Bush and Blair: Iraq and the UK's American Viceroy

Abstract

Tony Benn: I do think that without Blair, Bush would have found it much harder to go to war. Memories of Vietnam were at the back of people's minds. He was able to talk about the 'coalition of the willing', a new version of 'the free world' or 'the international community'--whatever words you use to describe something other than the UN. I think Blair's motivation was twofold. First of all, the positive: now we haven't got an empire, if you piggy-back on Bush's military force you become an empire again, and 'Bushand- Blair', 'Bush-and-Blair', are spoken about in the world as if Blair was Vice-President of the United States. Secondly, the price we would have paid for standing up against the United States would have been terrifying. It wouldn't just have been making it difficult to sell French wine or having Americans calling French fries 'freedom fries'. It would have meant taking away our nuclear weapons and generally punishing us. So what you realize is that even if you wanted simple things like jobs, trade union rights, no means test for pensioners, no student loans, no privatization and no war-- even if you wanted those things, for the US you'd be a 'rogue state'.