Blair's Wars
John Kampfner
401 pages including index
published in 2004

Tony Blair is the first UK prime minister to take his country to war five times in six years. It's this for which he will be remembered, especially for the last war he started, the War on Iraq. Yet, according to John Kampfner in Blair's Wars, Blair was never that much interested in foreign policy until well after he became prime minister. It's this seeming contradiction that forms the heart of this book, an examination of what drove Blair to go to war so often and how he managed his wars.

John Kampfner is the current editor of the New Statesman and before that was a longtime foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, chief political correspondent for the Financial Times, as well as political commentator for the Today programme at the BBC. In all a fairly typical representative of the political media elite, who describes himself as leftist and whose opinions, as showcased on his website, are firmly in the mainstream of British politics, even if not necessarily shared by the British voter.

This background is echoed in Blair's Wars: this is a book about the politics behind the wars, not the wars themselves. So there's plenty of material about how Blair tried to get UN approval for the War on Iraq, how he succeeded or failed to persuaded the Americans to do something or to not do something, all from an insider's point of view, with various senior advisors describing their roles in these processes. Kampfner is very good at describing the mechanics of this, but it is all treated somewhat like a ballgame, in that who wins these behind the scenes political struggles and the struggle itself is given more attention than what the outcome of such a struggle means.

Furthermore, in depicting the evolution of Blair's views on foreign policy and the use of military action for humanitarian reasons, Kampfner has a disturbing tendency to take Blair on his word, to believe that the reasons Blair gave for his support of military actions were indeed the reasons he did so and not to put these actions in context or to look for other explenations. Kamfner is good at reporting, but falls short in analysis.

As said, when Blair came to power in 1997 he was barely interested in foreign policy; he had gotten in number ten on domestic unrest, not foreign policy issues. Those were left to Robin Cook to shape, with his "ethical foreign policy". No longer would Britain support dictators or sell arms to repressive governments. Unfortunately, almost with the first test of this policy, the sale of Hawk fighter-trainers to Indonesia, it turned out that Blair was more than willing to overrule Cook if the interests of British industry were threatened...

That incident also showcased one Blair tendency that would be of enormous importance later on: his distrust of Whitehall in general and the foreign office bureaucracy in particular and his reliance on a small circle of informal advisors who shared this distrust. The dreaded "sofa government", in which the important decisions are taken in informal, adhoc meetings without any oversight and presented to cabinet and parliament as fait accomplish. It was through these that Blair's policies evolved, rather than through cabinet discussions.

The first two military actions that Blair was involved with did not come about through his choice. The first was Operation Desert Fox, the US/UK airstrikes against Iraq after it had supposedly been found to interfere with the weapon inspectors in their search for weapons of mass destruction. Here Blair's overwhelming concern was to be shown to be a loyal ally to the United States, after relations had soured under Major, as well as with showing that he wasn't your typical weakwilled pacifist Labourite. There was also the United Nations mandated humanitarian mission in Sierra Leone, which Blair for the most part kept his distance from, but from the criticism of which by the opposition and the media and the subsequent success of the mission he learned the lesson to ignore such criticism.

It was during the Kosovo crisis that Blair developed a coherent vision on humanitarian intervention. For much of the nineties the western European powers had been helpless or unwilling to stop the civil wars springing up in Yugoslavia after the collapse of the Soviet empire, had failed to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing. It was the Americans who finally managed to stop the fighting. Now here were the Serbs back to their old tricks again, but this time it was the Americans who were unwilling to get involved and Blair had to convince Clinton to not just sign up to an air campaign, but when that seemed to have failed, to be willing to use ground forces as well. It was his finest hour. He had managed to be a bridge between the European NATO allies and the US, getting them to fight to prevent genocide. Of course, reality was slightly more complicated than the rhetoric made it look, but who cares? Blair had proven that his informal, personal style of highlevel diplomacy worked, that he didn't need the foreing office to tell him what to do and that the concept of humanitarian intervention was working.

And then the September 11 attacks happened, and Blair lost control. A new president in power in the US, one determined not just to destroy those who had attacked America, but also to use September 11 as an excuse for a grand restructuring of the Middle East meant Blair could no longer be in the driving seat of international politics. Already during the War on Afghanistan things began to turn sour: while the NATO members had unanimously declared to support the US in its fight, Bush largely spurned their help, not involving them in the war planning, while even the British were largely ignored.

But it was with the War on Iraq rhat things really got worse. In the buildup to the war, Blair had set himself two tasks: to support Bush while moderating his stance and to convince skeptical powers like Russia, Germany and France to as well as public opinion in Britain, to if not actively support the war at least not to oppose it. In both he failed. The US and UK launched their war without getting explicit UN approval, with large scale opposition to the war both home and abroad. From there on the story is wellknown; it ends with Blair a failure as prime minister, all his accomplishments overshadowed by the fact that he led his country into an illegal, immoral, unwinnable war.

Kampfner is convincing in setting out the reasons why Blair did what he did, showing how his thoughts on war and intervention changed over the years, how he was seduced by the glamour of being more than just the prime minister of a middle ranking country, but an international statesman (not for nought has he taken a job as meditator in the Israel/Palestinian conflict as his new career). He also makes clear how Blair's weaknesses as a leader: his reliance on a small group of trusted advisor, his belief in being able to convince opponents of his views through sheer personal will and charm, his frankly weak grasp of the realities of international politics, helped shape the road to Iraq. It was his ego that brought him to think he could get Bush to moderate his stance and get the international community on board, his desire to be the great statesman that made him lead his country into the Iraq War.

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