Opinion: Low dishonest decade in review

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:

LONDON, U.K. — It was a different time and a different place when W.H. Auden coined the phrase "low, dishonest decade," but it is as apt a way of describing the Two-Thousand Noughties as it was the 1930s. I could sit down over the Twelve Days of Christmas and easily write 10,000 bitter words a day about all the low, dishonest things the great and the good and we ordinary mortals got up to since the turn of the millennium. I’d have written a 360-page book by the time the holiday was over.

You could start with the stolen American election of 2000 and end with the Obama team doing nothing about Goldman Sachs’ bonuses, stopping off along the way to visit the useless egocentricity of Davos-man and woman and the bloody duplicity of Israeli and Palestinian politicians, their people and their respective diasporas. I could throw in the way the owners and managers of the news media in the U.S. dismembered their businesses and the way aid work became a gravy train for those who administered it.

But no one reads anything that long online so I will furnish you with a record of the lowest and most dishonest actions from this island off the western coast of Europe.

This was the decade when the "Third Way," the British Labour Party’s adaptation of the American Democrats’ political philosophy of triangulation, was revealed for what it was — a brilliant method for winning elections to no particular purpose. There are no principles in the Third Way, just slogans. Tony Blair, was its greatest practitioner. He made finding a middle way on virtually every issue his hallmark and won three elections doing it.

But you can’t lead a government without eventually having to take a stand on principle. For Blair, that moment came in Iraq in April 2004, the first anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam. That was the week Bush administration arrogance collided with the deepening alliance of Ba’ath loyalists and Al Qaeda operatives. From the shock waves of that collision emanated an insurgency that would destroy Iraq’s chances of a decent transition to fair government and bury the prospects of humanitarian intervention by any nation or international organization in the foreseeable future.

I know this was the moment Blair failed because I was in Iraq at precisely that moment reporting on the state of the country a year after Saddam’s overthrow. I remember sitting in the Green Zone with a British diplomat on the staff of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s top man in Iraq — Blair’s eyes and ears — listening to the diplomat’s criticisms about the grotesque politicization of the occupation. It was all being run as an extension of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, he complained. Greenstock, a fluent Arabic speaker, a man with infinite knowledge of the region was completely sidelined, according to this fellow.

Day by day, hour by hour, blunder by blunder, Iraq was falling apart. Abu Ghraib, the failure to co-opt Moqtada al-Sadr, the flattening of Fallujah to avenge the deaths of four Blackwater mercenaries: The White House seemed not to care, so long as the American media was being spun and the president’s poll numbers were buoyant.

Blair had to have known all of this and yet, he did nothing. As the only foreign leader of any note to have signed up for the overthrow of Saddam, as a partner of the U.S. in the ending of Slobodan Milosevic’s wars in the Balkans, as the prime minister who had finally neutered the IRA and seen the Good Friday Agreement to completion, he had the authority to speak out in private or in public against the Bush administration’s blunders. He did not.

Why not remains a question to this day. It perplexes those who knew him intimately, people who worked for him and journalists who covered him. No one has ever given a satisfactory explanation. I think it was because he was trapped in the Third Way ideology. The ingrained habit of seeking compromise meant there was no bottom line … no point of principle to which he would hold fast and say, "No more." Finding a mid-point between opposing views may be a way to win elections but it offers no help when it comes to governing. Blair, like the ancient general Hannibal knew how to win victories but he did not know how to use them.

Iraq might well have gone through the convulsions of 2004-2007, but having been there in the streets when Saddam was overthrown and then a year later, I am certain it would never have been as bloody if Hannibal Blair had stood up to George Bush in private and told him America’s policy in Iraq had to change immediately or he was pulling his troops out. If Bush didn’t listen then he should have put his foot down in public. But he was a Third Way man up against My Way or the Highway politicians. There was no middle ground for Cheney-Rumsfeld.

The search for an answer to Blair’s behavior continues as the decade ends. Once more in Britain, the main players in Iraq are summoned to an inquiry. This one chaired by Sir John Chilcot. The scope of the inquiry is very broad. It isn’t billed as "The Search for Why Tony Blair Put Up With Bush Administration Incompetence and Arrogance," but that is the theme. The senior diplomats and civil servants are questioned almost exclusively about why the British government went along with the Bush administration on everything related to Iraq.

Those testifying finally acknowledge how perplexed and angered they were by the Rumsfeld-Cheney duopoly’s lack of post-war planning; by American satrap Jerry Bremer’s continuing to send the messages his masters wanted to hear even as Iraq went to hell in a handcart. Nothing new in what they say — it was all covered eloquently in books by American journalists published years ago. What rankles is that when it might have done some good, back in 2004 as Iraq fell apart, they acted in a low, dishonest way and said nothing. And even now they protect Blair, practicing the Omerta common to their class. When Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who knows every detail of the Bush administration’s stupidity and hubris was asked by the Chilcot Inquiry what he told Blair about the ineptitude of America’s man in Baghdad, Jerry Bremer, he ducked. "I took the approach that if I disagreed with something that was happening on the ground and was trying to change it, that I would not go weeping to London about it and ask them to get Washington to persuade Bremer to do something differently."

So he never asked the boss to help out by talking to Bush? I don’t believe it.

The decade is over, Iraq is staggering out of the pit, does it matter that Blair was incapable of finding some bottom line of principle to stand on? Yes. Think of the people of Zimbabwe still ruled over by Mugabe or the never-ending suffering in Sudan. Think of the unbridled brazenness of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, leading his nation towards peril. There will be no intervention from the international community now to ease the suffering of these countries’ people because the idea of of intervention has been discredited. If Blair and his team had been less low and dishonest that might not be the case.