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 according to several accounts, he had failed to get on with the us 
 vice-president, the neo-conservative Dick Cheney. He eventually 
 resigned from government over the Iraq war in 2003--Blair and his 
 American friends were happy to see him go. Jack Straw, Cook's 
 replacement, was more ignorant of foreign affairs and more pliable. He 
 stayed put at the Foreign Office without much complaint, while Blair 
 made foreign policy on the hoof, reviving Britain's imperial war 
 machine and providing old-fashioned rhetoric to match. In his 
 man-of-action mode, Blair even accused John Major of `presiding over 
 the largest reduction in our military capability since the war.' 
  
 Few people imagined in 1997 that Blair's brand of conservatism would 
 drag Britain back to the days of empire, with fresh wars of conquest 
 and new forms of colonial rule, in alliance with the sole surviving 
 superpower. No one would have guessed then that a British viceroy 
 would be sent to run Bosnia, that British generals would control parts 
 of Sierra Leone and Iraq, or that British civil servants would be 
 appointed to help with the administration of Kosovo and Afghanistan. 
 So where did this new enthusiasm for empire come from? Not even 
 Seldon's biography provides an answer to this conundrum, nor is the 
 question asked. Thatcher had never shown any interest in taking up the 
 white man's burden, and the Conservative concern for empire at the end 
 of the 20th century was largely confined to expressions of nostalgic 
 empathy with the white settlers of southern Africa. Only sections of 
 academia and of publishing were tuned into the same wavelength as 
 Blair, with right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew 
 Roberts judging that the time was right to emphasize the benevolent 
 aspects of empire. 
  
 Blair's biographers often remark on the new prime minister's 
 unfamiliarity with international affairs, and the fact that he had 
 rarely expressed himself on any foreign topic when in opposition, yet 
 fail to explain his metamorphosis into world statesman and philosopher 
 of foreign affairs. He had received informal briefings from 
 recently-retired Foreign Office mandarins when finally in sight of 
 office, but these had dealt more with the detail of Britain's 
 particular problems in Brussels or at the United Nations than with 
 some grand reformulation of Britain's role in the world. Robin Cook's 
 improbable invention of an `ethical' foreign policy, outlined in the 
 first week of power in May 1997 and swiftly forgotten, was seen as his 
 own sideshow, conducted from the Foreign Office. 
  
 Yet signs of the imperial megalomania of Blair and his coterie of 
 advisers were discernible, for those with eyes to see, as early as the 
 morning of his election. After accepting the Queen's official 
 invitation to take up the reins of government, he was driven from 
 Buckingham Palace to 10 Downing Street, and there, in a new and 
 invented ceremony, he was greeted by hundreds of supporters waving the 
 Union Jack. New Labour and its prime minister, was the message, would 
 clothe themselves in the red, white and blue of the national flag, the 
 most historically evocative symbol of Britain's imperial past. 
  
 No more powerful image of the government's intention could have been 
 constructed. The British in normal circumstances do not `do' public 
 patriotism. Not for them the tricolore on every village green and from 
 every urban balcony. Schoolchildren may be dragooned into turning out 
 for visits by the Queen or foreign dignitaries, and infrequent royal 
 anniversaries may produce a display of coloured bunting, but 
 politicians rarely swathe themselves in the national colours. With 
 their inherited complex of innate superiority, the British have never 
 felt the need to congratulate themselves publicly on their good 
 fortune to be a top nation. The Conservatives may sometimes display 
 the Union flag in their local committee rooms, yet this is more to be 
 viewed as an element of the furnishings than as a significant 
 political statement. Labour, on the other hand, though often drawing 
 on deep reserves of patriotism, notably within what were once the 
 cohorts of the organized working class, has never been demonstrative 
 in its use of national icons. May 1997 marked a sea change in the 
 party's public presentation of itself and its leader. 
  
 At the end of a century that had seen the British Empire expand to its 
 furthest limits--to the northern frontiers of Iraq at the end of the 
 first world war--and then rapidly deflate under the Conservatives in 
 the 1960s, Labour--traditionally the least imperialistic of all 
 Britain's political parties--made clear its plan to resume an imperial 
 project in the new conditions of the post-Cold War age. As the illegal 
 wars of Blair's premiership succeeded one another in subsequent years, 
 no one could complain that they had not been warned. In his excellent 
 book entitled Blair's Wars--there have been five in six years--John 
 Kampfner points out that Blair had made one particular speech during 
 the 1997 election campaign, at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, 
 that had emphasized his nationalistic leanings: `I am a British 
 patriot and I am proud to be a British patriot. I love my country. I 
 will always put the interests of my country first. The Britain in my 
 vision . . . is a Britain confident of its place in the world, sure of 
 itself, able to negotiate with the world and provide leadership in the 
 world.' This remarkably non-Labour speech, drafted by his foreign 
 affairs adviser Jonathan Powell, even included the sentence `I am 
 proud of the British Empire', though this was removed at the last 
 moment. 
  
 Blair's belief that Britain had a significant role again in the world, 
 and his messianic sense of his own importance in activating that role, 
 was first laid out to a foreign audience two years later, in the 
 speech to the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999. This was a key 
 text, and one that his advisers felt had been unduly 
 overlooked--partly because it took place in the middle of the night as 
 far as the British public was concerned--so it was virtually repeated 
 at the Labour Party conference in Brighton in October 2001, in the 
 aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. His advisers 
 thought that `an updated statement would help prepare the ground for 
 what was about to unfold shortly in Afghanistan and possibly beyond.' 
  
 In Chicago, Blair had announced `the beginnings of a new doctrine of 
 international community'. He was speaking in the middle of the nato 
 aggression against Serbia during the Kosovo campaign. This phrase was 
 a typically Blairite one of great portentousness and even greater 
 vacuity, but it was designed to signal the start of a new imperial era 
 in which he hoped that the United States and Europe would jointly 
 participate. The speech was not Blair's own; it had been drafted by 
 Lawrence Freedman, a foreign affairs groupie who had been on the 
 fringes of officialdom for many years, and professor of war studies at 
 King's College, London. The phrase `international community', however, 
 was all Blair. He had dreamt it up on the plane. 
  
 Blair also launched into his own untutored explorations of history. He 
 told his audience of fearful events taking place across the Atlantic: 
 `Unspeakable things are happening in Europe. Awful crimes that we 
 never thought we would see again have reappeared--ethnic cleansing, 
 systematic rape, mass murder.' He was talking about Milosevic4's 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)