Diplomats slam Blair on Mid-East

PM 'has influence over US policy'

Tony Blair has succeeded in influencing US President George W Bush's policy in the Middle East, a senior minister has insisted.

Mike O'Brien was responding to a letter from more than 50 former UK diplomats criticising Mr Blair's close ties with President Bush over Iraq and Israel.

The diplomats urged the PM to start influencing America's "doomed" policy in the Middle East or stop backing it.

But the minister argued: "We can influence the US."
"But we can't control a superpower. They listen to our quiet diplomacy but they also have their own policy - we influence each other."

The diplomats said they had "watched with deepening concern" as Britain followed the US lead in Iraq and Israel and called for a debate in Parliament.

They said Mr Blair had "merely waited" for the US to advance a "roadmap" for peace in the Middle East and that had raised expectations of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

But Mr O'Brien, a foreign office minister, said there were a number of areas where Mr Blair had been able to influence the US position.

Consultation?

"Certainly everyone would accept we have had some influence in encouraging President Bush to become the first US president to call for a Palestinian state independent of Israel and to support the whole road map process," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"Certainly Tony Blair has encouraged President Bush to move down that road. Indeed ... President Bush said he supported a two state solution and that's our policy too."

But Mr O'Brien said he could not comment on whether Mr Bush had consulted Mr Blair before giving his support to Israel's plan to leave Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

"That's not something I can tell you now. As far as I'm aware, there are regular conversations between Tony Blair and George W. Bush," said Mr O'Brien.

While the diplomats' letter would be taken "seriously", he said it was more a "cry of frustration that things are not going as quickly as we would all like".

No 10 responded to the letter by saying "stability, peace and freedom" remained the objective in the Middle East and Iraq.

'Difficult situation'

The attack by the 52 diplomats, including former ambassadors to Baghdad and Tel Aviv, is being seen as unprecedented in scope and scale.

The document's co-ordinator, former British ambassador to Libya Oliver Miles, said: "A number of us felt that our opinion on these two subjects, Iraq and the Arab-Israel problem, were pretty widely shared and we thought that we ought to make them public."

On Iraq he added: "We do think that through lack of planning and through a misunderstanding, a misreading of the situation, we have got ourselves into an extremely difficult situation."

The prime minister is urged to influence US policy in the Middle East as "a matter of the highest urgency".

"We feel the time has come to make our anxieties public, in the hope that they will be addressed in Parliament and will lead to a fundamental reassessment," said the letter, sent to Reuters.

' Damage'

Former foreign secretary Robin Cook said the diplomats could not be dismissed as a "bunch of Arabists".

He urged Tony Blair to meet them and listen to their concerns.

He told BBC Breakfast: "I think the fact that they have gone public reflects the fact that there is quite a consensus among many in the diplomatic community that we are in danger of doing a lot of damage to Britain's standing around the world."

Unlike the US, Britain was not a superpower, he added, and could not "go its own way".

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell told Radio 4's Today Programme the letter came from experts in their field.

"The prime minister would be well advised to read carefully what they have said and respond in a grown up fashion," he said.

Labour MP Louise Ellman, who sits on the all party parliamentary group on Israel, said: "This appears to be an organised attack on the prime minister and it does not offer a single way forward in Middle East conflict."

Downing Street rejects diplomats' challenge, casts suspicion on BBC

27 Apr 2004 by Malcolm Drury

A day after over 50 British diplomats released a letter condemning Tony Blair for blindly supporting US President "Boy" George W. Bush in his plans for US control of the Middle East and its oil resources, the Prime Minister's office has fired back with a blistering rejection of the accusation. In their letter the diplomats urged Mr Blair to start influencing what they called America's doomed policy in the Middle East or to stop backing it. They said they had "watched with deepening concern" as Britain followed the US lead in both Iraq and Israel.

Douglas Ramsbottom, a spokesman for Number 10, told reporters at a hastily-convened press conference late yesterday evening that the Prime Minister had indeed been able to influence Mr Bush's thinking in several key areas concerning the president's Middle East policy. He cited several examples, including:


Mr Blair successfully convinced Mr Bush that Argentina is not a Middle Eastern country in the generally-accepted definition of the term and therefore need not be invaded, at least not at present.


He also convinced the president, after much argument, that there is no case to be made for including Wales in the so-called axis of evil. Mr Bush continued to believe that it should so be designated until he was convinced, by being shown a school atlas, that Wales is not, as he believed, situated between Iraq and Iran. It should be noted that a representative of Plaid Cymru, while welcoming this and expressing gratitude to the Prime Minister, did want to put it on record that Wales could be pretty dangerous if it had to be.


