Britain recognizes its own clown

Blair was dangerously off target in his condemnation of Iran

Two things occurred last week, apparently unconnected. In the first, Tony Blair, at the end of his tour of the Middle East and the Gulf, issued a thunderous denunciation in Dubai of the 'threat' posed by Iran. He painted a scary picture. (Doesn't he always?)

Iran, he said, was 'at war' with the 'moderate' Arab world and Western forces trying to bring peace and stability to the region. If it was not for evil Iran, Blair implied, Iraq and Afghanistan could become holiday hotspots for tourists, following the example set by Dubai, which has had more than a million British visitors this year. Iran at war with the Arab world? The last statesman who framed it in that ugly context was ... Saddam Hussein.

The second event was unconnected, but only in the Prime Minister's mind. Iran held local elections and polls for the influential Council of Experts. Elections. That democracy thing that Blair and President George W Bush keep saying they intend to deliver to our poor benighted Arab and Persian brethren.

And as the results emerged, it was clear that ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - he of the Holocaust denials and alleged nuclear ambitions - had been given a trouncing. In cities such as Shiraz and Bandar Abbas, not a single pro-Ahmadinejad candidate won a council seat. In Tehran, too, candidates supporting Mayor Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, a moderate conservative, won seven of 15 council seats, while reformists were set to win four. Which has left Ahmadinejad loyalists with only three seats.

Anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment was visible in elections for the Council of Experts - 86 clerics who monitor Iran's supreme leader and choose his successor. There, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani polled the most votes of any Tehran candidate to win re-election to the assembly. Also re-elected was Hasan Rowhani, Iran's former nuclear negotiator whom Ahmadinejad has accused of making too many concessions to the Europeans.

So what will Blair's comments have achieved? Certainly they will not have bolstered Iranians like the students who recently heckled Ahmadinejad for his poor record on jobs and confrontational attitude to the West. Instead, Blair's comments fit precisely into Ahmadinejad's narrative of 'them and us'.

And what happened to Downing Street's insistence barely two weeks before that we should be talking to Iran about Iraq? It was rejected by George Bush. So apparently it has been forgotten.

None of this is to say that there are not problems over Iran. Its tutelage of the increasingly powerful Shia crescent has sometimes seemed disruptive for the hell of it - in Iraq and Lebanon in particular.

But is it a war on 'moderate' Arabs, or is it that the Tehran leadership - to which Shias look - has yet to mature into something more politically responsible as Iran becomes a regional power? It may indeed be maturing: Iran appears, over Iraq at least, belatedly to be recognising that the last thing it needs as a neighbour is a failed state and a proxy war with Saudi Arabia.

Others have been asking these questions. Not Tony Blair.

But then Blair's performance in Dubai was the inept conclusion to a clumsy trip that seemed to break the fundamental rule of prime ministerial diplomacy - only to go on these kinds of tours when there is something to achieve.

Instead, Blair blundered round without much purpose. He met a cool welcome in Egypt and later a rebuke from Turkey over Palestine.

And if his trip was calculated to prove to Muslims, particularly at home, that Britain does care about the plight of Palestinians, that too spectacularly backfired.

Whatever you think about Hamas and its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, it won fairly in elections that the West insisted on. And while the Arab street has equally mixed views about Hamas, it also sees the hypocrisy of insisting on Arab democracy, then undermining the result and offering to support the losing party in something close to civil conflict.

All of which leads one to conclude that something pretty terrible has happened to British diplomacy.

As Downing Street has further and further encroached on Foreign Office territory, we have been left not so much with a foreign policy that has been thought through, but a policy made by hunches and 'feel-good' ideas on the Number 10 sofas. All of them have been designed, it would appear, to bolster the reputation of a lame-duck Prime Minister in his last months in office.

As Blair has travelled to Washington and to the Middle East, his journeys increasingly have been accompanied by the sense that no one - in the White House, Turkey, Tel Aviv or in the Arab world - much listens or cares what he thinks or does these days.

Original article posted here.