It seemed to everyone in Britain and the U.S. that when the American president said “Jump,” all British Prime Minister Tony Blair could say was, “How high, George?” But if you remember Blair on planes to just about everywhere doing Bush’s work for him after 9/11, you may also remember wondering if No. 10 Downing Street’s real mission was to stay on the American bronco in the hope of keeping it reined in.
That was the goal the PM couldn’t reveal publicly, according to former British ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyer, who is quoted in The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair, a documentary that recently debuted on Channel 4 in Britain. “Blair’s real concern was that there would be quote unquote ‘a kneejerk reaction’ by the Americans,” Meyer told the filmmakers, adding that Blair was afraid the U.S. “would go thundering off and nuke the shit out of [Afghanistan] without thinking straight.”
Furthermore, the film shows, Blair knew the Americans had done no planning for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and faced an agonizing decision about whether to send British troops into a situation that would probably be unsafe for that reason. Among those interviewed for the film was Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s envoy to the postwar authority in Baghdad, who said Blair “was tearing his hair out over some of the deficiencies” in American preparations for management of the country it planned to occupy. Judging from this retrospective on Bush’s lead partner in the “Coalition of the Willing,” the U.S. is clearly in far deeper isolation than Washington thinks.
