Sunday in the Park Without Tony
American Spectator
5/11/99 John Cory
All is not lost. The best of Britain still lives. London's elegant parks and greenswards have not yet been overcome by Tony Blair's "cool Britannia." Lawns remain lush and green, while flowers blossom, and coots, mergansers, and swans honk and quack and paddle up and down the waterways. Londoners may still sit on benches, and throw them bread crumbs. They may also still smoke in most restaurants, and raise their cholesterol to alarming levels by ingesting clotted cream.
"Cool Britannia"--Blair's alarming catchwords for a new, improved England--has not yet left things in ruins.
On the other hand, there is still the man himself, bursting with ambition, and eager to leave his mark on history. The one-time dove has embraced his new role as the leader of NATO's war party. Bill Clinton may waffle, but Blair stands firm, and he wants the world to know it. The day after Clinton hinted in Germany that removing Slobodan Milosevic from power was not a necessary policy goal, Blair contradicted him.
"I will not be sitting down and dealing with Milosevic," he said. "I don't think anyone is in a position to be dealing with Milosevic. The corrupt dictatorship of Milosevic must be cast out." Blair, however, is a little shaky on how this would be done--bombing, ground troops, or, for all one knows, tactical nuclear weapons--although there is no mistaking his ambition. At the very least he wants to prove he is as tough as Margaret Thatcher, who dispatched an armada to the Falkland Islands, and later told President Bush not to "go wobbly" over Iraq.
You may think of that as understandable: New Labour must show it is as resolute as old Tories. But the spooky part is that Blair's personal ambition goes far beyond that, and the call to greatness is clearly upon him. In a series of speeches and op-ed pieces he has reminded Britons of World War II and the great deeds that were accomplished then, and insisted it is a time for great deeds once again.
As he wrote in the London Times last Friday:
"Tomorrow is Victory in Europe Day. It is a time for my generation to reflect on the fight of our parents' generation against Hitler's evil regime. That victory was hard won. Millions of people suffered in the struggle to preserve freedom and democracy."
Meanwhile Blair likened Milosevic to Hitler, and himself, by extension, to Churchill, although the tinpot Serb is no Hitler, and goodness knows Blair is no Churchill, no matter what he thinks. In the Times piece, Blair also described his visit to refugee camps in Macedonia. Despite the smells, the fear, the horror of it all (his wife, Cherie, had burst into tears) he had waded right in, and listened to the Albanians. The terrible tales he heard only strengthened his resolve, and he would do what he could to help them.
Indeed the visit had been something of a triumph for Blair. Pictures of the weeping Cherie and her determined, shirt-sleeved husband were in most of the papers. It was noted, however, that despite Blair's concern for the Kosovars, only 330 had been allowed refuge in the United Kingdom. Germany, by contrast, had accepted nearly 10,000 Kosovars, while even Norway had accepted 2,600.
So what should we make of Blair? Is he a statesman, mere annoyance, or, terrible as the thought may be, a menace? On the grounds that it would be immodest for an American journalist to make a judgment, we will turn now to the British author A. N. Wilson, writing in the Independent:
"We have grown used to having [in Blair] a prime minister who is ignorant, but now a more worrisome thought occurs. Has he gone mad? Perhaps this is question that only doctors can answer.
But Tony Blair's recent self-justifying speeches, delivered with laryngitic, manic jerkiness persuade me that war is almost always an act of madness."
In other words, Blair is a dangerous man. There are perils in cool Britannia. |
