|
By The Hill Editors
|
|
Posted: 07/31/07 07:32 PM [ET] |
Critics of President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq frequently have suggested it represented a piece of go-it-alone aggression and was a token of his unwise readiness to defy international opinion.
The administration, for its part, has sought to depict its role as that of the leader of a broad and impressive “coalition of the willing” of 48 countries.
Both sides have overstated their cases. The administration made much of substantively irrelevant contributions from diminutive Pacific nations and other statelets of which relatively few people had even heard. Tonga, for example, sent 45 troops to help in the invasion of Iraq, and since has withdrawn them. Iceland sent two.
But the critics did as much violence to reality. There were and are allies who have contributed sustained and substantive forces to the war in Iraq. Poland, for example, contributed 2,500 personnel to the invasion and has reduced the number mainly because of financial considerations rather than a lack of commitment to the war’s purposes.
The most important ally in Bush’s fight against global Islamist terrorism has been Britain. Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain sent 45,000 troops to join American forces in toppling Saddam Hussein, and still has some 5,500 personnel in Iraq today.
Now, Blair is gone. His successor, Gordon Brown, who has just wrapped up his first meeting with Bush since becoming prime minister, is a leader of a very different stripe. Whereas Blair wore his principles on his sleeve and was possessed of a sort of messianic certainty about policies in which he believed, Brown is more calculating and pragmatic, more likely to think of public opinion than of anything so highfalutin as his role in a historical combat of good against evil.
There is little doubt, with the great majority of Britons opposed to the war and heartily contemptuous of Bush, that Brown will temper his government’s rhetorical support of Washington. But his pragmatism ensured that during 10 years in Blair’s government he shed some of his hoary old left-wing prejudices. And his pragmatism, similarly, will recognize that a strong Anglo-American relationship is based on shared interests and mutual advantage.
B
rown made some of the right noises while visiting Bush at Camp David, but his roots, temperament and electoral base will not allow him to match Blair as an outspoken ally of the committed conservative, crusading president. That is not all bad.
It doesn’t mean the relationship is broken. Rather it means that Britain, like the GOP on Capitol Hill, is adjusting to the realities of Bush’s low popularity and waning tenure.
|
