No War!

Prime Minister Tony Blair could not have been entirely pleased to hear Bill Clinton tell the Labour Party conference in Blackpool that Blair would be "central" to any decision over war on Iraq. It was another certificate of world statesmanship to Blair, this one delivered with the best of Clintonian charm. World statesman, yes, but not quite leader of all of Britain. Before Blair can hope to deliver Germany, France and Russia to action that would satisfy US President George W. Bush, he must deliver Britain.

Blair has looked a long way from doing that over recent days. The gung-ho echoes of Bush have faded in the face of rising opposition at home. "I know the worry over Iraq," Blair acknowledged at Blackpool. "They fear it's being done for the wrong motives. They fear us acting alone." Blair promised the UN route more firmly than ever before, though he left it open what it could be—or be made to be. But there is a new restraint in Blair's language and tone, largely forced on him by opposition from within his own party, and yes, by just plain people like you and me.

A thousand people a minute filed by 10 Downing Street for four hours and 40 minutes in the biggest anti-war rally London has ever seen. Not the kind of rally a leader can ignore, not even with Blair's majority and elections four years away. When more than a quarter of a million Brits gather to give up a sunny Saturday, another Brit certainly knows what that means.

The rally from the Embankment by the Thames to Hyde Park succeeded before it began. You had first a long march backwards just to join the rally. Those who joined around the middle waited two-and-a-half hours before they could begin marching; there were just too many people joining in the front. And many who joined the march were students and office workers with no clear political leanings. The spontaneity of the attendance said as much as the numbers in their hundreds of thousands.

"There's no party that speaks for us now," a student at the rally told Outlook. "The Tories are the Tories, Labour are the Tories, so who do we have left, just us." This was a show of direct people power, and from the mood of the protesters, Blair could have more than a long glimpse of it were he to push Britain into support for an attack on Iraq. Rallies don't change Whitehall policies, but this was a rally that even cynics would hardly dare disregard.

Of particular concern to Blair was the strong turnout of the unions. They showed their muscle again at the annual Labour Party conference in Blackpool this week. A motion supporting the government policy on Iraq was withdrawn from debate at the conference after unions said they would collectively oppose it. The withdrawal was a clear sign of deep division within the party. Some of Old Labour is kicking in with force. Saddam Hussein has in effect turned the heat on Blair more than Blair has on Saddam.

Blair faces revolt from his own party MPs. He did not give them a chance to revolt formally during a Commons debate on Iraq. It was a debate that did not entail voting. Yet 53 Labour Party MPs exploited a technicality to register their opposition to an attack on Iraq. That was only the first sign of revolt. Other Labour MPs threatened opposition to the government if Britain were to back a US attack outside of a UN mandate, a possibility that Blair has left open.

A British government dossier offering what it claims is evidence to justify an attack on Iraq could boomerang on Blair. Within two hours of posting the dossier on the internet, a team of British journalists was shown the facilities around Baghdad that the dossier said were centres for biological and chemical weapons. The journalists saw nothing. Blair wrote the foreword to the dossier and an effective Iraqi rebuttal undermined him directly.The 29-page Iraqi counter came Wednesday, October 2. The British government and the media pretended that the Iraqi counter wasn't there.

Britain has for long punched above its weight in international diplomacy but rarely has it been called on to do so more momentously than now. It seems inconceivable that Bush could launch an attack on Iraq were Blair to oppose it. It is also inconceivable that Blair would. And equally, it is hard to see Blair get away with it at home as Bush would. The British premier will find it hard to say No to Bush and tougher to say Yes.

Blair has been louder in his support for the US than for the UN. "My vision of Britain is not as the 51st state of anywhere but I believe in this alliance and I will fight long and hard to maintain it," Blair told the Blackpool conference. But well before it gets to the UN, let alone Iraq, this is becoming a tussle between two Britains and to some extent two Americas.

"The British people have seen and heard the President (George W. Bush) and they think they are estimating him just about right as not a man who we would want to be at the wheel of the car as we drive along the edge of a cliff with ourselves sitting in the backseat," said George Galloway, Labour MP at the front of the anti-war campaign. Opinion polls back him. Support for a military strike against Iraq has dropped from 37 per cent to 33 per cent this week, according to a Guardian poll. The survey showed 44 per cent opposed to a strike, with the rest undecided. If an attack were launched, Blair could have more of a fight on his hands in London than in Baghdad.

If Blair's war talk does not speak for Britain, the Bush speeches hide another America opposed to war, Galloway said. "I ask Labour members how we ended up on George Bush's side of an argument with Al Gore, the Democrats' presidential candidate. How do my friends feel having to say that Al Gore is wrong and that George W. Bush is correct?"

Gore criticised plans for an attack on Iraq on the ground that it would weaken the war on terrorism and take the focus away from Al Qaeda. But Bush is not encountering opposition to war to the extent that confronts Blair. Gore is far from a convincing Democrat candidate for the next election. Two likely Democrat candidates, Representative Richard A. Gephardt and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut (who was Gore's running mate), turned up at a White House meeting on October 2 to support Bush's Iraq policy.

Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democrat who has had some reservations over Bush's Iraq policy, stayed away. But he heads nothing like a Democratic wave against Bush over Iraq. Bush is greeted by anti-war protesters at many places, but the US has not seen an outpouring of protest on the streets to match the London rally. Bush has the military and political support to use it; Blair has neither. As a diplomatic ally to Bush, he is indispensable. Blair wants to deliver to Bush, but cannot be certain that his party and his people will let him.

After his dossier, Blair could even have lost the moral grounds for an attack. The admitted lack of certainties in the dossier made it a document that convinced few. Robert Fisk, an old Middle East hand, wrote in The Independent: "If these pages of trickery are based on 'probably' and 'if', we have no business going to war." And to think those 12 years of sanctions against Iraq were aimed precisely at ensuring it didn't develop weapons of mass destruction. Wrote Fisk, "If they (charges in the dossier) are all true, we murdered half a million Iraqi children (by sanctioning the country). How's that for a war crime?"