Bill's Comment Page

Tony Blair’s dilemma – authorise military action by British troops, or save his political career

Can he do both? This is becoming increasingly uncertain.

Support for Tony Blair’s strong position on Iraq has been haemorrhaging for weeks, but in recent days this has become public and very heated, specially amongst Labour supporters and even amongst a large number of Labour MPs and at least one Cabinet Minister.

Clare Short, International Development Secretary, last Sunday described Tony Blair’s Iraq policy as ‘reckless’. This flouts the notion of collective cabinet responsibility, which says that disagreements with government policy be expressed only in private and that once a decision is made that all members of the Cabinet support it. She has declared she will resign from the Cabinet if Britain undertakes military action having failed to achieve a further UN resolution.

Yesterday evening Donald Rumsfeld dropped one of his occasional bombshells, which we are told caused ‘panic’ in Downing Street. Frankly, this surprises me if it is true and I can hardly believe it is. I can of course understand that there would be a certain amount of anguish in Downing Street, because whilst the UK government supports the US government’s policy almost totally (and rightly in my view), there are obviously nuances which separate them. Not to mention the political reality that Tony Blair’s personal position has suddenly become much less strong in this country specially amongst his own ‘supporters’. It is difficult to see how Blair can ignore these realities, even if he does decide to plough on with his basic policies. The bottom line is, though, that the US will most probably continue with its plans to initiate military action very soon to thwart Saddam Hussein’s regime, even if the UK decides it cannot participate in at least the early stages at a practical military level. This is the message that Rumsfeld was putting across last night, I think, and whilst it may grate a little I am certainly not going to say he should not have said what he did – he was after all only stating the obvious.

Today at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons I thought the PM did moderately well, in the circumstances, even managing to joke a little about the internal cabinet dissension he is faced with. The reality is, though, that talk of yet more conditions and yet more time in tortuous negotiations to try and get at least 9 of the 15 UN Security Council members to agree to a ‘cobbled together’ resolution will work only if President Bush agrees to play along. Frankly, I doubt if he will or even whether he should. The sooner Saddam Hussein is removed from power in Iraq the better – that must remain the over-riding objective.