The Blair Identity: Leadership and Foreign Policy

174 Pages·2009·0.502 MB·English

by  Stephen Benedict Dyson

The Blair identity

The Blair identity
Leadership and foreign policy
Stephen Benedict Dyson
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © Stephen Benedict Dyson 2009
The right of Stephen Benedict Dyson to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 0 7190 7999 3 hardback
First published 2009
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Typeset by Helen Skelton, Brighton, UK
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Contents
List of tables page vii
1 Blair’s wars 1
2 Neoclassical realism and leader psychology: 10
a theory of foreign policy
3 Tony Blair’s personality and leadership style 25
4 The Kosovo and Sierra Leone interventions 47
5 September 11 and the ‘war on terror’ 70
6 Iraq – Blair’s war 98
7 Postwar Iraq 132
8 The Blair balance sheet 150
Index 161

List of tables
3.1 Tony Blair’s trait scores and a reference group page 33
of post-1945 British prime ministers
8.1 Predictions and evidence from realist and 153
personality variables: summary of the argument

1 Blair’s wars
Secluded in his private Downing Street study and facing the most
fateful decisions of his political career, Prime Minister Tony Blair
conferred with his ‘inner-circle’, a group of close advisers upon whom
he relied heavily. John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, had just returned from briefings in Washington and
shared with the group his discoveries: US military action against the
Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was, to all intents and purposes,
‘inevitable’. Should Britain be a part of this coming war, which was
sure to be both risky and controversial? Jack Straw, the Foreign
Secretary and close Blair ally, felt that the case against Saddam was
‘thin’. He was ‘not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD
(weapons of mass destruction) capability was less than that of Libya,
North Korea or Iran’. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, told
Blair that under international law the US proposition was a dubious
one, as ‘the desire for regime change was not a legal basis for military
action’.1
Yet Blair had made up his mind. He had given a commitment to
US president George W. Bush that the British would support him,
and so his thoughts were focused on how to sell the war domestically
and internationally. He saw Saddam Hussein as ‘evil’, felt that there
was little chance of resolving the matter through United Nations
weapons inspections, and believed that he could replicate his previous
foreign policy successes, especially in Kosovo and the immediate
aftermath of September 11 2001, in influencing the United States and
the broader international community. In the weeks following this
meeting, as rumours of its content swept the government, Blair was
approached by senior Cabinet colleagues and asked to schedule a full
official discussion of Iraq policy. Blair rebuffed these requests point