[continued from previous message] 
  
 government in Serbia, but he failed to explain that much of the horror 
 in the Balkans at that particular moment--the destruction of cities 
 and bridges, and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees--had 
 been occasioned less by Milosevic4's army and more by the nato bombing 
 campaign that Blair himself had helped to instigate. Blair turned to 
 the old arguments about appeasement that have had an easy reception in 
 the United States over the years, ever since the publication in 1940 
 of John F. Kennedy's youthful book, When England Slept. Continuing his 
 historical exposition, Blair explained what he thought were its 
 lessons: `We have learnt twice before in this century that appeasement 
 does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will 
 have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.' 
  
 Apparently unexceptional, these Blairite sentences deserve some 
 exegesis. `Twice before'? So was the Kaiser the beneficiary of 
 appeasement in 1914, as well as Hitler in 1939? And what is this 
 reference to `blood and treasure'? What strange kind of Churchillian 
 rhetoric was Blair the actor summoning up to condemn a minor warlord 
 on Europe's eastern marches? Blair went on to call for `a new Marshall 
 Plan' for the Balkans, evoking the memory of the conditional us loans 
 to Europe at the start of the Cold War, and well aware that Britain 
 could not afford to run a new empire on its own. The British 
 operations in the Balkans were not cheap, as Jack Straw revealed to 
 the audience at the Foreign Policy Centre in March 2002: `Sorting out 
 Bosnia cost the British taxpayer at least #1.5 billion, Kosovo cost 
 #200 million.' Britain needed `blood and treasure'--troops and 
 money--from the Americans if the Kosovo war was to be won, and if the 
 wider imperial revival was to be pursued. This was something that 
 President Clinton was little inclined to provide. Only in the era of 
 George W. Bush, and after 9/11, did the Americans begin listening to 
 Blair's imperial message. 
  
 In the Chicago speech, Blair outlined a five-point, non-negotiable 
 ultimatum to Serbia, which had shades of the ultimatum issued to the 
 same country by Franz Joseph nearly ninety years earlier: a cessation 
 of hostilities; withdrawal from the contested region; the deployment 
 of an international military force; the return of refugees and 
 unimpeded access for humanitarian aid; and the establishment of a 
 political framework imposed from outside. This was to become the 
 pattern for future imperial interventions, soon followed in Sierra 
 Leone, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. He also outlined five 
 considerations that should govern the workings of this new 
 interventionist imperialism. Imperial aggressors in future would need 
 to be sure of their case; exhaust the diplomatic options; ensure that 
 military operations were sensible and prudent; plan for the long term; 
 and prove that their national interests were at stake. 
  
 As the years went by, and 9/11 provided an excuse to elaborate on this 
 interventionist programme and to proselytise in favour of it, Blair 
 grew ever more confident, and more outrageous in his evocation of 
 history. In his constituency of Sedgefield in March 2004, he spoke 
 about the evolution of his thinking: `Before September 11, I was 
 already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations 
 from a traditional one that has held sway since the Treaty of 
 Westphalia in 1648.' That treaty, Blair found it necessary to inform 
 the good burghers of Sedgefield, had established the doctrine of 
 non-intervention in the affairs of other states, a basic strategy that 
 had informed British foreign policy for more than 350 years. Now it 
 was time to junk it all and to re-order the world. 9/11 was a wake-up 
 call, and Blair was the only man available to respond to its message. 
  
 Blair is wrongly characterized as the lapdog of George W. Bush. He has 
 developed into a politician with a programme of his own, and he seeks 
 to use the power of the United States to support it. During the second 
 world war, in what was still the era of Franklin Roosevelt, us 
 rhetoric was hostile to the empires of Europe, and the withholding of 
 American money in the postwar period was instrumental in accelerating 
 their collapse. Blair's aim is to reverse that policy, and persuade 
 the Americans to use their `blood and treasure' to restore the old 
 empires in a form suitable for the age of globalization. His 
 Commission for Africa, and the neo-imperialist New Partnership for 
 Africa's Development (nepad), are designed to re-introduce strategies 
 of colonial control with American support. 
  
 It is of course a pipe-dream. The clock cannot be turned back in such 
 a way. Old empires cannot be recovered or reconstructed. The citizens 
 of `Old' Europe have no great taste for war, while the United 
 States--when true to its historical record--remains isolationist at 
 heart. Blair may seek to find fame as a professor of international 
 relations, and maybe a retirement home could be found for him at the 
 Royal Institute of International Affairs, but in office he has been 
 found seriously wanting. Few British prime ministers have been so 
 inadequately prepared for government, and few have been so arrogantly 
 unaware of their failings. 
  
 It is a British tragedy that the same must be said of his ministerial 
 colleagues, skilled in nothing over nearly two decades but the shabby 
 politics of opposition and the sectarian infighting that accompanied 
 it. Their inability to prevent the Gadarene descent into war with Iraq 
 in 2003, with Blair as the most demoniacally possessed of the pigs 
 that urged their colleagues over the precipice, has led to one of the 
 greatest failures of government in recent history. Not only the prime 
 minister but his cabinet, his junior ministers, members of parliament, 
 the government bureaucracy, the security services and the so-called 
 `Rolls-Royce' foreign service have all been involved. Britain's entire 
 governing elite has been found wanting. Many of them hastened to wash 
 their hands of responsibility afterwards, but they were mostly 
 complicit at the time. The handful of honourable resignations was very 
 far from tipping the balance against the government's policy. The 
 legacy of this abysmal failure will be long-lasting, and only the 
 passing of years and the emergence of a new generation can bring 
 recovery from the national humiliation caused by Blair's war of 2003. 
  
 If and when that recovery happens, the reconstruction will take place 
 in fresh circumstances and over the ashes of the old political 
 parties; institutions of the political system that have failed to 
 represent the population. Just what caused the collapse of the ancien 
 rigime will preoccupy later historians, but even contemporary 
 observers can detect the outline of the rotting timbers at the heart 
 of these historical parties. Thatcher made the Conservative Party 
 permanently unfit for power, Blair has destroyed the Labour Party. 
 Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all continued to 
 pay lip service to their ancient tribal beliefs, but voters remember 
 neither the words nor the music of their songs. That is the legacy of 
 a disastrous quarter-century of political life, dominated by the 
 neoliberal agenda of Thatcher and the neo-imperial wars of Tony Blair. 
  
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