For Tony Blair it was a poignant, even painful, coincidence. Britain’s former prime minister was at an international donors’ conference in Paris this week, passing round the hat for the Palestinians in his role as Middle East mediator. In a small, unremarkable ceremony 2,000-odd miles away in Iraq, British troops were bidding farewell to Basra.
Iraq, as far as Britain is concerned, is a lost war. Mr Blair’s premiership was one of its many casualties. Perhaps that explains why the former prime minister is not ready to give up on a Middle East peace deal.
To Mr Blair’s mind removing Saddam Hussein and a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians were always connected. A thousand stories have been written as to why he went to war beside George W. Bush in 2003. Nine hundred and ninety nine of them – variations on the theme of calculated deception about weapons of mass destruction or blind obeisance to the White House – are wrong. Mr Blair really did believe that regime change in Baghdad was the start of an enterprise to remake the region in the image of peace and democracy.
Iraq is long beyond his influence. Gordon Brown, his successor in 10 Downing Street, gave the order for this week’s handover to Iraqi forces in southern Iraq. A couple of thousand troops will remain for a time at Basra airport, but the British occupation is over. In truth, Mr Blair would have had to make the same decision had he still been in office. There was nothing more, his generals would have told him, that they could do.
The mission of the British forces was to provide the security and space for pluralist politics. Instead, while the newly formed Iraqi army holds some sway, power has largely been ceded to the Shia militias that emerged from the chaos of the 2003 war. A rough-and-ready stability long ago replaced western-style democracy as the best achievable objective.
To make that point is not to deny the resourcefulness or gallantry of the British soldiers. Once the US had allowed the rest of Iraq to descend into anarchy after the 2003 invasion, there were never enough British troops to keep order let alone to build a new economic and political infrastructure. As early as 2004 I heard a British general concede that the initial ambitions, always overblown, were beyond reach.
Elsewhere in Iraq, the situation is said to be better. As the British withdrawal has accelerated, the so-called surge in American forces seems to have staunched the worst of the bloodshed. Al-Qaeda has been weakened, refugees are returning to Baghdad. There is a certain mood of optimism in Washington.
I hope it is justified. Too many people seem to have allowed their dislike of Mr Bush to cause them to delight at the carnage in Iraq. Better the US be vilified than anything done by the president be seen to work. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the invasion, no one, least of all the Iraqis, gains from the chaos and bloodshed. That said, the present relative stability may owe more to the deals and compromises the US has made with Sunni tribal leaders than to any self-sustaining improvement. There is little sign of national political reconciliation.
Back in 2003, Mr Blair thought victory in Iraq would be followed by peace-making in Palestine. Though he probably would have backed Mr Bush anyway, if there was a price extracted for committing British troops it was agreement from the White House to restart a Middle East peace process. The promise was never kept. With the British prime minister at his shoulder, the US president would often pledge a new push for peace. Once or twice, as when Mr Bush publicly endorsed a two-state solution, the initiative seemed to mean something. But nothing much happened.
That seems to have changed. Last month’s Annapolis conference was not quite the abject failure that many, including this writer, had feared. The donors who gathered in Paris agreed to provide the Palestinians with $7bn in aid over the next three years. A process has been established for regular negotiation between the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, will oversee the talks. Mr Bush, still casting around for a legacy, will soon make his first presidential visit to the Middle East.
So you might say Mr Blair has been vindicated. Well, not quite. The road to Jerusalem does not, as he expected, run through Baghdad but through Tehran. Beyond the chaos inside Iraq, the biggest single effect of the 2003 invasion has been the empowerment of a hostile regime in Iran.
Fear of Iran more than anything else persuaded the region’s Arab governments to turn up at Annapolis and to back the latest peace effort. Tehran’s regional ambitions have also convinced some in Israel that there is a more dangerous enemy than the Palestinians. Above all, perhaps, Iran’s rise has shown the White House that malign neglect of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer an option.
In the Middle East you take the chances from wherever they come. Mr Blair, ever the optimist, wants to reconnect events on the ground in Palestine with progress towards a two-state agreement. Mr Abbas gets the financial help he needs to restore security; a safer Israel relaxes its stranglehold over the West Bank; Palestinians reap the rewards of peace in a reviving economy. All this in turn provides the Palestinian and Israeli leaders with political space to negotiate a final settlement.
That is the theory. Two things are missing. For all its recent engagement the US administration has yet to show it can be even-handed in insisting that Israel as well as the Palestinians meets its obligations. Mr Olmert must be told he cannot negotiate peace while continuing to build Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
Nor can negotiations progress as if the Hamas-controlled Gaza simply does not exist. Israel will not make peace in the West Bank while fighting a war in Gaza. At some point moderate Palestinian Islamists will have to be brought into negotiations. The present strategy of exclusion seems more likely to strengthen the extremists than disarm them. To be durable any peace must be inclusive.
Mr Blair is not giving up. He divides his time between his mediating role and lucrative (though, I am told, rather lacklustre) speeches. He is writing his memoir. Sometimes I suspect that his determination to remain in the limelight speaks to hubristic self-belief; sometimes I wonder whether it is not an act of contrition for Iraq. But we spend too much time trying to discern motives. If he were to defy the odds and succeed who would care why?
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