What the war in Iraq did for Bush and Blair
The infamous bond between George W Bush and Tony Blair has never been a simple one. MSN UK home page editor Ian Jones examines how it has been influenced by events in Iraq.
Long distance relationships never work.
Consider Tony and George, two people separated not merely by nationality, but by a distance of 3,674 miles.
Chances to meet face to face were, understandably, few and far between. Chances to say what they really felt about each other, even on the phone, were even rarer. So many other people made demands on their time. So many other issues kept proving a distraction.
Cynics had proclaimed the affair doomed from the outset. Sceptics had reflected that it could only end in disaster. Nobody expected, however, that it would leave anywhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 dead in Iraq, and both protagonists - and their respective nations - at best mistrusted, at worst loathed, right around the globe.
The relationship between Blair and Bush was fostered in trying times and from contrasting motives. They might have claimed to think they were behaving out of pure pragmatism, but clearly both had other reasons for falling in together and turning the so-called 'special relationship' between the UK and America from a largely docile sideshow into a desperately antagonistic double act.
Take Blair first. Before Iraq he had tried to cultivate an image of himself as a kind of enlightened warrior, striding into the world's hotspots - the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan - like a 19th century missionary, looking to heal discord and division with stirring words and stern action.
By and large it worked, if you measure the level of his standing in the eyes of both the press and the public. In the case of Afghanistan, Blair had even been able to get most of the world on his side.
Yet little by little he started acquiring a new image for himself, to replace those – ‘New Labour reformer,’ ‘the People’s Prime Minister’ – he had collected since coming to power.
He was becoming a foreign crusader. Issues of the wider world were beginning to seem more important to Blair than those concerning his citizens' wallets.
Dynamic shift
Iraq sealed the change. Throughout his second term of office (2001-5) it never went away. Indeed, it increasingly dominated every aspect of the man and his government. Who now remembers anything about what else Labour did in power during those years? What we were sold as a quick, efficient liberation turned into a blood-soaked occupation. On and on it dragged. Blair seemed obsessed by it - or rather, obsessed with not letting it become seen as a bad thing.
Now that Blair has been gone from Downing Street for almost a year, perspective has dealt his legacy a woefully bad hand. Whatever good he did as Prime Minister feels like it happened in spite of, rather than because, of his own personality. Whereas everything that went wrong, of which Iraq is most prominent, is traced right to his own doorstep. His entire premiership gets summed up under the heading: Fighting The Wrong Kind Of War.
Of course, a lot of scorn was poured on Blair for that 'special relationship' with George Bush.
Initially Blair had been able to define himself on his own terms, and not on those of another world leader. That all changed when Blair started repeatedly claiming he thought it was worth sticking with the US President in order to better influence the outcome in Iraq. His blinkered idealism prevented him from realising he would not - could not - have any influence at all.
How has Iraq left its mark on George Bush? The man himself appears not to care. He is spending his final months in office fooling around, behaving like it's the last day of term and openly stating his eagerness to get back to his ranch. After all, when you claim to have God on your side, who else do you need?
Almost everything he tried to do in his stint at the White House, however, is in ruins. He won power in 2000 speaking of compassionate conservatism and of America leaving the world to mind its own business. The fact those aspirations were but fig leaves to mask a nakedly militarist agenda was made plain by the speed at which Bush used the events of 11th September 2001 to launch a 'war on terror' and promote an 'axis of evil'. Both backfired. Both lost his party control of the Congress. Both lost his country a titanic sum of dignity and respect across the planet. And both have meant those people hoping to replace him have run a mile from any kind of similar sentiments.
As for that tête-à-tête with Tony…well, as is so often the case with such liaisons, the chance to remain just good friends has rather been scuppered by one of the couple behaving like he was never really that interested in the first place, and the other choosing to spend more time with his family.
Truly, long distance relationships never work – except tens of thousands of innocent people don’t usually pay for it with their lives.
By Ian Jones, MSN home page editor
March 2008
