Tony Blair - Prisoner Of
War
By Greg
Palast
7-16-3
'Here, boy! Sit! Here y'go! Good boy!'
Poor
George Bush. All week he's been practicing his lines for presenting Tony
Blair with a special medallion for his services to the USA when the
British Prime Minister arrives in Washington tomorrow. Unfortunately for
Bush, Mr. Blair's handlers realized what joy it would bring to England's
political cartoonists for the President to hang a gilded collar around the
man now known as 'Bush's poodle,' a nasty, if wholly justified,
sobriquet.
Blair is in the doghouse with his own Labour Party for
having been caught in a fib. Seems the Brits have their knickers in a
twist about their leader's ludicrous fabrication of evidence that Saddam
Hussein had jars of bad bugs, piles of atomic mud and an evil chemistry
set in his basement capable of wiping away London. I've just read a
Parliamentary report in which Blair's own minister calls his boss' claims
about the bogus Weapons of Mass Destruction, 'a bunch of Horlicks.' The
phrase defies translation, but you get the idea. So does Tony � which is
why England's bookies are giving 2-to-9 odds Blair will ask our president
for political asylum.
To Americans, the English Parliament's bad
attitude is a mystery. After all, our own President repeated Blair's goofy
allegations that Saddam was buying nuclear bomb fixings from Africa --
among other WMD howlers and whoppers. But in America, if you believe Fox
TV, only whiners, traitors and the last three Democrats had some kind of
problem with official mendacity. In fact, that's why Blair was supposed to
get the medal. Hell, anyone can go to war based on the facts; it takes a
true ally like Mr. Tony to send kids into gunfire based on a packet of
fictions.
How did Blair get into this fix? The answer is, he can't
help himself: Blair's an Ameriphiliac. I watched the Prime Minister's mad
affection for all things American while working for BBC and the
Guardian/Observer in London, a Yank in King Tony's court. Over the past
six years of his administration, I've seen his puppy love for Bill Clinton
degenerate into pathetic poodledom at the heel of George Bush. His need to
pad along behind Bush is the result of the strange pathologic politics
that Blair calls, 'modernization.' Blair, you see, hates
Britain.
This Prime Minister despises his storybook countryside and
its grumbling farmers with their two little pigs and their tiny fields
edged with dry stone. He cringes at the little bell ringing over the door
of the village post office - so quaint and so maddeningly inefficient. He
cannot fathom a nation that weeps when he shuts the last filthy coal
pits.
Blair is frustrated to tears by what he sees as fossilized
trade unions which chain workers to dead industries, rather than building
new ones. Britain's Prime Minister dreams of birthing the Entrepreneurial
State. Instead, he finds himself caretaker of a museum of
nineteenth-century glories made somnolent by easy welfare and low
ambitions.
So Tony gazes across the water with almost erotic envy
at a thoroughly 'modernized' America Inc., where Wal-Marts and McDonald's
and Microsoft roam free, creating a shiny New Economic Order.
I saw
Blair's America-mania up close and inside in 1998 when I went undercover
to investigate US corporate influence on his government for the Observer,
the Guardian's Sunday paper. Working out of an expensive hotel suite
overlooking the Tower of London, my confederates and I pretended to
represent Blair's favorite American corporation, a Texas company called,
'Enron.' We wanted to find out how much it would cost in 'consulting fees'
to overturn England's environmental laws for the benefit of our US
client.
It turns out the price for bending the rules for Enron
would be ludicrously low. Blair's ministers and cronies were selling
policy changes dirt cheap because they knew that Tony, like an amateur
hooker, was giving it away for free. While I was pretending to get Blair
to change energy policy rules for Enron, I discovered the real Enron was
doing the same thing. The sleazy Houston power pirates successfully talked
Blair, for example, into reversing his sworn campaign pledge not to let
American companies build proposed electricity plants on English soil. It
was no wonder that, one of Blair's closest advisors, after he weighed my
checkbook, had no hesitation calling me from 10 Downing Street to invite
me in. When it came to Enron and other handsome 'modern' American
corporations, he knew his boss Mr. Blair just could not say,
'no.'
From faith in Enron to faith in Enron's President is a short
lover's leap. In January 2000, just before George Bush's inauguration,
Rupert Murdoch's lobbyist warned the prime minister that for Blair to
satisfy his lust for corporate America's affection, Britain must accede as
well to the new US president's military mission.
Blair's decision
to take that advice looked pretty good just after September 11, when
tail-gunner Tony jumped into Bush's cockpit to avenge in Afghanistan the
attacks on the USA. British sympathy for America was deep, sincere and
wide � the one minute of silence for the World Trade Center victims was
better observed in London than in New York. But joining in the conquest of
Iraq has made Blair a prisoner of Bush's warmongering. Parliamentarians
must now decide if their prime minister is a fraud or just a
fool.
So Blair's one subtle act of independence is to refuse the
award of Congress's golden collar. But Bush is hardly likely to let Tony
off the leash.
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times
bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Contact Palast or view his
reports for BBC television and Britain's Guardian newspapers at www.GregPalast.com
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