Guardian: In hock to George Bush

[muriel_volestrangler]

Blair must speak out on Lebanon. We can't leave the United States to set our moral compass

I defy any person watching TV not to cry out loud for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon. Yet our government and that of the US have weasel-worded their way through this tragedy. Why?

Tony Blair would argue that words of condemnation come cheap and that the job of a leader is to forgo the glib soundbite if, by grabbing a headline at home, you write yourself out of the script where it matters most - in this case, in Israel and the US. I have no doubt he has been urging President Bush to action, as well as working for a solution himself. He is right to sympathise with Israel's plight. And he will know the role that Iran and Syria are playing behind the scenes.

Yet sympathy for Israel and its suffering, the detestation of terrorist organisations such as Hizbullah, and the desire to see a durable cessation of hostilities, do not justify silence - or adequately explain the reasons for it.

In their bunker, leaders become isolated from the world. Pressure, isolation and fatigue undermine good judgment. But the overriding reason for Britain's loss of moral authority is Blair's conviction that he has to hitch the UK to the chariot of the US president. Realism about an independent foreign policy is sensible, not least on the 50th anniversary of Suez. This government has taken to unprecedented lengths the view that Britain's influence on the US can be exercised only in private. It has too readily lost sight of the fact that Britain's interests and those of the US are not identical.
...
· Sir Stephen Wall was foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair until last year; a version of this article appears in this week's New Statesman

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1831944,00.html

Although I thought Wall stopped advising Blair earlier than last year, it's interesting to see him criticising Blair like this. I have my suspicions that it could have been he who leaked the Downing Street Memos - as European Policy Adviser to Blair in 2002 and 2003, he would have known what was going on with respect to the relations with European leaders about Iraq; and on Iraq he subsquently said "We stretched the legal argument to breaking point in my view...". He was criticising Blair on Iraq back in 2004.

[whistle]

1. Perhaps, but will Blair listen to his critics or do what Bush ...

...and the British neocons tell him to do?

[KoKo]

2. Reaching the point where political atennae only broadcast and not recieve

:rofl: Well that about sums it up for both Blair and Bush....

snip from article:

Foreign Office posts around the Middle East will have been reporting on the cost to Britain's interests of our response. I imagine cabinet members have been warning about the price to be paid in Britain for our apparent complicity. I hope Margaret Beckett has been as robust in private as she has been loyal in public. To what avail? David Owen said of Margaret Thatcher that she reached the point where her political antennae were able only to broadcast and no longer to receive.