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Blair’s Part in Bush’s Failure on Terror
By The Anglo American | July 30, 2008
Richard Clarke, served under five Presidents and was the Terrorist tsar to Clinton and in the early years of the Bush administration - until he gave up because nobody would listen to him. In his book, “Against all Enemies” he said of the President that he
could see Bin Laden pulling the strings. Blair new this and could have prevented the President from walking into terrorist traps, but did nothing.
The Republican and Democrat party faithful may envy their British counterparts in that the major British parliamentary parties hold a conference for their membership on an annual basis. They may not have the scale of the Republican and Democrat conventions but the speeches are just as good and, sometimes, equally bad. They are the sharp-end of British politics and a good time is had by one and all.But 1984 Conservative party conference in Brighton was different. It was typical of the Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher to be still at work on her speech and reviewing government papers a few minutes before 3.a.m. Yes, that’s no mistake. She would often work in the small hours of the morning. It was at this time that a 100-pound bomb exploded 50 feet from her bedroom destroying 8 floors of the central section of the Victorian Grand hotel right down to the basement.
All credit must go to the architect of the building, John Wichcord and his building engineers, that the hotel they completed in 1861, did not implode on itself. It withstood a colossal force for which it was never designed to withstand. Had it not done so the elected Britsh government would have been annihilated. Five people did lose their lives and a further 34 people including two senior cabinet members, were injured.
If life insurance for Government officials was now to command a premium, the risks presented to the underwriter were only to increase. On February 7th. 1991 another Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, had to dive to the floor, along with his senior ministers as 3 mortar rockets landed on his Downing St. office in Central London. Fortune was on the side of the elected, once again, as only one of the ordinances exploded in the garden, blowing out all the buildings windows as it did so. There were no injuries this time. But the threat was real as ever and terrorists were, yet again, close to achieving their aim.
It was this accumulative experience of terrorism from his immediate predecessors that Prime Minister Tony Blair was able to draw upon. Here was an opportunity of hard earned council for George Bush - not just after 9/11 but also for the initial decision stages of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. True, the President had more important things on his mind than just swapping old war stories with his ally; after all America had a few of its own to tell before 9/11. The US officials at their Kenyan Embassy and the US sailors aboard the US Cole, as well as President Clinton would no doubt testify to this.
The wisdom that lay at Blair’s fingertips was not what his predecessors did in response to these terrorist atrocities but precisely what they did not do. Both Thatcher and Major knew that they could not do anything that would give the IRA propaganda machine an opportunity to promote the war with Britain. So beyond the statements of outrage there was no physical response, no retaliation. There are governments today, given similar circumstances that would not have hesitated in bombing Dublin. After all the, the Irish government has always been ambivalent in its approach to the IRA, refusing terrorist extradition requests time and time again. There are also governments today that might have taken a less direct route but an equally bloody one by entering Catholic regions of Belfast and giving the community a firing lesson that it would never forget - an indiscriminate eye for an eye.
Such actions would no doubt have put some so called charities in the US into overdrive as they took money off innocent Americans and turned it into weaponry to be used against British troops and Irish civilians alike. It may have also lead to a large Irish American volunteer army.
Fortunately, Britain had no such government. But they were also not lead by a government that were genetically wiser than their American counterparts when it came to terrorism. Internment is an open wound to the Irish peoples and British judges putting Irishmen, terrorists or otherwise, in prison without a jury trial, was the salt the IRA recruitment officers were wishing for. And nobody should forget the apparent indiscriminate shootings by the British army of Irish civilians, some of whom may have been armed. That day has become known as Bloody Sunday. It is the day that turned the IRA from being an irritation that blew up customs posts, every year, on St. Patrick’s Day, to the effective fighting machine that fought a war.
To do nothing is a hard sell! Of course, behind the scenes Major and Thatcher were doing everything they could to infiltrate the IRA with their intelligence operatives and they were successful in penetrating their high command. But despite IRA bombs causing considerable damage in many English cities they did not bring around any change in government policy and gave no propaganda advantage to the IRA. It was stalemate. It was to lead to the IRA giving up its armed struggle. It gave Tony Blair the platform to push the peace initiative in Northern Ireland.
It is indeed ironic that Tony Blair said, in peace negotiations in Ulster, that he could feel the hand of history upon us {sic} yet ignore the recent history of British terrorism when advising his friend George Bush.
George Bush is known to make decisions from the summary not the detail. Maybe the British approach to terrorism is too subtle for somebody who always wants to know what the bottom line is. But we will never know because Tony Blair never presented the British inheritance for the President to take on board or discard. And there lies the tragedy of it all. If anyone could have sold the President the political black art of dealing with terrorists then it was Tony Blair. It is of course conjecture but publicly available information suggests that Bin Laden expected, indeed wanted the US to invade Afghanistan - Iraq was an unforeseen bonus.
Had Blair persuaded Bush to Zig when the terrorists wanted him to Zag then the World would look very different today. Thousands of allied troops would still be alive. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be living even if they were living under a brutal dictator. Saudi Arabia would have an effective geographical barrier between itself and Iran. There would be no East-West polarization. American resources would be focused on freezing Bin Laden’s assets and therefore his power to recruit his mercenaries and weapons; that successful infiltration by US intelligence into the Afghan/Pakistan border would be breaking up Al-Qaeda, leading to the capture of the man himself.
What is intriguing is that, despite of everything, these are goals that are still achievable.
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