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.

Casting the First Stone

The UN is often accused of being blinkered about the Middle East, a situation that will not be helped by the news in an Arabic paper today that Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked whether the view from his quarters in Beirut was the Atlantic Ocean.

To be fair, and non-Eurocentric, I could not swear in Pusan whether I was looking at the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea or whatever, but perhaps some intensive coaching on the Middle East situation, like where the Levant is actually situated, may be in order

More substantially, my latest in the Guardian, on UN Watch and its "martyrdom" at the UN, may provide grist for a Middle East mill or two.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/04/it_was_a_makemyday_event.html

With Friends Like These, NAM, Darfur and Palestine

There's No Monopoly on Hypocrisy

In an exemplary display of chutzpah this week, John Bolton and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dore Gold called for the International Criminal Court to go after the Iranian President. Please note that this is the International Criminal Court whose founding Rome Treaty Bolton "unsigned" and which he has spent six years trying to sabotage.

One has to admit that having Bolton as the US Ambassador was a good excuse for a lot of silly behavior by alienated Third World delegations. But it is not a good enough excuse for their collusion in covering up violations of human rights. Since the controversial Human Rights Council was established, the Non-Aligned have behaved as if they deliberately trying to vindicate Bolton and the pro-Israeli anti-UN lobby.

Of course I am not complaining that the Council sees fit to criticize Israel for its human rights violations--often. After all Israel often violates the human rights of its Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors and the various pro-Israeli UN-Watch and NGO-Monitor sites could productively suggest to the Israeli government that the best way to avoid being in the dock is to stop committing crimes.

But providing cover for tyrannies like Uzbekistan or Belarus, as the non-aligned majority has done this year, blocking resolutions on their practices, is to give the Palestinian cause a bad name in an equally hypocritical way. Human Rights are too important to indulge hypocrisy.

In his valedictory speech to Human Rights Watch last Friday, Kofi Annan pointed this out and more. In a recent interview with me, he commented that "The question of double standards is a question you never get away from when you touch the Middle East, whether you are discussing the Middle East in the region or outside the region. We’ve often been accused that UN resolutions are implemented selectively, and I try to explain that we can only implement these resolutions with the cooperation of the member states. In situations where the member states concerned do not cooperate it’s extremely difficult for the UN to impose any resolutions."

In particular, of course, is the issue of Darfur, where all the objective evidence shows that the Sudanese government is backing a murderous militia in mass killings, rapes and ethnic cleansing of local people. Having outvoted a resolution that named the government, the Non-Aligned and Muslim countries on the Human Rights Council supported an African Union resolution that passed condemning the killings--without mentioning the government that was organizing the murders.

This is a travesty that plays into the hands of Israel supporters. Most of those campaigning for Darfur are sincere humanitarians, but there many among them who see it as a wonderful opportunity for anti-Arab propaganda. And who can blame them--it is a wonderful opportunity, handed to them on a plate by the Arab and African governments who will not speak up against Khartoum.

However, as a testament to the efficacy of international and popular pressure, including strong words from Annan, in the end, the Council realized it was losing all credibility and was forced to agree to hold a special session this week, which decided to send a team to Sudan to investigate. But even now, the only references to the Sudanese government are to thank it for its cooperation. The five person team will be picked by the President of the Council after "informal consultations" among members, which means that he will have to resist governmental pressures to appoint those who will not rock the boat with Khartoum.

There are some caveats here. The situation in Darfur and Sudan is much more complex than some of these lobby groups would have us believe. Some of them take the UN to task because it refuses to call what is happening there genocide, which makes one suspect their motivation. In fact the UN inspectors reported that what the Jinjaweed were doing may be "no less serious and heinous than genocide."

For a close look at the complexity of the issues see Alex De Waal's piece in the current London Review of Books.

Darfur should matter to the Palestinians, despite the large cheque the Sudanese handed over to the Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyah. Diplomatically, the Palestinians have lost ground, not least because of the large, and very important, European Union bloc whose support for entirely correct resolutions has wavered. The EU members are under heavy pressure from the US, and they have a Trojan horse in their midst, in the form of Tony Blair’s Britain. But externally, the Non-Aligned’s stance on overall human rights issues, and its seeming refusal to accept that anyone other than Israel violates international humanitarian law, has certainly made it easier for Blair and Bush to pull the EU away from its former commitment to international law on the Middle East to a more expedient view.

That is a much larger threat than the handful of Pacific coral atolls which are the only active supporters of Israel that the US can muster. And the way to deal with it is for delegations that really care about the Palestinians to is to do the right thing by supporting human rights wherever they are violated, regardless of which government is doing the violating – or indeed even if it is terrorists depriving people of the fairly fundamental right to life.. There is really no excuse for democracies like India and South Africa to cover up for Uzbekistan, Belarus--or Sudan, just as there are no real excuses for EU collusion with Israel's violations.