What Difference Did He Make? Tony Blair and British Foreign Policy from 1997–2007

Abstract

Several years after the Iraq intervention, the Guardian columnist Peter Preston conjured from his imagination a hypothetical world where Tony Blair had not joined George Bush:

It is March 2003 and the US has 100,000-plus crack troops poised in the zone. Australians, Poles and numerous small fry are there or thereabouts. But France and Russia and—now—Britain are staying out. The weapons inspectors need more time, they say. Resolution 1441 doesn’t sanction invasion. (Lord Goldsmith is quite clear on that.) So what happens next? What was always going to happen. The Americans, too committed to permit delay, blast in anyway. Saddam folds. That toppling statue stars on TV screens around the world. “Mission accomplished!” cries George Bush. Freedom lives! And, at a subsequent press conference, he voices his sorrow over “what must be the end of our special relationship. Since Winston Churchill, Great Britain has been our staunchest friend. We gave it our bomb, our help in the Falklands. We came to its rescue in 1944. But now, in our own war after 9/11, that friend has turned its back. All Americans will be specially saddened and shocked.”

There follows an unfortunate tale of cancelled trade and Iraq reconstruction contracts, a decline in the numbers of US tourists visiting the UK, and the ending of the visa waiver program. Nicholas Sarkozy, the new French president, is able to flamboyantly proclaim “Moi! Je suis le special relation maintenant.” In this hypothetical world, Blair is hounded from office a broken figure, harangued for having failed to give the US the wise counsel it required at its time of greatest need, with every insurgent attack on US troops in Iraq evidence of the folly of leaving the US alone to manage the postwar (Preston, 2007).