Middle East
No 10 is no preparation for the Middle East
Published 19 July 2007
It is stating the obvious that Tony Blair is a man about whom very few people in the Arab world (except for the rulers) have a good thing to say
The Middle East is a region where you can travel across eight or nine countries and hear the same language being spoken, see the same dominant religion being followed and eat much the same delicious cuisine. It also shares a common funny bone. Fly in to the Middle East and there are usually a couple of topical pan-Arab political jokes doing the rounds from Casablanca to Damascus. Most of them are pretty dark, gallows humour. It's a fair bet that this summer there'll be a few about Tony Blair taking up his position as the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East. The week after Blair's appointment was announced, an Egyptian friend called me and said the joke among his colleagues was that it was a bit like asking an arsonist to go back into the building to save the children.
It is stating the obvious that Tony Blair is a man about whom very few people in the Arab world (except for the rulers) have a good thing to say. We already know that Iraq has drained his reserves of diplomatic capital in the region and has robbed him of that other indispensable and rare quality in a Middle East negotiator - the reputation on both sides of being a fair and honest broker.
Few, if any, figures have had this distinction: possibly the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, or Blair's immediate predecessor, James Wolfensohn. Both left the region disillusioned and frustrated by US policies so biased in favour of Israel that they made the prospect of a lasting and just settlement impossible.
I can't think of any Middle East envoy in recent history who has been appointed after playing so integral a part in US regional policy as Blair. This need not doom him to failure. Coming to terms with the reality of returning as an envoy rather than a British prime minister "joined at the hip" with the US president might, however, be his undoing. It's going to be a very different world.
Blair may be finding it hard or awkward adjusting to life away from political power, but whatever decompression chamber he has been living in since he left No 10 may not have been enough preparation for him in the work before him in Palestine. His small office and tiny staff, most of them on secondment from UN agencies, will be based in East Jerusalem. There will be no big hitters who can pick up the phone to the state department or the White House.
Blair is still trying to negotiate his brief, hoping to get more wiggle room than just advising and helping to rebuild Palestinian institutions. It seems certain, however, that he will not get the wider brief he wants. In many ways, the best and most desperately needed role that someone like Blair could play would be as a voice echoing the concerns and hopes of Palestinians. It is hard to think of anyone else with sufficient contacts in Washington to be heard on this subject. Nobody else is doing that job.
He will have to get used to making the short journey from Jerusalem to the West Bank town of Ramallah, where the Fatah government of President Mahmoud Abbas is based. He won't have helicopters to take him as he did when he was prime minister. Instead, he will have to travel by road, across the main Israeli military checkpoints in to and out of Ramallah. Yet Blair will not set foot in the "other Palestine": Gaza, where the deposed but democratically elected Hamas administration is based. How will he be able to do his job if he cannot visit or talk to the 1.7 million Palestinians whose economic and social needs are by far and away the most acute? It's also where there is the clearest absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, with Qassam rockets being fired into Israel from the strip, and where Israel responds with air strikes, an economic blockade and military incursions.
Of course Tony Blair knows all this. The intri guing question, then, is why - why do it? Out of guilt over Iraq and the long-term damage that it is doing to the region? Because he still believes and wants to prove that his word is listened to in Bush's White House? Because of messianic self-belief - the idea that he's a bigger figure, a man of history who can pull off what no other has been able to do? Whichever of these is motivating him, there is no question that the Middle East is one region where political reality hits you harder and more quickly than you ever imagined.
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