A PREDATORY AND DISHONEST WAR 3

So the point in Britain is not which political Party will form a government after the looming shambles, but who will be in the driving seat.

Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the world’s greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant’s head to wave at the boys?

Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the United Nations, he will drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or the UN. By doing so, Blair will have helped provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. He will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come. Welcome to the party of the Ethical Foreign Policy.

There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the Special Relationship.

The stink of religious self-righteousness in the American air recalls the British Empire at its worst. Lord Curzon’s cloak sits poorly on the shoulders of Washington’s fashionably conservative columnists. I cringe even more when I hear my Prime Minister lend his Head Prefect’s sophistries to this patently colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq.

We are in this war, if it takes place, in order to secure the fig-leaf of our special relationship with America, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.

‘But will we win, Daddy?’

‘Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed.’

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him after all.’

‘But will people be killed, Daddy?’

‘Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people.’

‘Can I watch it on television?’

‘Only if Mr Bush says you can.’

‘And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?’

‘Hush, child, and go to sleep.’

Last Friday an American friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying ‘Peace is also Patriotic’. It was gone by the time he’d finished his shopping.

John le Carré January 2003

© David Cornwell 2003