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14th December 2006 Published in The Japan Times By David Howell Is the USA losing Britain? LONDON – President George Bush must have drawn some comfort from having the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, standing beside him at the White House in Washington the other day. At least there was one friend left who was prepared to stick by him as the Iraq situation worsened. But should he have felt so reassured this way? Mr.Blair is now in the departure lounge as Prime Minister, with his handover date, almost certainly to his colleague Gordon Brown, pencilled in for next June – although it might be even earlier. This means, as is always the way with departing leaders, that his authority is ebbing and his supporters are drifting away or jockeying for positions under the new man . On top of that, as the chief architect of Britain’s policy of total commitment to the Bush strategy for the Middle East Tony Blair’s credit is draining even faster as that strategy unravels. The Bush-Blair alliance has a disaster on its hands and both leaders now face a severe credibility problem. Mr.Blair himself may stand by the beleaguered President, but the mood in Britain has swung right away from the Bush administration, which is widely regarded as incompetent and out of touch. Neither Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, nor the Conservative Opposition leader David Cameron, are going to be the kind of compliant and faithful accomplice that Blair has been. In short the USA may be about to lose its key ally in the whole Iraq adventure. Could the situation be saved by a marginal change of direction, as advocated by the long awaited Iraq Study Group which was presented with a fanfare in Washington a few days ago? High hopes were pinned on this report and it is certainly very blunt about what is going wrong. The situation in Iraq, it says is ‘grave and deteriorating’ – a very different story from the Bush-Blair line until recently that improvement and success were on the way. The report goes on to recommend a number of changes in the deployment and status of American troops (and therefore by implication British troops) and to urge the rather obvious importance of somehow involving Iraq’s neighbours in trying to stop its total disintegration. But even this distinguished group, led by the wily and experienced James Baker, the former Secretary of State, as it struggles to find a third way between the quagmire of unending commitment and the humiliation of withdrawal and defeat, suffers from the same fundamental error of vision as that which bedevils the Bush administration. This is quite simply that America is still in the driving seat in world affairs and still has the power to transform the Middle East region . Thus, whether one is listening to Bush himself, or to the Study Group members, or to all the critical commentators and columnists in Washington, or New York, or indeed in London, there is the same underlying and false assumption – that America may have got things wrong but it is America which must now take the lead in putting them right. What none of these leaders or politicians or experts have grasped is that size and sheer military weight and spending no longer equate with power and influence in the world. Whatever conclusions the policy-makers reach in Washington, whether to ‘stay the course’ or change direction , will no longer shape events in the Middle East and no Americans, whether in the White House or in Congress or anywhere else, are in a position to control the pattern of events. Thus there is something almost tragic about the persistent belief that the U.S. can call together a conference of near-by powers, such as Iran and Syria, as well as Jordan, Egypt and Turkey, as though it was the victor in some great battle and was now grandly ready to settle the peace terms all round. But of course there has been no victory, and nor is there going to be one. Any conference America tried to convene and chair would be looked on with pity and possibly even amusement by other key countries, who might well not even wish to attend. The only motive for doing so might the general one that it is in no state’s interest to see Iraq implode and very few states’ interests to see America totally humiliated. Any lead will almost certainly have to come from the region itself or from the new powers in the network world, with China, Russia and India prominent amongst them, although even their powers are limited, as they are aware. The missing piece of understanding in all the views coming out of Washington, in the Bush-Blair press conference, in the media and in all the comment from the pundits in newspapers both sides of the Atlantic, is that the age of the microchip has changed everything. It has dispersed power massively - away from the American giant and into the hands of the smallest and most lethal unit, into the most vicious cell and into the most malign clique. Outside Baghdad vast American military bases hum with every conceivable piece of modern equipment, with almost unlimited firepower, with every state-of-the-art electronic device and every tracking system ever devised. Yet American soldiers cannot walk down a Baghdad street without fear of pin-point rocket and sniper attacks and guerrilla assaults organised with deadly efficiency. And Baghdad itself is virtually inaccessible without the lowest flying helicopter skimming over the rooftops in the hopes of dodging the most modern and smartest missiles. The era of ultra-asymmetric warfare has arrived with a terrible vengeance. Great armies, even when armed to the teeth, are no longer in command. And this means that great nations like the USA, even when prepared to spend to the limit, are no longer in control. Their chief allies, the British, are beginning to see that. For a check on the bloodshed and chaos of Iraq and the Middle East today the world is going to have to look elsewhere. Ends www.lordhowell.com
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