Neo-Conned. How Blair Took New Labour for a Ride.

The Independent, 27 June 2007

An edited excerpt from Black Mass.

Neo-conservatism is not the most recent variety of conservatism. It is a new type of politics that can emerge at any point on the political spectrum. In Britain, neo-conservatism's political vehicle was not the Conservative Party but the new party that Blair created when he seized the Labour leadership.

The single most important fact in Blair's rise to power was Thatcher's new settlement. Both in economic and political terms it was an established fact, but while this was an index of Thatcher's achievement it was also a source of weakness for the Conservatives.

Thatcher often declared that she aimed to destroy socialism in Britain. She never paused to consider what would be the effect on her party if she succeeded. For much of the 20th century the Conservatives acted as a brake on collectivism. The Conservative Party existed to oppose not just socialism but also - and more relevantly - any further advance towards social democracy. By dismantling the Labour settlement, Thatcher removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative Party. Without a clearly defined enemy it lacked an identity. Labour had never been a doctrinaire socialist party - as Harold Wilson remarked, it had always owed more to Methodism than to Marx - but by identifying New Labour with the market, Blair was able to deprive the Conservatives of the threat that had defined them for generations. As a result they were mired in confusion for nearly a decade.

While Blair's embrace of neo-liberal economic policies was a strategic decision, it soon acquired an ideological rationale. More conventional in his thinking about domestic issues than most politicians, and having an even shorter historical memory, Blair embraced without question the neo-liberal belief that only one economic system can deliver prosperity in a late modern context. Modernisation became the Blairite mantra, and for Blair it meant something precise: the reorganisation of society around the imperatives of the free market.

When he was still in opposition, Blair curried support from disillusioned Conservatives by representing himself as a One Nation Tory - a progressive conservative who accepted the central role of the market but also understood the importance of social cohesion. Once in power it was clear Blair came not to bury Thatcher but to continue her work.

Blair's One Nation Toryism was like his fabled Third Way, a political marketing tool. The Third Way originated in Bill Clinton's practice of "triangulation" - a tactic invented in the mid-1990s by Clinton's adviser Dick Morris, which involved Clinton setting himself up as a more pragmatic alternative to both parties in Congress. Adopting the same tactic, Blair attacked his own party as much as the Conservatives. His successful campaign to remove Clause Four (which mandated common ownership of the means of production) from the Labour constitution in 1995 was a symbolic act rather than a policy shift. At the same time it was a marker for larger challenges to Labour's social-democratic inheritance. Blair carried on the agenda of privatisation that had developed from Thatcher's original programme into core areas of the state such as sections of the justice system and prison service, and inserted market mechanisms into the NHS and the schooling system.

In these respects Blair did no more than consolidate Thatcherism, but he did not change British society in the way Thatcher did. His chief impact has been on his own party. New Labour was constructed to bury the past and in this, if in nothing else, it succeeded. It began as a coup masterminded by a handful of people - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and others - who aimed to rebuild the party as an instrument for securing power.

New Labour was a purpose-built construction with few links to the political tradition that preceded it. If it displayed any continuity with the past it was with the Social Democratic Party that had split from Labour in the Eighties, but unlike the Social Democrats, New Labour grasped that issues of strategy and organisation are more important than questions of policy. New Labour's first priority was to restructure the party as a centralised institution. Power had to be concentrated before anything else could be done. New Labour always had a Leninist aspect, but it was a Leninism that focused on reshaping the image of the party. If New Labour was "modern" in its acceptance of the free market, it was "postmodern" in its conviction that power is exercised by changing the way society is perceived.

Blair's most prominent talents were his skill in using the techniques of public relations and his sensitivity to the public mood. These traits have led some observers to the view that he is an opportunist with no underlying convictions. It is true that there has never been anything like a Blairite ideology, but that does not mean Blair has no beliefs.

His career in politics is testimony to the power of neo-conservative ideas, which guided his most fateful decisions. Blair was a neo-liberal by default, but a neo-conservative by conviction. Neo-conservatism diverges from neo-liberalism at crucial points, and it is specifically neo-conservative beliefs that shaped Blair's view of the world. Unlike neo-liberals, neo-conservatives do not aim to return to an imaginary era of minimum government. They perceive that the social effects of free markets are not all benign and look to government to promote the virtues the free market neglects.

