Blair was Bush’s poodle? Try Chihuahua

If you’ve been known to call Tony Blair “Bush’s Poodle,” maybe you should think smaller. Yesterday, the U.K’s Mail on Sunday published excerpts of Blair Unbound, a new biography by Anthony Seldon, Peter Snowdon, and Daniel Collings that sizes Tony Blair’s stature at approximately “Chihuahua.” (Parts 1 and 2 here and here, story here.)

Colin Powell seems to have greeted Seldon-Snowdon-&-Collings with glee at this new opportunity to dish and distance himself from it all. His account makes clear that Blair always quailed before Bush, time after time stifling his own better impulses and insights to support a war he knew was all wrong. The portrait of Blair that Powell does so much to shape would be pathetic did it not damn him for all time as second only to Bush himself for heedlessness.

If Blair Unbound fully explains the prime minister’s remora-like attachment to Bush, it must be in an unexcerpted passage. In the Mail, we read only that

[chief of staff Jonathan] Powell was the strongest advocate for “hugging America close”.

He judged Britain would best be able to sway American policy by working closely with the White House and trying to influence it from the inside. Blair agreed.

Among other passages, I found these especially remarkable:

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001,

Blair’s staff had been calling the White House, but with little joy.

One senior Bush administration official based in the White House Situation Room that day recalled: “We were simply not in ‘making calls mode’.”

“The President often wasn’t available, the Vice-President [Dick Cheney] and Condi Rice [National Security Adviser] were downstairs in the bunker, and we had virtually no communication with them.”

Unaware Bush had been told Washington was not safe for him and that he should stay airborne on Air Force One, Blair was troubled that Bush’s priority appeared to be keeping out of danger, rather than returning to the centre to take command, which was always his own instinctive reaction.

“It’s odd,” Blair mused, “and it’s not right.” …

The following day Blair took a call from Bush at 12.30pm – to his relief he was the first foreign leader Bush called.

As early as October 2001, “The sense being communicated by the US,” Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell would later write, was “that they were constantly trying to link Iraq into the equation. TB was keen to pull it back.” But

[a]t the end of July [2002], Blair wrote to Bush. Domestic opposition to a war had grown, and Blair feared that in the US momentum for a war was growing too fast. He stressed, as he had in the past, the need for a UN resolution, to release a dossier on Saddam’s WMD, and to kickstart the Middle East peace process. But then he faltered and pulled his punches.

To the despair of his officials, he said in effect: “You know George, that whatever you decide to do, I’ll be with you.”

[British ambassador to the US Christopher] Meyer was horrified. “Why in God’s name has he said that again?” he asked [foreign affairs/defense adviser David] Manning.

“Well, we tried to stop him…but we didn’t prevail,” came the weary response.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell and his British counterpart, foreign minister Jack Straw, were becoming friends — and secret allies-within-allies. Both appalled at the approaching war, they met secretly, Straw flying to the States on the Concorde, accompanied only by his own private secretary, to meet Powell at his vacation spot in the Hamptons. They used each other’s private email addresses “to stop it getting into the American bureaucracy” (which British readers may not realize means “to Dick Cheney”). But none of it was enough, and in late October 2002, a senior diplomat told Straw that British intelligence suggested a “high likelihood” the Americans would go to war. “I can remember Jack going quite white,” the diplomat told Blair’s biographers. “It wasn’t part of his agenda.” Later, Powell would recall:

“In the end Blair would always support the President. I found this very surprising.

“I never really understood why Blair seemed to be in such harmony with Bush.

“I thought, well, the Brits haven’t been attacked on 9/11.

“How did he reach the point that he sees Saddam as such a threat? Jack and I would get him all pumped up about an issue.

“And he’d be ready to say, ‘Look here, George.’ But as soon as he saw the President he would lose all his steam.”

On April 16, 2003, Straw went to Kuwait to meet Jay Garner, the retired American general charged with pulling Iraq together again.

[Straw] was “completely taken aback by how little had been done, even after the victory, and how hamstrung the allegedly key American player in theatre was”.

For the first time Straw appreciated the extent to which the post-war planning worked on by the FCO and State Department had been allowed to “turn to dust”.

He was shocked to find there were just some 20 American staff under Garner working in a small room in Kuwait.

He thought to himself: “Wow, is this it? They didn’t really seem to know what they were going to do.”

And of course, that turned out to be not a matter of mere “seeming” at all, but rather the germinal fact of God-only-knows-how-much disastrous history to come. But Blair remained docile to the end. In November 2006, when presented with the idea of the “surge,” he was “dispirited” that Bush stressed its military rather than political component. But like Powell, he kept publically quiet.

“We had been in there with him since the start,” explained one official, “and at this very late stage the Prime Minister did not want to be seen to fall out with President Bush.”

And so neither Jack Straw nor Colin Powell ever resigned in loud or any other kind of protest. Tony Blair never got up on his hind legs to George W. Bush. The toll of their fecklessness will outlive them all, and some of us hope a Hell awaits.

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Tags: Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jack Straw, Tony Blair