Blair and Bush: When Time-honored Ties Become a Short Leash
by William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, July 24, 2003

Tony Blair's current crisis, with a Law Lord inquiring into the death of David Kelly, the Defense Ministry advisor on biological weapons who committed suicide last week, surely derives in part from the prime minister's intense but puzzling commitment to George W. Bush's leadership in the Iraq war. If he or his entourage cut corners to justify Iraq's invasion, it was to serve the common cause.

The Blair government has turned the 61-year-old Anglo-American security alliance into an unprecedented subordination of Britain's security and foreign policy to the United States. This was the unspoken message of Tony Blair's emotional address to a joint session of Congress last week.

Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon had already announced, in late June, that British military forces are to be reconfigured so as to function henceforth as Pentagon auxiliaries. This is because from now on, "it is highly unlikely that the U.K. would engage in large-scale combat operations without the United States."

By depriving itself of the ability to operate independently, Britain will abandon one of its most important assets, its possession of balanced and autonomous multi-arm military forces, capable of serving distinct British interests.

In Europe, only France now will have the capacity for sizable independent military operations. All other non-neutral western European forces have been turned into specialized units of an American-commanded NATO army.

As David Leich and Richard Norton-Taylor reported in The Guardian last week, Britain has begun re-equipping its nuclear missile submarines with U.S.-$ made and -maintained Tomahawk cruise missiles, usable only with U.S. acquiescence.

Britain, under Tony Blair, has sold its principal aerospace manufacturer, BAE Systems, to the United States. The Blair government has just agreed to extradite British subjects to the United States on demand, without need for prima facie evidence. [...]

Why does Tony Blair wish this slow suicide of one of Europe's greatest nations, whose independent legacy to modern Western civilization, and certainly to the United States, is so immense? Where is his electoral mandate for so enormous a decision?

Britain gets nothing from the United States in return (other than Congressional cheers and a gold medal for the prime minister). If Bush remains in office beyond next year, Britain might find itself implicated in what could become an American national tragedy. [...]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 10:20 pm