Shoulder to shoulder

Jonathan Freedland reviews a new book on Bush's best friend Tony Blair, but fails to answer whether he'll be revered or reviled for the invasion of Iraq

If Mary Tudor believed that "when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart", then Tony Blair must surely tremble that any post-mortem examination of his own vital organs will reveal the single word "Iraq". For just as Mary's yielding of the French port marked a loss of prestige that she feared would define her reign, so Blair frets that his chief legacy as Britain's prime minister will be the war for Baghdad.

American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror, by the British journalist Con Coughlin, proves he has good reason to be anxious. Like Bob Woodward before him, Coughlin retraces the political and diplomatic dance that culminated in the invasion of Iraq. He doesn't provide a huge amount of information that was not already known, and perhaps inevitably, the choicest observations are attributed to unnamed sources, but by focusing on the London end of the narrative, he sheds some useful light on one of the mysteries wrapped inside the enigma of the Iraq conflict. If future historians will scratch their heads over why the war was fought at all, many will struggle to understand why Blair sacrificed nearly everything to be at George W Bush's side in fighting it.

That sacrifice is clear in chapter after chapter. Blair's determination to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with a Bush administration on the warpath put him at odds with a vast swath of British public opinion, his own Labour Party, several members of his cabinet and loud voices in both British intelligence and the military. More than once, he seemed to be in terminal peril; at one point he had civil servants make arrangements for his resignation. And the pain has endured. Labour's majority was slashed in last year's election, with Iraq frequently cited as the decisive factor, while polls show trust in the prime minister has never recovered. His problem has been painfully simple: Blair's sole justification for war was not the vileness of Saddam Hussein's regime, but the threat posed by his weapons of mass destruction. Their refusal to materialise has made him look like a liar. Just this month, one of Britain's foremost generals (now retired), Sir Michael Rose, called for Blair to be impeached for leading the country to war on false pretences.

These pages show how little Blair got in return for all this trouble. Yes, Bush took the "UN route", but Blair was not the only one pushing for that. It's true that Washington agreed to seek a second United Nations resolution, following desperate pleas from Downing Street, but that hardly counts as a reward; rather it promised to get Blair out of a hole he was in only because of the White House's unshakable determination to go to war. And yes, the president made the occasional move on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (publishing the long-delayed 'road map', for example); but those tended to consist of statements and declarations rather than the genuine action Blair needed so badly if he was to win over his critics.

Otherwise, he endured a series of defeats that taken together count as serial humiliation. Blair wanted more time for weapons inspections; Bush wouldn't budge. The British didn't like the appointment of Jay Garner as the first viceroy of occupied Iraq; Garner kept his job all the same (at least for a while). London prepared a detailed plan for postinvasion Iraq; Donald Rumsfeld hurled it into the trash.

One of the book's most revealing lines appears to be a Freudian slip. "Blair had to compete with the other key figures in the administration," Coughlin writes, as if the British prime minister were merely another Bush appointee. Indeed, in this telling, when Blair shuttles around the world, making Bush's case for him, he seems almost grateful to be a glorified United States envoy. Sometimes, backed by Colin Powell, he wins a Washington turf battle against Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, sometimes he loses. But he does not stop to wonder whether this is a suitable role for the head of a sovereign government. As Coughlin makes clear, Britain had considerable political and military leverage with an American administration and army that did not want to fight alone -- but Blair never used it. He could have threatened to back away from Bush, but he never did.

The book has some tasty nuggets, including a clear declaration that Blair found the straightarrow Bush easier to work with than the pollchecking Clinton though according to an unidentified adviser, he thought Cheney "rather sinister" – but it does not supply a satisfying answer to the big question: Why did Blair gamble everything for Bush and this war?

Coughlin reminds us that Clinton had advised Blair to be Bush's "best friend". But why was a tight embrace with the United States so essential that Blair was prepared to risk his political life for it? There are possible answers, among them a moral revulsion at Hussein that predated Bush. More plausible, perhaps, is the fact that Blair's entire political strategy has been dedicated to exorcising the ghosts of Labour's wilderness years in the 1980s, and that one feature of that period was the party's remoteness from the United States – a stance that Blair forever associates with failure, and that he would not repeat. But these are speculations. For all Coughlin's meticulous detail, we are left with the same enigma – a riddle that Blair, like Mary Tudor, may take to his grave.

© 2006 The New York Times

AMERICAN ALLY. Tony Blair and the War on Terror

By Con Coughlin.

Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. €27.70