Mr Blair persuaded the president that it would be unwise to suggest offering Norway as a homeland for the Palestinians on the grounds that the Norwegians would, in all likelihood, object, particularly if they had not first been consulted.


The PM tried to persuade his presidential colleague that a British company should be awarded a sub-contract to Halliburton to provide table napkins and those little paper salt and pepper containers to coalition troops in Iraq. Mr Bush is understood to have agreed to the napkins but stood firm that only 'good ol' US salt 'n' pepper' would be acceptable to US troops.


Mr Blair successfully dissuaded his US friend from sending Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder a parcel of "fake doggy doo-doo to teach 'em a lesson for not supporting us". Instead, the PM suggested a diplomatic response, which unfortunately was misunderstood and resulted in the French being called a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Mr Ramsbottom said that it is clear from these and other examples, which he said might be made available in a day or two, that Tony Blair has had a significant influence on Mr Bush. However, he went on note that in the view of Downing Street there was considerable doubt about the authenticity of the letter. "We checked the signatures and found that many of them appeared to be from the same hand, which we believe may be that of a former reporter at the BBC," he said, "and we've asked Lord Hutton to look into it."

Former diplomats' attack on Blair is off the Richter scale, says Cook
By Colin Brown Deputy Political Editor

28 April 2004

Robin Cook delivers a fresh and devastating blow to Tony Blair today by claiming that serving British ambassadors support the 52 former diplomats who criticised the Prime Minister over his policy on the Middle East.

The former foreign secretary's remarks will infuriate Mr Blair, whose leadership was the subject of open speculation among Labour MPs last night following the backlash among his cabinet allies over his U-turn on the EU referendum.

Mr Cook, writing in The Independent, says it is inconceivable that agreement on a common text could have been reached among the former diplomats "without widespread sympathy for their views among the ambassadors who have replaced them".

Underlining the unprecedented importance of their letter, Mr Cook adds: "By the standards of diplomatic communiqués, their statement is off the Richter scale."

Mr Blair will defend his position today at Prime Minister's Questions, but Labour backbench MPs were saying privately that the diplomats had delivered a devastating blow to Mr Blair's authority, already damaged by his U-turn on the EU constitution. Mr Blair suffered more criticism yesterday after announcing a review of immigration policy, which was seen as an admission that previous initiatives had failed.

Mr Blair criticised the former diplomats for being unbalanced in their criticism of his support for President George Bush and the deal with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, which critics say will tear up the Middle East road map.

Following talks in Downing Street with his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi, Mr Blair acknowledged the "frustration" of the former diplomats over the Middle East. However, he said the coalition had to ensure Iraq did not fall into the hands of "fanatics and terrorists" - language dismissed as "neither convincing nor helpful" by the former diplomats in their letter.

The former envoys said that if Britain was unable to exert "real influence" on the US administration, it should abandon its support policies which were "doomed to failure".

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, warned against attempts to drive a wedge between London and Washington. He told BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show: "It is very important for us to try to work with the United States and not to have a polarisation that would weaken our influence and weaken the influence of Europe."

Labour MPs said the Foreign Office shared the view of some of the former diplomats. One former minister close to Mr Blair said the diplomats had complained that Downing Street had seized control of foreign policy from the Foreign Office.

Left-wing Labour MPs who backed the former diplomats predicted last night that Mr Blair would step down before the general election. Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the Campaign Group, said: "I think Blair is ready to go. He looks increasingly out of sorts. It is past the time when Blair should recognise foreign policy should not be decided in the West Wing." Three of Mr Blair's former allies, including Peter Mandelson, who wrote a joint article in The Guardian yesterday, are privately pressing for Mr Blair to reassert his leadership on Europe in the European elections.

One former Labour minister said: "I think Tony recognises that a lot needs to be done. We need to get a grip organisationally, within the Labour Party and outside, to sort out how we are going to match the anti-European campaign. We need to re-establish a body like Britain in Europe to run the "yes" campaign for the constitution, and we need to do that now."

Labour MPs will express their support for the former ambassadors' letter tomorrow. A clutch of Labour MPs will back the former ambassadors' call for a change of direction and urge Tony Blair to make it clear he does not back Mr Sharon's plan for the Middle East.

Richard Burden, the chair of the All Party Britain-Palestine Parliamentary Group, said Mr Blair would be advised to listen to the former ambassadors who are "very serious people" who have "a great deal of experience in the Middle East". A total of 108 MPs have signed Mr Burden's parliamentary motion voicing "strong concerns" over Mr Bush's endorsement of Mr Sharon's plans.

Joan Ruddock, the Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford, said the former ambassadors were reflecting concerns of a huge number of Labour backbenchers. "I hope that the Prime Minister recognises that these sentiments are very widely held in the Parliamentary Labour Party," she said.