The neocons strike again

The treatment of Jack Straw throws new and alarming
light on the dismissal of Robin Cook

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1769900,00.html

David Clark
Monday May 8, 2006
The Guardian

It wouldn't be the first time that the Bush
administration has played an important role in
persuading Tony Blair to sack his foreign secretary.
It was little discussed at the time, but Robin Cook's
demotion in 2001 also followed hostile representations
from Washington and private expressions of doubt in
Downing Street about his ability to work with a
Republican administration. Again, there may have been
other factors, but of those suggested at the time,
none seems convincing. Last week's reshuffle helps to
put the episode in a new, revealing context.

The first signs of what lay ahead came in the run-up
to the 2000 presidential elections, when telegrams
from the British embassy in Washington started to
report an attitude of suspicion towards the Blair
government on the part of those likely to fill senior
positions in an incoming Bush administration. People
such as ***** Cheney and Richard Perle were expressing
scepticism about Labour's reliability, citing the
presence at senior level of ministers who had
supported nuclear disarmament and criticised US
foreign policy in the cold war.

There was little reason to suppose these telegrams
had made any impact until a relatively small
incident at Labour's annual conference. Like all
cabinet ministers, Cook was commissioned to write a
"pre-manifesto" paper, setting out Labour's
provisional second-term agenda and illustrating how
the government intended to build on its achievements.
One proposal was to appoint a special envoy to
campaign for global abolition of the death penalty.
Switching Britain's position to support abolitionism
was one of Cook's early foreign-policy decisions, and
he thought that a special envoy would be an
uncontroversial, but useful, way of promoting the
government's policy.

Blair had other ideas. On the day the proposal become
public, Jonathan Powell and other Downing Street
officials warned Cook that it was unacceptable and
must never be mentioned again. The reason? The only
one given was that a special envoy would inevitably
indulge in "finger wagging" at America, one of the
biggest users of capital punishment, and therefore
strain diplomatic relations with Washington. Under
no circumstances would the prime minister countenance
this, especially under a Republican administration.
The Foreign Office could continue to support
abolition of the death penalty, but not in any
particularly active sense.

Cook was aware of his vulnerability, especially
after the Florida chads ended up hanging in the
wrong direction. He sought to replicate the strong
relationship he had enjoyed with Madeleine Albright
by cultivating her successor, Colin Powell. Indeed,
the two men established a relationship of mutual
respect even before Bush was sworn in. But in a
foretaste of Powell's own marginalisation, this cut
little ice. As Cook revealed in his diaries, the
neoconservatives never dropped their hostility to
him and eventually got their wish.

The treatment of Straw seems uncannily reminiscent,
but the issue of Iran is of a different order of
seriousness to anything Cook was grappling with five
years ago. There is a pressing need for Blair to
tell Bush what Attlee had the guts to tell Truman
in the Korean war: that a decision to breach the
nuclear threshold would encourage proliferation and
make America an outcast from the community of
civilised nations. He may think it clever strategy
to put pressure on Tehran by keeping all options
open, but the Iranians are not the only ones who
need deterring.

Once again, Blair seems willing to put the wishes
of the US government before those of the British
people. That should be reason enough for wanting
him out of office as soon as possible.

· David Clark was special adviser to Robin Cook
from 1997 to 2001.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1769900,00.html




--

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

John J. Mearsheimer
University of Chicago - Department of Political Science

Stephen M. Walt
Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011

( has polemical response from Alan Dershowitz at site )

Edited non-PDF version :

http://www.lrb.co.uk./v28/n06/mear01_.html