The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency

This book represents a great achievement in explaining what drove the seemingly strange pairing of a UK Labour prime minister and a US Republican President on a venture that hardly any other major political leader in the world supported, being the war on terror post 9/11 which ultimately led to the invasion of Iraq and its ongoing occupation at great cost to the occupiers and the Iraqi people. The writer is a UK political correspondent with great experience of the Labour Party (he has written the best account to date on the Blair relationship with Gordon Brown, whose unwillingness to remain Number Two features to the end of this book) and the US and while he covers the US aspects very well his real story is on the road that led Blair to a policy that few in his party really supported and has since cost him dear in public perceptions of his leadership. After a rather unfocussed start (where the story seems to be continually jumping around in time) it settles down into an incisive chronological analysis of how Blair having reached his agreement with Brown to be leader then became prime minister without any prior government office experience and with an unassailable parliamentary majority started to develop links with Clinton which then had to be replaced with Bush after his slim victory over Gore. That both have developed such a strong personal bond despite very different backgrounds and world views is skilfully explained in the context of Bush badly needing Blair to have international credibility for his very US neo-conservative driven strategy and Blair having taken a very personal decision with little input from his Cabinet in seeking a great international issue to grasp. The book gives a very good feel for the inner workings of Blair's "presidential" style of government especially in Cabinet that led to this being so easily done and which Naughtie demonstrates led to Bush underestimating how far Blair had gone out on a limb and was then exposed to UK parliamentary revolt against that decision. Naughtie includes lots of personal off record comments that flesh out how the end result was Bush and his Executive conceding little to their end gameplan (the book should kill any remaining views of the UK ever being likely to benefit from the much touted "special relationship" unless US and UK interests are aligned on an issue) and Blair having made a personal commitment based on his early views of Islamic revolutionaries then being moulded post 9/11 into a intransigent loner who trusted his instincts and not the counsel of his colleagues and advisers plus other political leaders. The book is worth buying just for the chapter on the failings of the various Intelligence Services and how in the UK their role was to try and provide evidence and justification for a decision which Blair had already made and in which they failed him plus fooled themselves into not providing the clarity that may have stalled (if not stopped) him. A very unique book with

James Naughtie, the Today presenter, has written a useful account of Blair's links with the USA, particularly with Bush and his colleagues. Naughtie recalls that when he asked Pentagon insider Richard Perle what came next after Afghanistan, Perle replied, "The really important thing is that there is a next." So, in January 2002, Bush set the timetable for invading Iraq and told Blair. Blair then promised to join Bush's war, secretly changing government policy from peace to war, without telling anybody. Naughtie writes that the `bloodstream' of the US-British special relationship is the intelligence linkage. Indeed, the USA's intelligence services are the world's biggest and most expensive. Yet all the US intelligence claims about Iraq's WMD - the uranium oxide bought from Niger, the mobile chemical laboratories - have been proven false. US intelligence was so bad that the CIA's head resigned, and his deputy left too. The Labour government had all these intelligence resources behind them. Yet their notorious government dossier on WMD was largely pilfered from a ten-year-old PhD thesis! So what, exactly, did Britain gain from this so-special relationship and its precious `bloodstream'? As a result of the illegal invasion of Iraq, there is now an illegal occupation of Iraq. Naughtie quotes a senior Foreign Office man who described the US's occupation policy as `a catastrophe from beginning to end'. When Naughtie asked Blair if he agreed with the White House lawyer who said that the Geneva Conventions were `quaint', Blair replied, "Of course not. Neither do the Americans." Typically, Blair was denying the evidence just put in front of him. Labour's war (for the Labour Party could have stopped it, but didn't even try) has weakened all that it holds dear. The link with the USA is in danger, the EU split, NATO divided, the Labour Party eviscerated, and Parliament, the Foreign Office and the intelligence services all discredited. But worse, Labour's war has made Israel increase its killings, thrown the Middle East into chaos, worsened the risks of terrorism to Britain and elsewhere, and added the danger of endless wars in a `clash of civilisations'.