spectacularly surprising policy innovations on taking office: he stunned the Bank of England and the City in 1997 when he announced that he was giving the Bank independence to set short term interest rates – an innovation that has turned out to be extremely successful. But whether he has in mind a similarly stunning policy innovation on Iraq we will not know until some time this summer.

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