Blair has always been a strong advocate of "law and order", and made this a theme when he served as shadow Home Secretary under Labour leader John Smith. In part this was a strategic move to wrest the territory from the Conservatives, but it also matched his instincts.
Neo-conservatives may not always be admirers of Victorian values - some (including Blair) have seen themselves as having liberal views on personal morality - but they reject the view that the state can be morally neutral. Government must act to promote the good life, which involves accepting the need for discipline and punishment. It also means promoting religion. Unlike neo-liberals, who are usually secular in outlook, neo-conservatives view religion as a vital source of social cohesion - a view expressed in Blair's support for faith schools.

Above all, neo-conservatives are unwilling to rely on social evolution. Commonly more intelligent than neo-liberals, they understand that while capitalism is a revolutionary force that overturns established social structures and topples regimes, this does not happen by itself - state power and sometimes military force are needed to expedite the process. In its enthusiasm for revolutionary change, neo-conservatism has more in common with Jacobinism and Leninism than with neo-liberalism or traditional conservatism. The common view of Blair as a crypto-Tory could not be more mistaken. There is no trace in him of the scepticism about progress voiced by Tories such as Disraeli. Nor is he simply another neo-liberal prophet of the free market. He is an American neo-conservative and has been throughout most of his political life.

It is in international relations that neo-conservatism shaped Blair most deeply. Whatever he may have wished his inheritance to be - British entry into the single European currency, perhaps - he will be remembered for taking the UK into a ruinous war. His part in the Iraq War destroyed him as a politician, and he cannot have wanted this result. It would be a mistake to imagine that he was as committed at the beginning of this ill-conceived venture as he later came to be; he made errors of judgement at every stage. At the same time, his support for the war expressed his most basic beliefs.

From one point of view it was a misjudged exercise in realpolitik. Like other British prime ministers, Blair feared the consequence of opposing US policies and was prey to the conceit that by being America's unswerving ally Britain could help shape its behaviour in the international system. Anthony Eden's attempt to topple the Egyptian president Nasser and reassert British control of the Suez Canal in 1956 destroyed his political career and underlined the risks of any British leader opposing American power. Later prime ministers successfully distanced themselves from American policies - most notably Harold Wilson, who wisely declined to send troops to support the Americans in Vietnam - but Blair was insistent that Britain must give the US full support. He feared the impact on the international system if the US acted alone and saw an opportunity for Britain to "punch above its weight" by acting as the bridge between America and Europe.

In fact, the war left the transatlantic divide wider than at any time since the Second World War, with British opinion alienated from the US, and Britain at the same time more at odds with Europe even than in Thatcher's time. But it was not only a misguided attempt at higher strategy, and there can be no doubt that Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam chimed with Blair's convictions. Saddam was a tyrant who represented a stage in human history whose time had passed. A new international order was under construction with America in the lead, and Blair wanted to be at the forefront of this project. As John Kampfner has written, "Blair was not dragged into war with Iraq. He was at ease with himself and his own beliefs."

What were those beliefs? In a span of six years, Blair took Britain into war five times. He sanctioned air strikes against Saddam Hussein in 1998, the Kosovo war in 1999, British military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000, the war in Afghanistan in 2002, and Iraq in 2003. He dispatched further contingents of British troops to Afghanistan in 2006 when US forces were run down in the country. There is a strong strand of continuity in these decisions. Blair believes in the power of force to ensure the triumph of the good. From this point of view, the attack on Iraq was a continuation of policies in the Balkans and Afghanistan. In each case war was justified as a form of humanitarian intervention. This may have had some force in the Balkans and Sierra Leone. It was dubious in Afghanistan and duplicitous in Iraq.

Blair justified these military involvements in terms of a "doctrine of international community", which he presented in a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999. Blair's new doctrine rested on the belief that state sovereignty could no longer survive in an interdependent world: "We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction the doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour. Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community - the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self-interest - is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo."

