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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Steven Kettell, Dirty Politics?: New Labour, British Democracy and the Invasion of Iraq (London and New York: Zed Books 2006)
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| STEVEN KETTELL, like many other people, is puzzled by Tony Blair's decision to participate in the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But unlike many others who have written about this puzzle, he would have us shift our attention away from the main players and their immediate motivations. What he argues instead is "that the development of the Iraq policy was fundamentally conditioned by the underlying structural architecture of the British political system ... by a series of deeply entrenched norms and values pertaining to a centralized, hierarchical and elitist style of government." (4) The UK state has a democratic deficit, too few checks and balances, too limited a notion of representation, too great an enthusiasm for strong leadership. So too does New Labour. That, he tells us, is the key to the tragedy of Blair and Iraq. |
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In arguing in this fashion, Kettell positions himself in an ongoing debate about why Tony Blair went to war. In the broadest sense there are only four kinds of explanation in play in that debate: explanations privileging history, psychology, the accidental, and the structural. Kettell's explanation is a structural one. Within its own terms of reference, it is very persuasive: but so too are the others, and in key ways they help us to understand the substance of Blair's policy rather better than does Kettell's standing alone. A structural explanation definitely helps to clarify why the Iraq policy was Blair's to make, and why, once made, it was so difficult to stop. But for the full story we need more than that. We need to know too why the policy Blair chose was the one it was; and to get to that, we need a lot of history, a little psychology, and even a dash of tragedy. |
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After all, the tendency of UK governments to align themselves with the requirements of US foreign policy, in the manner of Blair's alignment with Bush, is not new. It has a long history, though not an unbroken history. Most famously, Harold Wilson resisted US pressure for UK troops to fight in Vietnam; but Wilson was the exception, not the rule. Post-war Labour governments, no less than Conservative ones, have regularly chosen — in Peter Riddell's telling phrase — to "hug them close," out of a desire to maintain a special relationship with US global power — a desire rooted in the reluctant recognition in UK governing circles that the UK alone is no longer strong enough these days, either economically or militarily, to play an independent global role. On this argument, Blair ended up as George Bush's point man on Iraq because he, in common with the rest of the New Labour leadership, had never broken entirely free of a mindset that requires the UK to punch above its weight on the international stage. Blair ended up sending British troops into Iraq because that's what UK governments habitually do. They help rearrange other people's political furniture because they have the military capacity and imperial arrogance to do so. |
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The fact that Blair participated so easily in this particular piece of furniture moving, and was then so resilient in the face of criticism from other European leaders, has also been explained psychologically by people like David Runciman, as a by-product of "the politics of good intentions." Blair the man — firm in his own convictions and well schooled in taking and winning political gambles — simply took another high-risk initiative. As a passionate advocate of globalization and an independent architect of the strategy of pre-emptive action, he inadvertently laid the ground for the invasion in his 1999 Chicago Address, and gained the necessary experience in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. On this argument, Blair actively wanted a leadership role post-9/ll, imposed himself on the Bush people to get one, and was geared to regime change in Iraq well before March 2003. When New Labour stalwarts looked on in horror as he aligned UK policy with that of neo-Conservative Republicans, the prime minister's hubris then kicked in, reinforcing his commitment to the alliance and the invasion. A different prime minister, drawing on the same history and enjoying the same structural advantages, would have played it differently. The differences are psychological here, not structural. It was "Blair the man," so the argument goes, that holds the ultimate explanatory key. |
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Or maybe there's a role for accident. Certainly James Naughtie thinks so; and so in a different way (in Blair's War) do Joel Krieger and I. By chance, Blair inherited a military relationship with the United States in relation to Iraq — the no-fly zones left over from the first Gulf War. He was — as he remains — close to Clinton, and supported his military moves in the Middle East. Nine/eleven killed UK citizens in significant numbers, not just Americans; and once Blair had accepted the Bush framing of the issue ("terrorism" and "axes of evil") he was trapped by the power of his own involvement in the demonizing of Hussein. To back down in the face of I r a q i defiance would strengthen the Iraqi dictator. To leave him in power alongside al-Qaeda would push the Baathists and the fundamentalists together. To take a principled stand alongside the French and the Germans would hurt the special relationship he so valued, and weaken the voices of moderation — mainly Colin Powell's — within the Bush Administration with whom Blair identified. In the end the UK went to war because Blair had to. His credibility was on the line, put there by a year of his own rhetoric. It wasn't the political architecture of the UK state that took us to war so much as the ideational architecture of Blair's public utterances. |
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All four arguments bring important insights to the puzzle of why Blair participated in the invasion of Iraq. In struggling to understand that puzzle, Steven Kettell's book provides a great service by emphasizing the impact of the structure of the UK state on the developing storyline. The service is a great one because it points to a vital area of reform; but it is also a limited service to the degree that it pulls us away from the other area of reform suggested by explanations more rooted in history, psychology, and accident. For it is the mindset of imperialism, still deeply engrained on the British Left, which also needs to go — not just the elitist structure of the UK state. We need democratization and mental cleansing at one and the same time. Labour leaders have to stop all this "punching above their weight" on the world stage. They need genuinely to reposition the UK at the centre of a social democratic Europe, and drop all their nonsense about bridging the Atlantic on Europe's behalf. That bridging simply allows them to strut their stuff before the world's media — to feel good by claiming to do good — when in places like Iraq, what they do, and what they support, is not good at all. It's not just the UK's political architecture that needs reform. That of the international community also needs reform. The Kettell argument points to that need in the UK. Let's hope it also triggers thinking about the equivalent need at the European and global level. |
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David Coates
Wake Forest University |
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