WASHINGTON, March 31 (UPI) -- Three funny things happened to the world's only serious alliance on the way to Crawford, Texas, the modest ranch house where President George Bush will entertain British Prime Minister Tony Blair this week.
The first funny thing was that their meeting, which the British media has dubbed "the Iraq war council," has become a critical issue for internal British politics. Blair's Labor Party is in serious danger of mass defections in Parliament.
Senior ministers are mumbling off the record that they might have to leave the Cabinet, and the respected development Minister Clare Short is openly talking of resignation.
The latest ICM poll finds 51 percent of the British public were against stepping up military action against Iraq. For the first time since Blair was elected in 1997, there are whispers in Westminster and from Labor Party groups around the country suggesting that a stalking horse is being sought to challenge the prime minister for the party leadership, the same technique that brought down Margaret Thatcher 12 years ago.
There was another massive anti-war demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square Saturday, following the 100,000 who protested in November, and the pioneer 20,000 who first rallied against the war in October, the first demo called by the new Stop the War Coalition.
A movement without precedent since the Vietnam war seems to be building. Hardly a single university campus in Britain or a local Trades Council (where the local labor unions gather) is now without its anti-war teach-in, and the first national conference for the anti-war group leaders meets in two weeks, along with delegates from parallel organizations across Europe. Tony Benn, a former leader of the Labor Party left, claims to have pledges of a general strike once the bombing starts from 100,000 labor union members.
The second funny thing is that Margaret Thatcher has finally left public life, after publishing a final book that rails vehemently against the Europe that she did so much to build, amid heartfelt relief from much of the Conservative Party she once dominated. It is not that they see her (although some do) as the crazed aunt best left locked in the attic, but that her passions against the European Union threaten to revive the internal party divisions that have cost the Tories the last two elections.
And just as Thatcher departs, hurling curses towards Brussels while blowing kisses towards "our true friends" in Washington, a lot of British Conservatives are reading another book that takes quite the opposite view. John Nott, who was Thatcher's Minister of Defense 20 years ago as the Falklands War broke out, has just published a genuinely sensational book of memoirs, which says Reagan, and the Americans went wobbly during the Falklands War (with the exception of Casper Weinberger and the Pentagon) and the "only true allies" were the French.
Nott concludes, in words that are resonating powerfully among British Conservatives who have been mulling the prospect of ditching the European Union and embracing instead the North American Free Trade Association with the U.S. Canada and Mexico: "For those, like me, who oppose our political integration into Europe, do not imagine the United States is in some way "an alternative" to Europe. It is not."
But then comes the third funny thing that happened on the way to Crawford, which may allow Blair to finesse what is looking like a very tricky meeting. Just as vice-President Dick Cheney found on his recent Middle East trip that his Arab allies were far more determined to focus on the Israeli-Palestine crisis and the need for renewed American engagement than they were to talk about Iraq to Bush and Blair might find their 'Iraq war council' overtaken by the latest dramatic events around Ramallah, and they might be grateful for the shift in focus.
Blair has done his best. He arrives in Crawford with a dossier complied by British intelligence and double-checked with the Americans, which spells out in details the dangers of Saddam Hussein's monstrous regime and details his successes so far in assembling chemical and biological weapons, and his determination get an atomic bomb. A similar dossier on Osama bin Laden and al Qaida worked back in November, it will be recalled, when opposition to the bombing of Afghanistan began to mount ominously in Europe.
Blair's own determination to find a way to neutralize Saddam is not in question. His ability to deliver the support of a united British government, let along a united Europe, is very much in doubt. So Blair is deeply grateful to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, who appears finally to have accepted the Anglo-American proposal at the United Nations for a new regime of 'smart' sanctions against Iraq. And Blair must have breathed a sigh of relief when the Arab summit persuaded Iraq to renounce its territorial claims in Kuwait, and to agree to accept the return of UN inspectors.
Taken together, the combination of smart and sanctions and the return of UN inspectors might be just enough to fend off the threat of American attack on Iraq--or at least make it much easier to justify military action if Saddam Hussein stalls yet again. And that is just what Blair needs, to continue his uncomfortable balance between holding together both the Anglo-American alliance and his own Labor Party.
