Rather dismal assessment from London:
LETTER FROM LONDON: On the back burner, By DOUGLAS DAVIS
The historic transatlantic alliance was being tested to the breaking point over Iraq. Defense treaties were being torn up.
NATO was facing the prospect of imminent demise. There were deepening suspicions over "alternative peace initiatives." Intra-European fault lines were expanding exponentially.
British authorities were bracing for a weekend anti-war demonstration expected to attract the largest gathering in London since celebrations marking the end of World War II.... And that was only the start of the week.
Into the maelstrom of political, diplomatic, security and strategic bickering stepped the hapless Tony Blair, Washington's closest ally in its current crisis, who is now experiencing intimations of his own political mortality.
After months of trying, Canute-like, to hold back the tide, the man once hailed by the soft left as the son of God no longer resembles even a distant relative.
His confident, chipper mien has become haunted and haggard. He must know that the end is nigh. His efforts to build a war coalition in Europe have served only to highlight his impotence and intensify his alienation from both his European partners and his domestic constituency.
But while there's life there's hope. Or is there? Blair's latest, some say hopeless, mission is an attempt to cover his alliance with Washington by reinvigorating the left with his clapped-out "Third Way" project "social justice, equality, solidarity" and to demonstrate that the displacement of Saddam Hussein is not only good for the Iraqi people but also good for the left-leaning soul.
On Monday he took time out from his frenetic diplomatic activity to chair a seminar at Downing Street in a bid to convince a group of British and European ministers and think-tank specialists that his modern, modernizing "Third Way" approach has a valid contribution to make in the current crisis.
Writing in The Guardian in advance of the seminar, Blair made two central points on the Iraqi issue: First, the UN had instructed Saddam to disarm and if he did not and if the UN then did not enforce its demand, "it will become hard to argue for the UN as a means of dealing with these issues in the future."
Second, Saddam's regime is probably the most brutal, oppressive, and dictatorial in the world, and "it would be odd for anyone on the left to shed tears at his departure." Of course, Blair is sufficiently savvy to know that such a message in the current climate would provoke veritable streams of left-wing tears, not of sorrow for Saddam but of irritation and anger at a Labor Party leader who has climbed into bed with the wicked United States.
To sweeten the pill, Blair urged them, in the spirit of Lyndon B. Johnson, to urinate out of, rather than into, the tent. He appealed to them to think beyond Iraq and help "broaden the agenda." And what exactly is that agenda?
Well, it's a lucky-dip of left-friendly causes that includes Africa, world poverty, climate change, and, top of the list, the Middle East peace process.
There should be no mistake: The axis of evil for many, perhaps most, Europeans is not Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but the United States, Britain, and Israel. And the forfeit they will demand of America and Britain for their "Iraq adventure" will be to bear down on Israel and deliver on their slogan, "Justice for the Palestinians." The Palestinian issue might have gone off the boil in recent weeks, but it has not gone away; it is simply simmering on a back burner waiting to explode on the international stage just as soon as the heat has gone out of Iraq.
There will be few among the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in London next weekend who do not regard Israel as the ultimate demonic villain. There is a hatred a deep, visceral hatred for Israel that transcends the bounds of rational political discourse.
"The Palestinians are lucky that their enemies are the Jews," a European colleague told me cheerily the other day. "If their enemy was Saddam they would be forgotten, just like the Kurds are forgotten." There are profound truths in these two sentences.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the world expelled Iraq from Kuwait 12 years ago, there was excited talk about the emergence of a "new world order." Such talk was premature.
But there is today a real sense that the tectonic plates which support the international political order are undergoing a seismic shift. What is being decided now, by default rather than design, is a global political dispensation that will define the way the post-Cold War world works, possibly for generations to come.
Iraq has increasingly less to do with all the street-level political activity. But Iraq and the long, slow march to war has served as the catalyst, and the fig leaf, for the current frenzy of political activity.
The anti-war demonstrators who are marching through the streets of Europe these days carry myriad banners, from the left to the right, from the religious to the radical, from human rights advocates to animal rights activists, from anti-globalization campaigners to anti-nuclear militants.
The single, uniting issue that binds this cacophonous group is an irrational hatred of Israel. Ariel Sharon is up there alongside Slobodan Milosevic, Zionism is the new apartheid, and the IDF an instrument for ethnic cleansing. Moreover, the virus has now comprehensively crossed the membrane from anti-Zionism into a virulent strain of anti-Semitism.
For the past half-century, the Palestinian cause has provided the glue that bound together the ideal of Arab unity, while being only tangential to the pan-Arab ideology.
Now the Palestinian flag is being run up the flagpole with equal fervor by a new generation of Europeans who perceive in the Palestinian cause the most potent leverage against the United States, its reviled outpost, Israel, and European Jewry.
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