By JOHN RENTOUL
The extraordinary high profile that Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair has maintained since the World Trade Center attack has raised eyebrows both abroad and at home. He has charged around the Middle East spreading the word on the coalition's behalf and has tried to be the concert-master to rally the Europeans.
The success of both enterprises is debatable - he was given a diplomatic mauling in Syria and ruffled feathers in Europe over invitations omitted or late to the meeting he convened - but there is no denying the energy and commitment.
For the domestic audience he rewrote a reference to Britain's "moral fibre" in a major speech after it received poor notices when the first draft was released in advance. He had to make it explicit that he was not accusing those who express doubts about the tactics of the campaign in Afghanistan of lacking moral fibre. "No one who raises doubts is an appeaser or a faint heart."
But the militant moralism of the Prime Minister shone through nonetheless, as he declared that "we" believe in justice and tolerance just as passionately as "they" believe in "fanatical hatred of Jews, Christians and any Muslims who don't share their perverse view of Islam".
As I look back over Blair's four years as Prime Minister for clues to the moral intensity with which he has seized on the "war against terrorism", complete with Churchillian grandiloquence, I wonder whether I might be tracing the origins of his first really serious mistake. Wasting £1 billion ($3.48 billion) of public money on a Dome no one wanted may come to seem benign compared with declaring an unwinnable war on al Qaeda and the Taleban regime.
The Kosovo campaign is the most obvious precedent for the kind of high-energy, morally charged marshalling of international forces against Category A wickedness that Blair has displayed over the past seven weeks, but it is far from the only one.
The first decision in which he was asked to risk the lives of British service personnel came just two months after his election in 1997, when he authorised the arrest of two suspected war criminals in the British sector of Bosnia. The use of special forces - in this case the SAS, who arrested one suspect and shot the other when he opened fire - to enforce international law on crimes against humanity played to Blair's self-image as decisive and pragmatic in a high moral cause.
In Sierra Leone, for example, Blair cut through a Gordian knot of ethical complications to declare that what mattered was that the elected Government had been restored to power. Never mind that this had been accomplished by British mercenaries from a company called Sandline and Nigerian forces sent by the notorious dictator Sani Abacha. At least when the Government was overthrown again, he sent in British paratroopers last year, who proved more effective than United Nations peace-keeping forces and restored some semblance of order.
Meanwhile, the running game of cat and mouse with Saddam Hussein provided another template for future engagements. As in the present case, a broad international coalition - the alliance that had fought the Gulf War - was reduced to simply the US and Britain when it came to risking the lives of armed forces in trying to enforce UN resolutions. While the moral case was strong, the tone towards Saddam was muscular - "If he again obstructs the inspectors' work, we will strike" - and Blair showed an insensitivity to the need to manage Arab and Muslim opinion which he is accused of repeating now.
Kosovo was, though, the main artesian source of his moral stridency and aggressive self-belief. He was thoroughly vindicated in a war that he was told could not be won from the air, by people who thought the idea of bringing Slobodan Milosevic to justice was laughably naive.
It was at an early stage of the Kosovo bombing that he gave a ringing speech in Chicago expounding the "doctrine of international community", in which he sought to establish the legal and moral basis for intervening in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.
As with his speech to the Labour conference last month, you could tell he wrote it himself because it had verbs in it.
There is another factor that might contribute to Blair's impatience and energy in prosecuting the campaign against Osama bin Laden, and that is his sense that his time is short.
Blair has been conscious since the age of 11, when his father had a catastrophic stroke, that he may not have long to make his mark. That feeling was intensified at the age of 21 by his mother's early death from throat cancer.
"You suddenly realise - which you often don't as a young person - that life is finite, so if you want to get things done you had better get a move on," he said.
"My life took on an urgency which has probably never left it."
He may think he has little time left in Downing St. He always used to say that he learned from observing Margaret Thatcher to be aware of when his time was up. He seems relatively immune to the megalomania that infects most prime ministers, fooling them into believing that they can go "on and on".
If there is a 10-year shelf-life at the top of politics, he is half way through his premiership already, and he must feel he has hardly begun to achieve the sorts of historic deeds he intended - even if he was rather vague about what they would be. Hence his hurrying towards a referendum on the euro. Hence his seizing the opportunity to stride the world stage, coaxing a coalition of nations behind an ethical objective once more.
It is not as though his handling of the campaign against al Qaeda has been wrong, although there are questions of language (notably the "war against terrorism") and of tactics (the appearance, after the first few days, of bombing for the sake of it).
But Blair has to make decisions that are not only right but that work. The war in Kosovo worked. His reward back home was negligible, however, and the chances of similar success in the present campaign seem remote.
Like generals, politicians risk fighting the last war. Any reasonable person must share Blair's conviction that the suicide hijackings of September 11 were crimes against humanity, comparable in their wickedness to "ethnic cleansing" or genocide. But the Kosovo war was different in that it had a clear objective (to return the ethnic Albanians to their homes and protect them there) and a plausible strategy (to put military and diplomatic pressure on the armed forces of a nation state).
Al Qaeda is not a state, even if it is protected by one. And the religious-psychotic ideology that gives rise to its kind of terrorism cannot be restrained by military and diplomatic pressure - indeed, it may be inspired to greater acts of nihilistic destruction by such action.
If further acts of terrorism are carried out in the name of irrational fundamentalist Islam, or simply if the fear of terrorism persists, the "war" that the Prime Minister declared on September 11 will be lost.
There is, sadly, no reward in politics for doing the right thing and failing.
- INDEPENDENT
* John Rentoul is the author of the biography Tony Blair, Prime Minister.
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
What makes Tony run
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