By Bronwen Maddox
Blair hurt by Rumsfeld's friendly fire
HOW badly has Donald Rumsfeld damaged Tony Blair? It is the first case of friendly fire in the war, and the bombing hasn’t even started.
Whether the US Secretary of Defence meant to dismiss Britain’s role quite as humiliatingly as he did, is — just perhaps — in doubt, after the Pentagon’s attempt at backpedalling. In calling opposition in Britain a “work-around”, Rumsfeld has brutally enriched the vocabulary of diplomacy. It has a direct translation in few languages, but was unambiguous in meaning and tone.
At home, he has hurt Blair severely. If anything could make the Prime Minister’s relations with his party more difficult, it was a further demonstration of the Bush Administration’s arrogance and impatience, even with its closest ally, and of Britain’s redundancy in battle. No matter if British troops lack boots and toilet paper, the US doesn’t need them anyway — that was the tone of Rumsfeld’s spontaneous remarks.
Yesterday, Labour Party opponents of Blair were rushing delightedly to drive him towards the escape route that they believed had suddenly been blown in the side of his fortress. Perception that he now has an exit, a chance to say to Washington, “Well, you didn’t really need me, so I’ll bow out”, can only increase opposition in Britain.
How about damage to relations between the US and Britain? It is pretty bad, despite Washington’s best efforts to portray Rumsfeld’s remarks as a sensitive appreciation of the pressures on Blair.
Although American diplomats have spent the week making clear that it is only to save Blair that they have been working so hard to get support in the UN, Rumsfeld showed how quickly that patience may snap.
After all, real differences between the US and UK are very apparent, scarcely below the surface. On Monday the Foreign Secretary, speaking to the House of Commons, said emphatically that Britain considered a serious attempt to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire an indispensable part of policy in the region. That is a line rejected by the Bush Administration.
But the most immediate question raised by the Rumsfeld brusqueness is the effect on the the vote in the United Nations. Here, the fallout is less obvious: the American-British campaign to gather support for a new resolution is struggling so badly that further damage is hard to discern.
On the face of it, Britain’s desperate efforts to secure the nine affirmative votes on the Security Council for a new resolution cannot be helped by Rumsfeld’s apparent view that Britain isn’t needed.
Yes, Rumsfeld’s arrogance will have annoyed even further those Council members who bridle at American unilateralism. That could well include Mexico and Chile; their opposition could clinch the death of a new resolution.
But in the end, the voting will be determined by the relations that Council members want to have with the US, not with Britain. It is Washington that has been in the powerful position to offer rewards for a “yes” vote, or to withdraw its favour for a “no”. That still holds true. Those countries particularly interested in the most tangible representations of that goodwill — say Angola and Guinea — may be just as responsive now as they were before Rumsfeld’s remarks.
The clear statement that the US is prepared to go it alone, without Britain and without the UN, if necessary, will no doubt infuriate Security Council members. But it will also remind them that the choice is a stark one: are you with us or against us? That abrasive challenge has inspired much of the Bush Administration’s diplomacy. All Rumsfeld has done is remind Council members of that blunt fact.