What's up? Blair is telling the truth

Andrew Gilligan congratulates the PM for accepting that we still have a struggle on our hands in Iraq, but wonders where fighting talk will get us

Rather like the crew of the Starship Enterprise beaming down to some long-forgotten planet, the British government and its Iraq policy finally, this week, made tentative contact with reality. After proclaiming for much of the past 18 months that reconstruction in Iraq was accelerating, security slowly improving and that everything was getting better in every possible way, that matchless old pro. the Prime Minister, has decommissioned the denials and deployed a shock new weapon — the truth. Things must, indeed, be bad.

Mr Blair's statement on Sunday that Iraq was the site of a 'new conflict', a second war, was perfectly correct. Yet so clouded has been the Prime Minister's record of truth-telling over Iraq that instead of plaudits for his honesty the main reaction was the one that King Louis Philippe is supposed to have had to the death of Talleyrand — 'I wonder what he meant by that?'

At one level, Mr Blair's purpose is clear enough. Whatever we felt about the war to depose Saddam and the terrible mistakes made in Iraq since, he is saying, we cannot go back on them. We are where we are; and the only choice now is between helping Iraqis achieve 'democracy and liberty' or abandoning them to the bombers and the murderers. In that sense, it really is time to 'move on;' the arguments over the war are irrelevant to the task now facing us.

This argument is legitimate, even attractive. Iraq is not yet a complete disaster, hut could become one. If we are capable of preventing that, we have an obligation to do so. We messed it up; we have a duty to help fix it. Our mistakes in the past should not lead us to make further mistakes now.

Yet to return to the Starship Enterprise analogy — however logical all this may be, we are not Vulcans; we are human. We cannot separate Mr Blair's two wars as he would wish; the second is a consequence of the first, and he was warned in the clearest terms by his own officials that it would be. We cannot separate our feelings about our leaders' incompetence and dishonesty in the first war from what they are asking us to do now, and we do not trust them not to be equally incompetent and dishonest again. We no longer feel emotionally, as we need to feel, that this is a cause for which British soldiers can be allowed to die.

This brings us to the second difficulty about Mr Blair's appeal. Are we capable of preventing disaster, and what more is he proposing that Britain should do? Progress in security is the key to progress in every other field. But it now seems clear that British troops in Iraq are making only periodic attempts to enforce their will over the area they theoretically control — as, for instance, on Saturday, when they staged a raid on Muqtada al-Sadr's offices in Basra and confiscated weapons. For much of the time, they appear to be trying to avoid direct confrontation — for fear, they say, of further inflaming the situation. Officers in Basra now speak of running a mainly 'intelligence war'.

There are some reasons to send more troops. They could help secure the open border with Iran, across which military assistance to the rebels is almost certainly flowing. With the US reportedly planning a huge offensive against the insurgents after its own election in November. British troops will probably find themselves drawn in to hostilities — whether they want to be or not.

But the question has to be asked: how much is the British presence in Basra merely a show of control? How much are the troops there simply on sufferance, with the implicit understanding that they can stay as long as they don't interfere too much with the locals? Have they been told by London to step back from confrontation for fear of casualties which the British public would no longer tolerate? Would such confrontation, in any case, do more harm than good? How useful, in short, is the British presence in Iraq?

One anonymous 'senior British adviser' to the coalition forces was quoted by the BBC's Paul Wood this week as saying that every time he comes to Basra, things there seem 'a step change worse'. The best thing, he said, would be for a new Islamic government to be elected in January which would ask the troops to leave.

That almost certainly won't happen. But Mr Blair has forfeited so much support for his policy on Iraq that it is difficult to imagine him being able to do anything particularly positive. He simply dare not risk a significant British death toll.

The idea that Iyad Allawi, the man standing by the Prime Minister's side at his weekend press conference, represents 'democracy and liberty' also raises some difficulties. Unelected, and without much support inside Iraq, this former Baathist strongman has been busily imprisoning people without trial, closing down newspapers and sanctioning air raids on his own citizens — the sort of behaviour which used to get Saddam into such trouble.

The underlying purpose of Mr Blair's appeal was, of course, not so much to persuade the British people to back the forces of democracy in Iraq, but for them to support the forces of Tony in Britain. After months in which New Labour hoped that Iraq was going away, there are now signs that it fears real electoral pain. It is no longer midterm, and poll ratings in the mid-30s are now rather too low for comfort. Conventional wisdom has it that the Liberal Democrats' war-borne surge is worse news for the Tories than for Labour. But as the political analyst John Curtice pointed out, by winning disaffected Labour supporters in constituencies where the Tories are second, the LibDems have reduced Labour's opinion-poll lead — and could help the Tories gain seats.

Iraq will not be the determining issue of the 2005 election. But it has brought the government into settled contempt across vast swaths of moderate, thinking Britain, particularly among women, and in parts of the core vote. The comments of Sir Ivor Roberts, Britain's ambassador to Rome, that President Bush is al-Qa'eda's 'best recruiting-sergeant' symbolise how ministers have lost the argument, even among their own colleagues.

Proclaiming that Iraq is now a new war against barbarism seems unlikely to work. There is only one way that Mr Blair may be able to draw that precious line under Iraq, and that is to apologise. But his problem, as ever, is that he still clearly believes that he has nothing to apologise for.

Andrew Gilligan is diplomatic and defence editor of The Spectator.