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Democrats versus Demagogues - Commentary no. 371 |
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History may not repeat itself but it certainly forms patterns. Take Tony Blair’s handling of Saddam Hussein. He may or he may not have been justified in taking this country to war against this disgusting dictator. But there he was, Saddam, embedded in one of the most Middle Eastern parts of the Middle East and yet it was he who ultimately would be responsible for the event which will go down in the Nation’s memory as marking the end of Blair’s career in official life. Never mind the distant memory of that personality who was going to give this country a real touch of hope and excitement. All that was expunged by this one colossal error. It is such a pity.
The most obvious parallel in our island story is with Anthony Eden and Suez. Eden’s career up to that moment was equally successful and attractive. Like Blair he looked every inch the part. He fitted the role and played it perfectly. Indeed he was a truly romantic figure. He’d had a wonderfully successful career in the war. He read a course at Oxford which included studying the Persian language. He stood up to Mussolini and he resigned on principle against the policy of appeasement. When he finally took office as Prime Minister, post Churchill, he was amazingly popular. But then came Nasser.
The Egyptian leader almost seemed to destabilise Eden. That blend of populism, ruthlessness and the ability to irritate the hell out of his opponents, particularly his British opponents, made him seem to Eden almost another Hitler. It made the usually cool Prime Minister indulge in a period of conspiratorial foreign policy and of unimaginable complexity and with the strangest bedfellows. Like Blair he divided the country and ignored many of the best and experienced brains in Whitehall, who were appalled by the drift of events. In one respect however Eden was the opposite of Blair. Eden ignored the US when he along with the French made war on Egypt. That was a very serious mistake. Doing so of course led to the collapse of his venture.
Paradoxically at the heart of Blair’s misadventure in Iraq there was that awful buddy- buddy relationship with the younger President Bush. Britain had little chance of pursuing an independent policy once this relationship had been formed. After all they both used Colgate.
It could be said that both Eden and Blair paid the price of getting the US wrong. Eden was put out of business by President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State Dulles. And Blair paid the price of being seen as having been far too close to Bush and his sidekicks Chaney and Rumsfeld.
So does it all go back to Chamberlain, the man who gave us that most toxic word in foreign affairs, appeasement. Chamberlain did for real appeasement what Jack the Ripper did for women’s rights. Again it was the failure of an otherwise very sound domestic politician, to understand the first thing about the real character of the monster who he was up against, Hitler. Like Eden and Blair, Chamberlain took foreign policy into his own very domestic hands. Chamberlain did not really like “abroad” and he distrusted foreigners. He was a million miles away from understanding what Hitler was about. Yet it was his pre war government that saw to the modernisation of the RAF so that when it came to the crunch, the 70th anniversary of which we will be marking this year, we survived Hitler’s attempt to make us see reason. There are signs that the days when the shadow of Hitler and our policy of appeasement may at last be lifting. There is talk for instance of a new willingness to negotiate with the Taleban. We managed to negotiated with Colonel Gaddafi with the result that Libya has come in from the cold. The point is we don’t always have to go to war with the tin pot tyrants that litter the world. They can be turned round. You may need a very long spoon when dealing with them. But better that than the alternative. As Churchill once said “better jaw-jaw than war-war”.
Tony Rudd
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