The American Spectator

Special Report

(Page 2 of 2)

For an ex-ambassador to say this of a prime minister who is leading a country in a war, when there are thousands of British troops in the field whose morale may be an important concern in battle, seems disgusting. There is an Anglosphere alliance, and it matters.

Reporting this, the conservative Daily Telegraph brought out the grandmother of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan to say: "Tony Blair should send his sons out there and see how it feels. We want out boys back home. Our boys are fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that they don't understand ..." At the risk of both sounding callous and of stating the obvious, professional soldiers in an all-volunteer Army do not join it with the idea of picking and choosing where they are sent. Further, I receive e-mails every day from servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan who appear to know exactly why they are there, who are proud of the job they are doing, and who are not pessimistic about its outcome. It is disappointing that a paper of the Telegraph's stature should indulge in this maudlin gimmickry, while elsewhere defeats suffered by the British in Afghanistan a century and a half ago are recalled with masochistic glee.

The most transparently dishonest ploy of Blair's enemies of left and right is to portray President Bush's greeting, "Yo, Blair!" as evidence of some subservient relationship in which the word "poodle" is almost invariably deployed. In fact it is evidence of nothing of the kind, but rather of friendship. The leftish Catholic weekly the Tablet was typical of the media in claiming on no evidence that this was "condescending." Leftish Tory Malcolm Rifkind claimed: "The Prime Minister is derided around the world as George Bush's lapdog."

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett gratuitously attacked the U.S. for flying munitions to Israel through Britain, behavior whose only motives would seem to be to pander to anti-Americanism on left and right and to undermine the appearance of allied unity in a crisis -- though the behavior of some Philbyesque Tories has been even worse. The ineffable John Pilger claims: "Eighty-two per cent believe his warmongering was a principal cause of the London bombings ... Blair's extremism, like Bush's, is rooted in the righteous violence of rampant Messianic power. It is completely at odds with modern, multicultural, secular Britain." But then, Pilger refers to Hezbollah as "the people's movement that saw off the Israeli invaders."

THE MYSTERY REMAINS: Why is Tony Blair persisting in this steadfast course that seems so alien to the rest of his and his government's character and style, and against what seems to be an appeasement and surrender culture at both the political and administrative levels? Even the fact his son Euan has been sent to the U.S. as a political intern for first a Republican and then a blue dog Democrat may be seen as a significant gesture.

Possibly Blair has found something he thinks is actually right rather than expedient and it is a heady experience. Perhaps he was actually changed by 9/11 and the London tube bombings. It may be there are men -- some might say Neville Chamberlain in 1939 was like this -- who are given just one great spurt of courage. Or perhaps -- it may come to the same thing -- on this issue at least he understands what is at stake.

In 1922 the great British writer G. K. Chesterton (of whose 1914 book The Flying Inn I wrote previously) published a book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, about cynical and conniving British politicians in sewers of intrigue.

p>At last comes a great national crisis. A crusading journalist claims the government is about to "send thousands of Englishmen out to die for nothing..." but at last he has a handle on the matter, and can "blow the Government to Hell." Horne Fisher, the man "who knew too much," says (I have abridged this slightly): br> /p>

"I am proud of the Chancellor because he gambled and the Foreign Minister because he drank and the Prime Minister because he took a commission on a contract. I am proud of them because they did these things, and can be denounced for them, and know they can be denounced for them, and are standing firm for all that.

"I take off my hat to them because they are defying blackmail, and refusing to smash their country to save themselves. I salute them as if they were going to die on the battlefield....And it will be a battlefield, too, and not a metaphorical one.

"Our unhappy politicians have made concession after concession. If we do not fight now we shall never fight again. But my poor old gang is going to stand to its guns at last. Of course it's only natural that when they have been whitewashed for half a century as paragons, their sins should come back on them at the very moment when they are behaving like men for the first time in their lives....

"Did you think there was nothing but evil at the bottom of them? Even in a Parliament, life can be lived with occasional efforts to live it well. I tell you it is as true of these rich fools and rascals as it is true of every poor footpad and pickpocket; that only God knows how good they have tried to be."

br> And perhaps that is a hint of an explanation.

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