The last decade: Bye-bye British power. Part III: Wars

Friday 29 January, 2010, was a remarkable day. For unlike when Anthony Eden led Britain into the foreign policy disaster of Suez, the Prime Minister at the time of the Iraq invasion was called in front of an inquiry. Tony Blair was, to some extent, being held to account for his particular foreign policy disaster.

He was nervous. On arriving, his brow was cut sharply with concern and his hands shook as he leafed through his meticulously ordered and annotated papers. In spite of all the talk of a toothless Chilcot Inquiry, Blair clearly did not see it that way. I assume he worried the questioning had the capacity to lacerate his legacy.

Britain never formally learnt any lessons from the Suez Crisis. As Howard Denton says, we never held an inquiry into that disaster. As Robert Fisk observes, the years after the Crisis were too soon, and a decade later was too late. But perhaps we learnt at least one informal lesson, that it is best not to freeze out the United States when it comes to war. We didn’t make that mistake in Iraq.

Of course, this is not to say that Iraq was as disastrous for Britain as Eden’s secret collusion with some powers and diversion of others, namely the US and the UN. But there remain parallels to be drawn between Suez and Iraq. Was there collusion? Maybe. Was there diversion of the UN? Eventually. Neither were as bare-faced as with Suez. But of course there was no ignoring the US, instead an obedient following of their bellicose footsteps.

And of course both Suez and Iraq had a catalytic effect on the erosion of British power in the world. Both brought to the attention of the crowds the fact that the emperor was naked. Britain was not the Great power of old, but just another nation, reliant on other nations in turn. The emperor is still parading through the streets, refusing to believe he is naked.

We were, Blair says, preventing the potential risk of Saddam and his sons going on a global rampage. As Michael Mansfield QC observed on Friday, 'Blair has changed his stance'. No longer does he talk of actual weapons of mass destruction, but about the reconstitution of an old weapons programme. “This was about preventing a risk, a possibility. This was a pre-emptive exercise”, Mansfield paraphrases.

But of course we, Britain, were not in a position to get pre-emptive. The most powerful nation in the world might be, regardless of international law, but not Britain. We were not in a position to play the role of the global policeman. As part of Europe, perhaps, but we parted company with Germany and France on Iraq, and in that sense actually froze ourselves out of the most compelling union on offer.

And we were not in a position to counter an unexpected insurgency. Having to do so strained our military and our economy and exposed our weaknesses. Blair says he was expecting a humanitarian crisis (which itself makes you wonder why he still thought it was worth going to war), which also speaks to our lack of regional understanding.

But to counter an insurgency required a holistic approach to our presence in Iraq. It needed not only military might, but persuasive cultural and social influence and reconstruction of an entire political and economic system. It was largely beyond us, because we did not have the money or the power, and we were exposed as lacking both.

These weaknesses have only been highlighted by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. And today, while it is too early for an inquiry, we are reassessing our conflict aims and are now at the negotiating table. Once again, Britain’s power is eroded.

The decision to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 was perhaps more easily justified than that to go into Iraq. As Blair said, after 9/11 “the calculus of risk changed.” And there was a link between the Taliban and the aggressors, Al Qaeda.

But still there was little consideration of the consequences of all-out war in Afghanistan. Did we expect in 2001 to be negotiating with the Taliban in 2010, offering them a seat at the table? No, we expected, far too optimistically, to establish a new government which would be strong enough to resist the Taliban.

Our misreading of both events has left us quietly trying to tiptoe out of the Middle East. At home, the population is angry at the bloodshed. And the politicians are left to learn lessons.

The wars of the previous decade did the most to damage Britain’s power in the world. The spectacular financial boom and bust only added to that. And our floundering education system makes it hard, if not impossible, to reverse the trend.

Looking to the future, our apparent inability to deal with the inherent instabilities in our financial system threatens Britain’s power. So too do the cuts that will come after the crash. Add to that an educational system which is no longer geared to providing a population of pioneers, and things look stormy for the United Kingdom.

We will be even more reliant on our allies in the future, and as I said in Part II, we may well have to seek shelter from the rain under the umbrella of the EU.