Having supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq three years ago as the necessary price for preserving British political influence in Washington, Tony Blair has repeated the exercise with Israel's war against Lebanon. Along with the US, Britain has resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire and supported Israel's right of self-defence against Hizbullah rocket attacks from Lebanon.
Yesterday he fended off criticisms from within his Labour Party and by diplomats that he has locked his government into an unbalanced position on the war and further reinforced international perceptions that he has sacrificed British interests to preserve a spurious influence over US policy. There is widespread despair over this policy stance within his party, his political critics say. Mr Blair acknowledged their concerns, but insisted that he represents mainstream opinion about the conflict. As always, Mr Blair is good on his feet and well able to turn public criticism around. But his charm is wearing increasingly thin and his responses are less and less plausible.
Scathing comments by former British diplomats bear out the impression. They were exemplified in this assessment published yesterday by a former UK ambassador to Moscow and head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who called on Mr Blair to go at once: "Stiff in opinions, but often in the wrong, he has manipulated public opinion, sent our soldiers into distant lands for ill-conceived purposes, misused the intelligence services to serve his ends and reduced the Foreign Office to a demoralised cipher because it keeps reminding him of inconvenient facts."
Mr Blair's very hands-on approach to policy-making in this crisis has clearly antagonised the British foreign policy establishment, which traditionally has been more Arabist than pro-Israeli, and believes British interests are now affected by Mr Blair's stance. Such attitudes were borne out in remarks by the (British) United Nations deputy secretary-general, Mark Malloch Brown, who advised that the UK should take a back seat in dealing with the conflict. "It's not helpful for it again to appear to be the team that led on Iraq. This cannot be perceived as a US-UK deal with Israel."
It is advice Mr Blair has no intention of taking. But he has been willing to call for a new Anglo-American approach to the Middle East by engaging with moderates there who are willing to confront fundamentalist extremism. But the moderates have been put on the defensive precisely by Israel's maximalist and harshly disproportionate response to Hizbullah's unprovoked attack. The dust has yet to settle on this miscalculation.