Blair's speech reflects the unreal intellectual climate of the time. In the Nineties, it was fashionable to maintain that the world had moved into a "post-Westphalian" era - so called after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which is often seen as marking the point at which the modern state was recognised in law. This system had ended in the post-Cold War period, it was believed: state sovereignty was no longer at the centre of the international system, which was governed by global institutions. In fact the sovereign state was as strong as it had ever been, and its seeming decline was a by-product of the interval after the end of the Cold War in which the US seemed able to act without restraint from other powers. The interval was destined to be brief.
China and India were emerging as great powers whose interests diverge at important points but which are at one in rejecting any system based on American hegemony. In the Nineties, as in the past, several great powers were interacting in a mix of rivalry and co-operation. In many ways this was a re-run of the late 19th century with different players.

The idea that the sovereign state is on the way out was nonsense, but it served Blair well. In the first place, it matched his view of the world in which human development is seen as a series of stages, each better than the last. This is a Whiggish variant of the belief in providence to which Blair subscribed as part of his Christian worldview.

It would be unwise to take too seriously Blair's claim to have been inspired by the Quaker philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976) - a Christian communitarian thinker who developed from the British Idealist tradition and argued for a positive understanding of freedom as a part of the common good. To a greater extent than for most politicians, Blair's view of the world was formed by the conventional beliefs of the day. He never doubted that globalisation was creating a worldwide market economy that must eventually be complemented by global democracy. When he talked of the necessity for continuing "economic reform" - as he often did - he took for granted that this meant further privatisation and the injection of market mechanisms into public services. The incessant "modernisation" he demanded was, in effect, an ossified version of the ideas of the late Eighties. Like Thatcher - with whom he has very little else in common - Blair lacked scepticism. For him, the clichés of the hour have always been eternal verities.

As with George W Bush, however, there is no reason to doubt the reality of Blair's faith. Like Bush, Blair thinks of international relations in terms derived from theology. To be sure, this is not the theology of Augustine or Aquinas. It failed to persuade Pope John Paul II when Blair had an audience with him in late February 2003.

Medieval Christian thinkers developed a rigorous theory of the conditions that must be satisfied before a war can be considered just, and the pontiff rightly believed they had not been met. The audience must have pained Blair, but it failed to shake his sense of rectitude. It was enough that he felt he was right. The scrupulous casuistry of medieval thinkers regarding the consequences of human action was of no interest.

Good intentions are what matter and they are bound in the end to prevail. And yet these same "good intentions" were promoted through ill-conceived and ideologically motivated policies, whose distance from any prudent assessment of facts he seemed unable to perceive.
The idea that the international system was moving towards global governance expanded the traditional purposes of war. The "international community" could take military action whenever it was morally right to do so. Not only "rogue states" that threatened the international system by developing weapons of mass destruction, but also states that violated the human rights of their citizens should be the target of armed force. The aim was not just to neutralise threats - even pre-emptively. It was to improve the human condition. War was no longer a last resort against the worst evils but an instrument of human progress. In his speech in Chicago, Blair acknowledged that military action should be taken only when diplomacy had failed, and then only if it had a reasonable prospect of achieving its goals.

Nevertheless, he dismissed the views of those - many of them in the professional military in the UK and the US - who demanded that an exit strategy be identified before military intervention could be seriously contemplated. For Blair, their caution smacked of defeatism. "Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider," he declared.

Later speeches show Blair accepting that military force alone cannot bring about the radical transformation in the international system to which he is committed. Addressing the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles in August 2006, Blair declared that the struggle against terrorism "is one about values". He was reticent in specifying what these values might be; but whatever they were, he had no doubt they spearheaded human advance: "Our values are worth struggling for. They represent humanity's progress throughout the ages and at each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again."
Blair returned to the subject in January 2007, when he opined: "Terrorism destroys progress. Terrorism can't be defeated by military means alone. But it can't be defeated without it."
Lying behind Blair's view of international relations is a view of America. Along with his fellow neo-conservatives in Washington, Blair regards America as the paradigm of a modern society. Propelled by the momentum of history, it is invincible. In giving his backing to the Bush administration in Iraq, Blair was able to believe that he was aiding the cause of human progress while having the consoling sense of being on the side of the big battalions. Blair's faith in American invincibility was misguided. America's defeat by the Iraqi insurgency was in no way unexpected. The French were driven from Algeria despite prosecuting the war with extreme ruthlessness and being backed by over a million French settlers. In conditions more like those the American forces faced in Iraq, the Soviets had also been driven from Afghanistan. The lesson of asymmetric warfare - where the militarily weak use unorthodox tactics against the seemingly overwhelmingly strong - is that the weak have the winning hand.

