Straw Men:
Vicarious Empire and Blair's inexplicable love of Bush

I lived in London for a semester in 1992, shortly after the Gulf War ended. As an unrecruited representative of American foreign policy, I was repeatedly asked for my take on the War. How humiliating was it for us to let Saddam get away? Is America losing its edge? People seemed to enjoy the thought of the US being taken down a notch.

I'd get these questions quite frequently, but, to be fair, the most common setting--Prince Alfred's pub near the Sutherland Avenue Tube stop--didn't suggest I was necessarily conversing with the most reliable, or sober, folks around. But when reading British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's address to the UN yesterday, I couldn't help but recall a conversation with a loose-lipped man who enigmatically wore a tuxedo (an oddity in this Aussie/Kiwi pub overrun by shaggy college students and dozing Border Collies). “What's it feel like to live in a dying Empire?” he slurred in a frank tone I'd rarely encountered in London. Misery loves company, he argued; we had empire once and so did you, and now we're both in the same boat.

I’ve been struggling to understand Tony Blair’s and Straw's intense desire for war with Iraq, and this encounter gives me a thought: England’s cultural memory of glories lost drives the Blair government to seek vicarious empire through the US. Straw’s comments to French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin yesterday were filled with such Wild West swagger, arrogance and condescension. The Straits Times reports the meeting this way: "Staring Mr de Villepin in the eye, Mr Straw called him repeatedly by his first name, a not-so-subtle putdown in international diplomacy. Laughter erupted the first time Mr Straw referred to Mr de Villepin as simply 'Dominique'." He repeated the first name 4 or 5 times. This is pure childishness--High Noon antics, right down to the confrontational stare--the British version of Bush’s Mad Cow(boy) Disease and the diplomatic equivalent of sandbox namecalling.

It's like Blair and Company are trying to be more American, i.e. more boorish. In the African paper The Sunday Nation, Philip Ochieng writes on the American-British likeness:

Loud and pushy, he has never heard of tact and courtesy even as an "ambassador" in somebody else's house. For he knows it all.

He excels only in the legerdemain of money-making, the filth of accumulation, the itch for other people's property, the cacophony of sabre-rattling as he grabs it, the artlessness of propaganda.

On Iraq, therefore, it surprises few that the West is divided precisely between the Franco-Germans and the Anglo-Americans and precisely on style.

Straw’s gall is on par with Dennis Hastert’s digs on the Eiffel Tower and calls for sanctions on French wine and cheese; Rumsfeld’s insults about “Old Europe”; and the Bush-Blair team’s track record of fabricated evidence of Iraq’s material breaches, spying on UN Security Council members, and trying to pass off a 12-year old doctoral thesis as "intelligence" on Iraq’s wrongdoings.

Straw, like Blair all along, has this weird me-too eagerness for supporting Bush and his preemptive war. Could "coattail empire" really be such a powerful motivator?

“The United States, conceived as an anti-imperialist project, is now engaged on remaking the world order,” writes The Guardian. “This requires allies, like-minded friends who will change the way the globe is ruled and regulated. It is these thoughts which, perhaps, lurk behind Tony Blair's moral case. The idea of finding yourself on the opposite side to America, a nation with a history, of wrecking global treaties and disregarding international law, must be terrifying.”

And Paul Foot in the same publication wrote in February:

Is not the truth that these US warmongers, most of them oil millionaires, are hell-bent on extending their capitalist empire--and their control of oil supplies--everywhere on earth, and that the invasion of Iraq is a further step down that road? And is not the British prime minister now fanatically committed to the same process? When the SNP MP Alex Salmond shouted at him last week ‘when do we stop?’ Blair rounded on him, eyes gleaming like those of Arturo Ui in Brecht's play [The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui]: ‘We stop when the threat to our security is properly and fully dealt with.’ In other words, we go on like Ui, until we conquer the world.

What strikes me about this passage is the fanatical glint in Blair’s eyes, suggestive of some other power governing the man. Many people have commented to me about Bush’s televised speech last week, and very little of it had to do with the content of the speech. “He looked drugged,” was the most frequent remark, followed by “He didn’t seem to believe what he was saying.” I’ve thought the same thing about Tony Blair, especially as he emotionally staked his reputation on the moral correctness of attacking Iraq.

Does the allure of Empire have a narcotic effect? Does Blair's lapdog fervor bear the same symptoms as Bush's religious zeal? Is empire that seductive? Considering all that empire entails--domination of markets and natural resources worldwide, global "partners" who give in to imperial wishes through bribes or fear, a "way of life" that rests on a diminished standard of living for developing countries--the answer is likely yes. Or, perhaps there's a simpler explanation. Like pride.