The Middle East doesn't need Blair - full text

The Middle East doesn't need Blair
Guardian Comment is Free
Appointing Tony Blair as peace envoy to Palestine would be futile, given the prime minister's track record.
Ian Williams

June 21, 2007 10:30 AM |

In response to a news story, Tony Snow, Bush's spokesman, denied that Tony Blair was being considered for a position of special representative for the Middle East quartet. So, based on Snow's record for obscuring issues, it must be true.

It would be the final epitaph for a quartet that has already proven to be a quadruple diplomatic paraplegic.

To be fair, Blair does realize the primacy of the Israel-Palestinian issue for peace in the region. It is indeed the blockage in the regional U-bend that needs clearing before any other issues there can be seriously addressed.

But knowing what the problem is, does not translate into knowing the solution, let alone being the solution. He has tried to tell George W. Bush this repeatedly - but with clearly limited success.

Blair has consistently done whatever Bush wanted him to do. When he took British forces into Iraq, it was with clear knowledge of the ineptitude of the White House but he nursed the fond illusion that his support would give him a hand on the steering wheel - and then he found that runaway trains do not have steering capacity, and no working brakes either.

His behaviour since he forced Robin Cook out of the foreign office follows a similar track, of coupling his wagon to the runaway Bush train. Once upon a time, even during the Reagan era, Margaret Thatcher had no compunction in having Britain vote with the rest of the world against the US on Middle East issues. Since Blair chopped Cook, on any occasion when the US has vetoed a resolution in the UN security council, British diplomats have abstained.

In the EU, that has translated into tacit support for the American-Israeli positions. Diplomats from countries like Germany complain that even when Israeli depredations horrify them, they cannot be more critical of Israel than the British. That has shifted the formerly even-handed EU consensus into the American camp.

The invertebracy of the EU has, as UN Envoy Alvaro de Soto demonstrated, helped the UN fall into the American-Israeli line. That accounts for three legs of the quartet and has left the Russians, who no longer really have a dog in the fight, as the half-hearted hold-outs, making the quartet a fig leaf for American positions.

But consider also Blair's personal position. One of the reasons he is leaving office is that he accepted the fund raising talents of Lord Levy, whose imaginative dangling of peerages for pounds attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. One should remember that his lordship was originally enticed to finance Blair's leadership campaign with the promise that it would be good for Israel for him to do so. And in return Blair made him Britain's special envoy for the Middle East.

When it came to the Lebanon war last year, Blair stood alongside with the US and Israel in resisting a ceasefire for a month during which millions of cluster bombs rained down on Southern Lebanon.He not only backed the wrong side in moral terms, he backed the losing side. This does not augur well for his announced career path.

It has been reported that Abbas has accepted Blair's nomination. That would be the beleaguered president of Palestine whose party lost the legislative elections and has accepted Israeli and American aid to oust the victors.

Blair has shown consistently that he has no influence with the White House on any important issue and will not even try to influence the Israelis. In the unlikely event that he has a blank cheque from the White House, he could do something useful. But it looks much more like the White House tossing him a diplomatic dime because there are vestigial memories of him doing them an occasional good service.