The Blair Doctrine

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Thu Apr 22 15:55:15 PDT 1999


At 01:45 22/04/99 -0400, you wrote: (thread title The Divisions in NATO)
>Chris Burford wrote:
>
>>Blair has just made
>>sure he has been photographed running up the steps to get into the plane to
>>tell Clinton what to do.
>
>You really eat that stuff up, eh? "Don't go all wobbly now, George"
>rewritten for the 90s?
>
>Doug

I have not quite got the allusion to George going wobbly, but it does seem to me that Doug and I share some pretty deep differences of approach.

I thought Blair's photo-opportunity was a bit silly actually. I noted that he came down the steps of the plane the other side, much more cautiously. Headlines about Blair falling flat on his face at the NATO summit are not part of the script.

I guess Doug is still stuck in seeing the Third Way as some comptemptible form of social democracy delivered in sound bites. There is much that is underhand in this attempt to manage capitalism for the sake of the whole people. But what Doug misses out is that this is actually increasingly how changes are made. Unless the left is just going to sneer at it all, it is worth analysing how the shifts of power are going, so that in due course the left can actually change them.

What is happening at the moment is that Clinton has just agreed to be publically mugged by Blair, to be followed up by the French head of state, to be followed up by Solana. They all say in words no decision has been made in favour of ground troops but the speculations are nurtured. Blair then goes on to meet half the Senate, who decide that Clinton has not got a coherent strategy by relying on air-power alone, so they have got to point out how illogical it is not to use ground troops. And in due course to pay for ground troops.

Meanwhile Blair has moved on to Chicago to announce a major new doctrine. It is to be an assertion of a global agenda of human rights and guidelines about how the west will interfere for the sake of human rights in its own sphere of influence.

Shades of the Brezhnev doctrine, because it does openly imply a restriction of national sovereignty in relation to the big economic power blocs.

But bad news potentially for Turkish oppression of the Kurds, concern for whose fate I share with Doug.

A painful compromise with hypocrisy to seek freedom from oppression now for Albanians, while Kurds are being oppressed ,in order to hope to stop Kurds being oppressed later. But we cannot buck the balance of power if we want to change the world, much as ultra-leftists try to ignore it on principle.

Chris Burford

London



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