BLAIR
LONDON (AP):
PRIME MINISTER Tony Blair repeatedly failed to use his influence over United States President George W. Bush to slow down the rush to war in Iraq, a former British ambassador claims.
In excerpts from his book serialised in The Guardian newspaper yesterday, Sir Christopher Meyer said Blair appeared to be "seduced" by the glamour of United States power and was reluctant to negotiate conditions with Bush for Britain's support for the war.
"We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise, but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone," Meyer wrote in his book DC Confidential.
"Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise."
The claim is embarrassing for the prime minister, who committed British troops to the U.S.-led invasion in the face of widespread opposition and is pilloried by the British press, and some of his own lawmakers, as Bush's poodle.
The prime minister sought to brush off the claims and told his monthly news conference on Monday he did not intend to fuel publicity for the book.
BOOK PROMOTION
"I have nothing to say at all ... Except to say that I'm not getting into book promotion myself," he said. Blair said he had strenuously sought a second United Nations resolution "that would have given us more time."
He repeated London's and Washington's long held belief that the resolution was scuppered by France's threat to use its veto on the U.N. Security Council. "That is the reason why in the end you had to make a choice, and there was no other way," he added.
As British ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2003, Meyer sat in on sensitive meetings between Blair and Bush in the run up to the war and had a close relationship with senior figures in the Bush administration - including his tennis partner U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
In his book, Meyer recounted a conversation with White House adviser I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who told him Britain was "the only ally that mattered. That was a powerful lever."
Nevertheless, Meyer wrote that Blair had little appetite for hard bargaining to delay the conflict and allow more time for post-war planning. Meyer has argued before that the March invasion should have been delayed until the fall.
London, Meyer wrote, "was not fertile ground for the notion of leverage or the tough negotiating position that must sometimes be taken even with the closest allies, as Churchill did with Roosevelt and Thatcher did with Reagan."
"Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside President Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to Blair the poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power," he added.
"But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages. They place your destiny in the hands of an ally.
"They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Turkomen and Assyrian. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Thatcher but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair."
In his book, Meyer argued that delaying the invasion until the fall would have allowed U.N. weapons inspectors extra time to establish whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, diluted intense opposition in the international community and increased support for the conflict, instead of going to war "in the company of a motley ad hoc coalition of allies."
