Blair on the defensive: Does anyone in the U.S. care?

The most interesting thing about the current British election campaign - something which seems to be making it a bit more compelling, with only four days to go till polling day – is the reemergence of the Iraq war, and Blair’s role in it, as an issue. The British media are full of stories about the run-up to the war and the questionable (at best) legality of the British government’s decision to take UK forces into battle.

The most serious charge for Blair is that he covered up a report by UK attorney general Lord Goldsmith over his concerns about the legality of invading Iraq without a second UN resolution. Among the more recent developments, as reported in The Guardian:

Labour confirmed that Mr Blair and his advisers had decided [Friday] to rush out a full version of the attorney general's interim legal advice, given 12 days before the war began, in the hope of proving it was consistent with his final advice that the war was legal.

Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion reveals the full extent of the attorney's concern about the risk of Britain being hauled before international courts which would even scrutinise allegations of war crimes by British troops.

It warns that British troops must use no more force than necessary to get Iraq to disarm. The attorney also makes it plain to Mr Blair that, in law, regime change could not be an objective of military action - a problem which did not concern the Bush administration.

His warnings to Mr Blair were not shown to the cabinet, which saw only Lord Goldsmith's later parliamentary answer, stripped of any of his earlier caveats.

Blair has been getting hammered on this issue for the past week, both by the other major political parties (including even Michael Howard’s Tories), and the mainstream media. He was booed by a TV audience in an extraordinary episode of BBC's Question Time (watch the program on the web from here). To give you a sense of just how isolated Blair is on this issue, check here for a sampling of highly critical editorials published in the past week by papers across the political spectrum, including The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Independent, and The Scotsman.

The latest embarrassment is the admission by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff, that he did not receive full legal cover from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which Britain is bound to by treaty obligation. Admiral Boyce is quoted in The Observer as saying: “If my soldiers went to jail and I did, some other people would go with me.” It’s inconceivable to imagine the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or any senior U.S. officer, currently making such a statement. Of course the U.S. does not recognize the authority of the ICC. Boyce’s statements show the gulf in conceptual thinking between the senior ranks of the UK and U.S. military. The UK apparently has internalized, at the highest military levels, a liberal-functionalist conception of a world where national sovereignty is constrained by global legal authority; the U.S. manifestly has not. It ignores or subverts international law whenever it wants, preferring to pursue a classic realist strategy emphasizing its own supreme sovereignty. (For indications of current and future U.S. views on international law, refer to the statements of Bush nominee for UN ambassador John Bolton.)

In UK-US terms, it's worth pointing out again just how little influence the U.S. media’s predominantly jaundiced, pro-Bush coverage of the whole Iraq war has had on the UK electorate, which remains profoundly more skeptical than its U.S. equivalent. But of course an equally important question for this blog is the extent to which the latest UK coverage of this issue is having any impact in the United States. The answer here, at least to date, is “no, not very much.” Coverage of the UK election has been fairly low-key in the States, and the latest trials and tribulations over Iraq have received fairly perfunctory coverage. And when the U.S. media do cover Blair’s problems, they rarely if ever make clear links to the Bush administration’s own (widely acknowledged) history of evasion and deceit on the issue. I’ll have to investigate this issue more carefully in the days leading up to the UK election itself, but my sense is that to date the U.S. media are carefully ring-fencing the whole war issue and its parallels with and applicability to President Bush’s own Iraq-related policies. By thus cordoning off the issue, any damage done to Blair will be limited to his side of the Atlantic. Even if Blair were to lose the election as a result of his war policy, the damage to Bush would be limited. This compartmentalization of the issue is in itself noteworthy, given Blair’s joined-at-the-hip alliance with Bush over Iraq. In any case Blair is not likely to lose. But his very serious problems have so far received suspiciously little media prominence in the U.S. Let’s see if this changes in the next few days.