If Blair failed to heed these lessons, the reason was partly ignorance. A politician who has unusual intuitive gifts in divining the British public mood, he lacked the knowledge necessary to make well-founded judgements in international contexts. His record of success in domestic politics was based on banishing the past. He was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually, he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes. History was significant only as a record of human advance. To turn to it to chasten current ambitions was unthinkable, even immoral. Like Bush, Blair viewed history as the unfolding of a providential design, and a feature of their view is that the design is visible to the faithful. Others may be blind to the unfolding pattern, and in that case they may have to be guided. In Augustinian terms this is unacceptable, for only God can know the design of history. Here Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.

Deception has been integral at every stage of the Iraq War. [Let us] consider some of the key episodes of disinformation that enabled British involvement in the war. In the run-up to the invasion, Blair always insisted publicly that its goal was not regime change - which he knew to be legally unacceptable as a ground for attacking the country - but the threat posed by Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. A document was circulated titled "Iraq's Programme of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government" (published on 24 September 2002 under the title "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government"). The document - which came to be known as the "dodgy dossier" - claimed to be an authoritative statement based on intelligence concerning Iraq's capabilities and intentions regarding WMD; but it contradicted earlier intelligence assessments. In March 2002, a report to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which brings together information from all of the UK's intelligence services, concluded that there was "no evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991 after the Gulf War". Moreover, while the dossier claimed to be based on intelligence sources, 90 per cent of it was copied from three published articles. In the case of one of them, the meaning was changed to imply that Iraq was supporting Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida - a claim for which there was no basis, and which evidence of enmity and suspicion between the two rendered highly implausible.

Like Bush, Blair has focused on intelligence failures as being among the chief reasons for the difficulty of prosecuting the war. In fact, a recurrent feature of the conflict has been that intelligence findings that ran counter to claims made in support of the decision to go to war have been ignored or suppressed. In February 2003, a leaked document from the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) acknowledged that there had been contact between al-Qa'ida and the Iraqi regime in the past but noted that any relationship between them foundered on mistrust. "[Bin Laden's] aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq," the report concluded. The report contradicted the claim that Saddam cultivated contacts with the group that organised the 9/11 attacks - a claim central to Blair's defence of the attack on Iraq as part of the "war against terror".

An earlier report, the "Iraq Options" paper produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office on 8 March 2002, surveyed the evidence and concluded unambiguously: "In the judgement of the JIC, there is no recent evidence of Iraq[i] complicity with international terrorism. There is therefore no justification for action against Iraq based on self-defence to combat imminent threats of terrorism as in Afghanistan." This report and others show that Britain's intelligence agencies were repeatedly tasked to find evidence for links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. Unable to find any such evidence and unwilling to invent it, they reported that none existed. The only effect their reports had was that Blair shifted the case for war to arguments about WMD, where intelligence could be more easily manipulated.

In this instance, as in others, the problem was not defective intelligence. It was that intelligence was disregarded when it did not support the case for war. Blair had no use for intelligence based on facts. He was only interested in "faith-based intelligence" - as a former arms-control expert who used to work for the American State Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described the way intelligence is viewed in the Bush administration. One of its key proponents headed the Office of Special Plans - an ad hoc organisation set up to screen out inconvenient intelligence.

Secret planning for the invasion seems to have started in America months or weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks late in 2001, and it was clear to Blair that Bush meant to go to war in Iraq from the time he visited Bush at Camp David in April 2002. A memorandum from the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, which was sent to Blair on 25 March 2002 in preparation for the visit, noted that while it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind, the case for war was thin - Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. Despite this advice, Blair gave his full backing to Bush when the two met at Camp David. At a meeting held at 10 Downing Street at 9am on 23 July 2002, whose details were subsequently leaked in the "Downing Street Memo", Blair was told by "C" - the head of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who had recently had talks in Washington with the head of the CIA, George Tenet - that military action against Saddam was "seen as inevitable" and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". Partly in order to placate opinion in the Labour Party, Blair persuaded Bush to go to the UN to seek a second resolution authorising military action. Yet at a meeting in the White House on 31 January 2003, Bush made it clear to Blair that he meant to go to war regardless of the UN's decision, and Blair again promised Bush his full support. He also rejected an offer from Bush that could have spared Britain from full involvement in the war. In March 2003, fearful that Blair's government might fall, Bush gave him the option of British forces not participating in the invasion. Blair dismissed the option and insisted he was fully committed. However, in the House of Commons Blair maintained the pretence that war could still be avoided right up to the crucial vote on 18 March (two days before the war).

