The Sunday Times
July 22, 2007
Brown should be fighting the Europeans, not America
By Michael Portillo, former Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party
When a British prime minister visits a US president it is never a meeting of equals because of America’s incomparable influence in the world. But when Gordon Brown arrives at the White House next week, his hosts know he will be in office long after George W Bush has departed for his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Brown can run nearly three years on Labour’s current mandate. The speculation about an early election has arisen now only because he has moved sharply ahead in the polls, opening the possibility that at some moment he could improve on the majority inherited from Tony Blair. Brown looks strong.
The fact that, on my reckoning, David Cameron has beaten Brown in two of their three encounters at prime minister’s questions in the Commons makes no difference. On Thursday real people voted in real by-elections and Labour did quite well, and the Tories badly. In any case, Brown uses the questions session to make headline-stealing announcements. Scrapping supercasinos and possibly toughening the classification of cannabis endear him to middle England.
To Brown’s joy commentators refer to “the new government” as though Brown had not been intimately involved with the misadventures of the Labour administration for the past decade. The prime minister himself seems different: reportedly more relaxed than at any time while chancellor of the exchequer. Unlike Blair before him, his existence is not soured by having a Brown in the cabinet. The end of tension between 10 and 11 Downing Street helps politics to feel different.
In foreign policy, Brown and the foreign secretary David Miliband have made a good start by expelling Russian diplomats after the Kremlin refused to extradite the man wanted in the Litvinenko poisoning case. Condoleezza Rice has endorsed the British viewpoint. Publicising a thwarted plot to kill the exiled Boris Berezovsky provided more bad press throughout the West for President Vladimir Putin.
The “new” government’s only stumble so far has been in handling America itself. The appointment of Lord Malloch Brown, an outspoken opponent of the neoconservatives, to the Foreign Office offended the US administration more than it won favour with the Labour left, because the Americans had heard of him, and Labour had not.
Malloch Brown vastly overreached himself in saying that Brown would not be joined at the hip to Bush as Blair was. Added to the speech in Washington in which the development secretary Douglas Alexander urged the US to build rather than destroy, the change in Britain’s tone was hardly subtle. Miliband has had to row back some distance.
Brown himself will be sure-footed. He has no doubt about the importance of Britain’s alliance with the US. America’s mission in Iraq may be a disaster, but things might be a lot worse if it pulls out. The new prime minister has abandoned the phrase “war on terror” but he knows that America, Britain, the free world and most Muslim regimes are battling a global Islamist revolution that has to be fought in Baghdad and Helmand as well as New York and London. European security depends on US engagement with the world much as it did during the cold war. It was Blair’s tragedy to recognise that truth.
Life should be a little easier for Brown. A marked rundown of British forces in Iraq - to 5,000 by the year’s end - is under way, without complaint from Washington. Also, the mood on Capitol Hill has shifted towards a reduction in the US presence there. Bush is awaiting a report on whether this year’s troop surge has succeeded. He may yet hold out against the political tide and not cut back, but it is likely the next president will reduce force levels to 60,000. The outstanding pro-war hopeful, John McCain, seems doomed to quit the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and Democratic contenders no longer talk of total withdrawal from Iraq.
But our forces’ position in Basra looks uncomfortable. Although we handed over three provinces to Iraqi control, the southern city has become steadily more hostile. Some months back the chief of the general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, mused that our position could become counter-productive. Basra is too dangerous and the local police too infiltrated for our forces to do much good. The reduced numbers make it harder for the British to defend themselves, and once they have withdrawn to one base, they will present an easier target. Three RAF servicemen were killed there last week. Viewed against the total numbers deployed, UK casualty rates are shockingly high.
There is, therefore, a strong case that Brown can make to Bush for an accelerated British departure from Iraq, which might dovetail with a new policy in Washington later on. But the British withdrawal could be camouflaged as a reinforcement of Afghanistan.
Last week the Commons defence select committee issued a worrying report on developments there, where Britain now has 7,700 troops. “Violence,” it warned, “seems to be increasing and spreading to the previously more peaceful provinces in the north and west of Afghanistan and the capital, Kabul.” In a leaked memo to fellow officers, Dannatt commented that reinforcements for either Iraq or Afghanistan are “now almost nonexistent” and that “we now have almost no capability to react to the unexpected”.
British forces are killing large numbers of “enemy” but it is unclear how many are hardcore Taliban as distinct from farmers sent into battle by the insurgents. The large number of civilian casualties makes it hard to win local support for our troops. Reconstruction efforts have had to take second place to fighting. British troops have also been demoralised when they are diverted from doing what makes sense strategically to meet political objectives of the Kabul government.
The dangers of being defeated in Afghanistan are clear. We attacked the Taliban because it invited Al-Qaeda to use the country as a terrorist base. To allow the Taliban to regain widespread control would be a serious defeat. Losing Afghanistan would imperil neigh-bouring Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf’s pro-western government is in any case under pressure from extremist violence.
There may be a case for doing things differently in Afghanistan. Lord Ashdown has called for the appointment of an international co-ordinator. The balance between military action and rebuilding may be wrong. We certainly need many more soldiers there to execute any plan. But it is difficult to make a case for pulling out, and harder still to argue that we should position troops there who are unwilling to fight.
Yet that is the position of European Union countries like Germany and Spain. Our European allies have failed to come up with the numbers requested by Nato, and some have heavily restricted the role their forces will play. German and Spanish politicians have allowed public disquiet over Iraq to dictate their policy in Afghanistan, even though following 9/11 we were unanimous that the Taliban be ousted.
British troops are placed in peril by the failures of our allies, Nato has become wholly ineffective and we risk strategic defeat by the same enemy that aims to blow up our transport systems and malls. At the recent European summit - chaired by Germany - our partners demanded British concessions to take forward their dream of ever-closer union. Why did Blair not make his agreement conditional upon a useful contribution from them to the war against the Taliban? You have to wonder what the EU is for if its purposes do not include fighting together against those who wish to subvert its values and bring down its societies.
Many are looking to Brown to be tough with the US. I would prefer him to be steely with the Europeans. How can a prime minister face the grieving families of British servicemen killed in action, unless he has tried by every means to reinforce our numbers with the thousands of European troops, already in theatre but standing idly by? Our partners want our agreement to their cherished treaty. Brown should refuse consent while they fail in their obligations to our common security.
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