A POLITICALLY ‘sick’ Prime Minister Blair was yesterday delivered another major blow, this time at the hands of the US State Department, when a leading Department advisor declared that Bush had taken Blair for a ride, and that this is what the so-called special relationship between the US and the UK amounted to.
What was special about the relationship was that the US administration made demands, the UK delivered, but with nothing to show in return for delivering what the US wanted.
This coup de grace for the poseur Blair was delivered by Kendel Myers, a leading State Department advisor, who publicly nailed Blair while giving a public lecture at a prestigious US university on ‘How special is the United States – United Kingdom relationship after Iraq?’
Myers asserted that right from the start of this relationship, called ‘special’ by Churchill in 1946, it had been ‘very one-sided’.
In Myers’ words: ‘There never really has been a special relationship, or at least not one we’ve noticed.’
He added that the Blairite notion of Britain as a trans-Atlantic bridge between the US and Europe is ‘redundant’ and ‘is vanishing before our eyes’.
As a result of the way that Bush had used Blair and effectively destroyed any reputation the Prime Minister may have had, Myers’ fear was that ‘Britain will draw back from the US without moving closer to Europe. In that sense London Bridge is falling down.’
Myers however contrasted Blair most unfavourably with his Labour predecessor Wilson.
He said that Wilson gave the most pro-American verbal support possible during the Vietnam war, while taking the greatest care that Britain never got involved.
Myers states that the reason why Blair made the catastrophic mistake that Wilson avoided was that ‘Unfortunately, Tony Blair’s background was as an actor and not a historian.
‘If only he had read a book on the 1920s he might have hesitated.’
While we are prepared to believe that the ‘actor’ Blair never read a book about Britain’s experiences in Mesopotamia in the 1920s when thousands of British troops were killed fighting Iraqi nationalists, we are convinced that if he had it would not have made the slightest difference to British policy.
The issue really is that the ‘special relationship’ was only discovered by Winston Churchill at a time when British imperialism could no longer stand alone against capitalist rivals such as Germany and Japan and desperately needed the support of the United States.
Churchill’s entire policy in relation to the US was to draw it into the war with Germany. He worked at it night and day. This was what was special about this relationship. It was a one-sided love affair.
After the Second World War the relationship was not so special, as was illustrated when the US, under President Eisenhower, intervened in the Suez crisis to stop the UK, France and Israel attack on Egypt after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
This antagonism was continued in the period of the Wilson governments. Britain was at that time still a considerable industrial and military power and Wilson was able to get away with refusing to send British military personnel into the Vietnam war.
Today, Britain has been de-industrialised, and does not even have the military strength that it had at the time of the 1982 Falklands war.
It is this shrinking of the one-time imperialist giant into a midget that fits Britain for only one role – that of a scavenger for US imperialism.
Even if the rewards are little or non-existent, capitalist Britain can play no other role in the modern world. Cameron will be no different from Blair in this respect.
The only way out of the degrading role that the historical crisis of British imperialism has condemned it to play is through the organisation of a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism and imperialism in Britain, as part of the European and World Socialist revolution.
