It could never be an equal relationship. America was always going to lead. The question was whether Britain would follow. No quid pro quo was requested or delivered. Indeed, both leaders shudder at the suggestion of anything so squalid when Coughlin raises it with them. Blair never made his support conditional but he did hope to persuade America to act through the United Nations, a policy neo-con hawks knew would fail to deliver the resolutions they wanted. He also repeatedly appealed to Bush to be more active in addressing Palestinian concerns. The President, however, would not negotiate with Yasser Arafat.
Regime change in Iraq had been official US policy since 1998 when Clinton was president. In contrast, the British government had to come up with a specific reason for attacking the country. Bush tells Coughlin that he reacted to the possibility of Blair losing the crunch Commons vote in March 2003 by telling him on the telephone to withdraw from the coalition rather than risk being forced to resign. Blair replied, ‘I’m staying, even if it costs me my government.’ It was the sort of attitude the Texan admired.
Coughlin provides a comprehensible and unpretentious narrative detailing how Blair became inextricably committed to invading Iraq. Unlike many of the highly partial accounts cluttering high street bookshops, he avoids introducing his own angle into this admirable work of reportage. Conspiracy theorists will be bored rigid.
The question for the reader, as for those assessing whether Saddam was within 45 minutes of launching weapons of mass destruction, hinges on the quality of the intelligence. The inside information that is American Ally’s real claim upon our attention is repeatedly cited without attribution in the endnotes as ‘private interview’. Since the author was granted co-operation on the condition of anonymity (many of those speaking to him are bound by the Official Secrets Act), we are expected to accept his assurance that ‘a senior official’ or ‘a close aide to Blair’ is what it purports to be, and not somebody who once spent ten minutes on the Thames Embankment jogging alongside Alastair Campbell. Unlike the sources that underpinned the WMD claims, the revelations in American Ally are informative rather than sensational. Put simply, Bush and Blair looked at each other and saw what they liked to imagine themselves to be — a pretty straight kind of guy.
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