Tony Blair: Peacemaker or Warmonger?

by Patrick Seale

Released: 21 Dec 2006

With just six months left of his ten-year rule, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is rightly concerned about what history will say of him. Fearing that he will be damned for his part in the catastrophic mess in Iraq, he is desperately casting around for something to redeem his political legacy.

His journey to the Middle East this week looks like a last-ditch attempt to breathe life into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He would love to be seen as the statesman who rescued the moribund process from extinction. He genuinely seems to want a breakthrough towards a two-state solution of the Palestine conflict but, unfortunately, all the indications are that he is heading for yet another dismal failure. Worse still, instead of bringing peace, he is fanning the flames of war.

Blair comes to the task with some severe handicaps, not least his declared bias in favour of Israel. He has openly boasted in the British parliament that he is the most pro-Israeli prime minister that Britain has ever had. These are not the best credentials for Middle East peace-making.

Blair’s record speaks for itself.

• Although he claims to favour Palestinian statehood, in making war against Iraq, Blair allied himself with Washington’s Israel-centric neocons, who fervently oppose any manifestation of Palestinian nationalism. Blair’s slavish support for the United States -- which earned him the humiliating sobriquet of "Bush’s poodle" -- has not resulted in any visible British influence on American policy.

• When Israel launched its war against Lebanon last summer, Blair refused to call for an early ceasefire, thereby colluding with the aims of Israel and the United States to smash Hizbullah and install a subservient pro-Western government in Beirut. As is now plain, the attempt backfired, and Hizbullah, the single most powerful political force on the Lebanese scene, is demanding a greater say in national decision-making.

• In Palestine, Blair has championed the boycott and siege of the democratically elected Hamas government unless it recognises Israel, renounces violence and accepts all previous agreements. But these conditions are purely arbitrary -- insisted upon by Israel and the United States, and shamefully endorsed by the European Union. A wiser course would have been to demand reciprocity -- that is to impose these conditions on both sides.

Blair has never asked Israel to recognise the Palestinians’ right to statehood, to implement past agreements, or to renounce violence. He has indeed pleaded with Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to release customs revenues owing to the Palestinians, which Israel has illegally withheld, and has urged him to meet Mahmud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority. But this is small beer. It does not begin to tackle the real issues.

Some 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli violence since last July, without a whisper of reproof from Blair. Astonishingly, the Israeli Supreme Court has recently passed a ruling which legalises "targeted killings." This must be the only case of a so-called democratic country openly embracing the political assassination of its opponents as policy upheld by jurisprudence!

Needless to say, there has been no criticism from Tony Blair of this outrageous practice. Nor has he condemned Israel’s separation wall, which gobbles up large tracts of Palestinian land, or called for a halt to the expanding settlements, or the removal of the hundreds of checkpoints which make Palestinian life in the occupied territories a misery.

• Blair’s closest advisers have been firmly in the pro-Israeli camp, like Lord Levy, his chief fund-raiser and envoy extraordinary, and Sir Nigel Sheinwald, to whom over the past decade he has given three of Britain’s most important diplomatic posts: ambassador to the European Union in Brussels; chief foreign affairs adviser to the Prime Minister, and most recently British ambassador in Washington.

This is the baggage Blair has taken with him to the Middle East. What uplifting message has he brought to the region? It is that ‘moderates’ must unite against ‘extremists,’ that those who seek to play a ‘constructive’ role must join forces against those who wish to ‘destabilise’ the region.

In Blair’s vision, Britain, the Unites States, Israel, "the West," and moderate Arab states are aligned against the forces of extremism and de-stabilisation represented by Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas.

In the former camp, he places three great democrats who, he believes, should at all costs be supported against their opponents -- Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, and the Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas.

In Blair’s simplistic view, Iran is the villain which is "derailing the prospects for stability, peace and democracy" and which is seeking to "undermine the government in Iraq, undermine the government in Lebanon, undermine President Abbas in Palestine."

This black-and-white vision of the forces of good confronting the forces of evil is pure Bushspeak. It is an instinctive not a reasoned approach. It is hollow sermonising not political analysis, for which Blair appears to have little talent. Above all, it will exacerbate local conflicts, not resolve them.

In approaching the Middle East, Blair has made the major mistake of focussing on the Israel-Palestine problem alone rather than seeking a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has said nothing about including Syria in the peace process. Unlike James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their recent Iraq Study Group report, he has not called on Israel to return the Golan to Syria. Echoing Bush and the more extreme Israeli leaders, Blair sees Syria as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But without Syria’s willing participation, there can be no peace settlement in the Levant.

In his statements to the press in Cairo and Ramallah, Blair went out of his way -- strongly and repeatedly -- to lend his support to Mahmud Abbas and to the latter’s resolve, in a recent speech, to hold fresh Palestinian elections, in order to break the stalemate over forming a Palestinian national unity government.

Blair called Abbas’s speech a "landmark speech, a very important speech." He added that "the next few weeks are going to be a critical time… for all of us who want to see progress." Addressing Abbas, Blair declared: "Now is the time for the international community to respond to the vision that you have set out. I intend to do everything I can… over the coming weeks to make sure we can deliver that support both in terms of helping people who are suffering, but also in terms of the political settlement that can deliver a just and lasting peace. That is my commitment to you and to the Palestinian people today."

"We can’t be in a situation," Blair added, "where the Palestinian people are held back, where progress is held back" by the refusal of Hamas to accept the demands of the international community. "Let me make one thing clear to you," Blair said, "The British government is certainly not negotiating with Hamas, or with any part of Hamas…"

The inescapable conclusion from Blair’s remarks is that he is egging Abbas on to have a showdown with Hamas. The fresh elections are clearly intended to drive Hamas from office. At the same time, Blair is said to be preparing to funnel substantial funds to Abbas to help him strengthen his Fatah security forces in their confrontation with Hamas.

Blair’s policy will not lead to conciliation but to a Palestinian civil war. It seems to have escaped him that, like Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas remains the vital force in Palestinian politics, outstripping the tired and corrupt Fatah, which since the Oslo accords of 1993 has failed to win any serious concessions from Israel. The emergence of Hamas is a direct result of this failure.

Nothing can be achieved in the Middle East if the legitimate interests of Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas are not addressed. It would seem that Blair needs a beginners’ course in Middle East politics, but the advisers he has chosen are not the ones to give it to him.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Copyright © 2006 Patrick Seale

---------------
Released: 21 December 2006
Word Count: 1,314
----------------

Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, rights@agenceglobal.com 1.336.686.9002, or 1.212.731.0757

Topics:

Afghanistan

Africa

Arab World

China

Europe

Iran

Iraq