Blair's complicity in deception in the run-up to war has led to him being seen as mendacious. This is a misreading. It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it. For him, truth is whatever serves the cause, and when he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about. His silences serve the same higher purpose. Blair has remained silent regarding the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib, and he has dismissed well-sourced reports that American planes have used British airports to implement the policy of "special rendition", in which terrorist suspects are kidnapped and transported to countries where they can be tortured. Blair's stance on these issues must by ordinary standards be judged to be thoroughly dishonest, but it is clear he believes ordinary standards do not apply to him. Deception is justified if it advances human progress - and then it is not deception. Blair's untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of history, and they carry the hazards of all such revelations.

During Blair's decade in office, British government changed in character. All administrations aim to present a positive image of themselves, and some have departed from truth in the process. Where Blair was unique was in viewing the shaping of public opinion as government's overriding purpose. The result was that, whereas in the past lies were an intermittent feature of government, under his leadership they became integral to its functioning. Writing about the role of lying in Soviet politics, the French political thinker Raymond Aron observed: "In the exact, strict sense of the word, he who consciously says the opposite of the truth is lying: Lenin's companions were lying when they confessed to crimes they had not committed, and Soviet propaganda was lying when it sang of the happiness of the people during the days of collectivisation... On the other hand, when the Bolsheviks, the Communists, call the Soviet Union socialist, must we say that they are lying? ... if they recognise the difference between what socialism is today and what it will be when it conforms to its essence, then they are not, in the strictest sense, lying, but rather substituting for reality (something that can be described as) 'pseudo reality': the meaning that they give something in terms of a future they imagine as conforming to the ideology. Despite everything, Sovietism becomes a step along the road to socialism, and hence a step toward the salvation of mankind." If there is an historical precedent for Blair's methodical disregard for truth it is in the Soviet era, when a generation of Western communists represented the USSR as a stage on the way to universal democracy. Believing they were serving an invincible cause, these fellow-travellers were ready to "lie for the truth" by portraying the Soviet system not as it was in fact but as it would inevitably - so they believed - become.

It was absurd to describe the Soviet Union as a democracy. It is no less absurd to suggest that Iraq is an emerging liberal democracy and to refer to the country as the place in which the war against global terrorism is being won. In factual terms Iraq is a failed state, and insofar as there is anything like democracy it is working to produce Iranian-style theocracy. In the same way, facts tell us that the US-led invasion has turned the country into a training ground for terrorists.
Blair did more than conceal these facts. He constructed a pseudoreality that aimed to shape the way we think. As in the Soviet case, the pseudoreality failed to withstand the test of history. The hideous facts of life in Iraq refute the postmodern dogma that truth is a construction of power. If they have yet to penetrate into Blair's awareness, they have entered that of American voters, and as a result he is condemned to live out his days as the redundant servant of a failed administration. Out of power, he faces decades on the lecture circuit dispensing uplifting platitudes to listless audiences drawn from the second division of American business.

The political environments in which Blair and Bush came to power could hardly be more different. Blair could not mobilise popular religious belief behind him as Bush did, and a neo-conservative intellectual movement supporting his messianic foreign policy began to develop in Britain only towards the end of his period in power. Yet there was a kinship between Bush and Blair. The combination of a shallow but intense religiosity with a militant faith in human progress that defines Bush's world-view also shaped Blair's. Blair and Bush interpreted the history of the past two decades - the only history they knew - as showing that humanity had entered a wholly new era. Like Thatcher at the end of the 1980s, they interpreted the collapse of Communism not as a setback for Western universalism - which it was - but as a sign of the triumph of "the West". Lacking any longer historical perspective, they understood the challenges of the early 20th century in terms of the triumphal illusions of the post-Cold War era.

Blair and Bush came at the end of a period of ascending utopianism in Western politics. For them, human progress was axiomatic; but it was never understood only in the terms of secular thought. Both practised a missionary style of politics, whose goal was nothing less than the salvation of mankind.