BRITAIN IS RIGHT TO STICK BY AMERICA

Conrad Black says that Tony Blair is

acting in the national interest by being George W Bush's principal ally

THE President of the United States said on the evening of 11 September 2001 that his country had been attacked by terrorists and was at war with terrorism, that his government would make no distinction between terrorists and countries that supported terrorists, and that it would judge all countries by their actions whether they were friends or foes in that war.

There is not the slightest doubt that Iraq is an international terrorist-supporting state. It continues to shelter and support terrorist organisations that operate against Iran. Israel and many Western countries. The Iraqi government bankrolled much of the suicide-murder campaign against Israelis, was very probably complicit in the original attack on New York's World Trade Center, and attempted to assassinate former President Bush and the Emir of Kuwait in 1993.

Saddam has been in gross violation of the terms ending the Gulf war since he signed them in 1991. The United Nations determined in 1999 that he had the capability to produce enough anthrax and botulinum toxin to kill many millions of people. Western intelligence estimates that Iraq has hundreds of tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve-agent, 30,000 projectiles for delivering these chemical and biological weapons. a mobile biological weapon development programme, and an extensive nuclear weapon delivery programme, all prohibited by treaty and a long succession of supporting United Nations resolutions.

No other regime in the world possesses the combination of Saddam Hussein's notorious sponsorship of terrorism, his record of invading neighbouring countries, his fervent pursuit of mass-destruction weapons and the capacity to fire them on other countries, as well as his barbarous mistreatment of his own citizens, murdering tens of thousands of them.

Saddam Hussein is also the leader of the militant Islamists. He is the head of a secular government, but he is the undoubted standard-bearer of all the Arab world's militant Muslims, who yearn for a violent defeat of the West, as bin Laden's endorsement of him this week demonstrates. He is the custodian of the hopes of all Muslims who rejoiced, as Saddam himself publicly did, at the massacre on 11 September 2001. The conventional methods of containing Iraq, with restraint, sanctions and moral suasion, have been a complete failure. The Iraqi government has made a mockery of every application of international law. A number of prominent countries have made a Swiss cheese out of the mandated sanctions, to the point where France and several other countries were advocating 18 months ago the pusillanimous claptrap of 'smart sanctions — by which they meant sanctions that did not commercially inconvenience them — as they rewarded Saddam for his criminal behaviour.

The mandate of the present 108 inspectors, and of previous United Nations weapons inspectors, has not been to scour Iraq, a country almost the size of Germany, looking for Saddam's illicit weapons programme. The only method to achieve the promised and internationally required disarmament is to have a regime in Baghdad that wishes to disarm. That will require a change of regime, which is what the President of the United States has called for.

It is not a privilege for the United States to act against Iraq, a favour and an indulgence America seeks from other countries, and a treat for the American armed forces and taxpayers. It is an enforcement of international law, an act of retribution for past provocations by Saddam, and the removal of the greatest political tumour that afflicts the Middle East. It is a service to the civilised world.

Yet there are parts of what passes for the civilised world that resist. Many reasons are advanced for opposing American policy, but most of them are no more than simple anti-Americanism. In order to present an obstacle to American action, an absurdly exaggerated legitimisation of the United Nations has occurred. The United Nations is principally composed of corrupt, failed despotisms, and the suggestion that its opinions can be aggregated into an unappealable world supreme court is bunk. No serious person could imagine that the threats of veto of the French, Chinese and Russians, or the antics of the French, Germans and Belgians at Nato, are based on a moment's adjudication of the sorts of issues we are talking about today. Those countries have a variety of motives, but some of them are pandering to the radical Islamist terrorists and the flabby soft-left opinion that accommodates them in the West.

The defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was exact when he described the French, German and Belgian prevention of Alliance assistance to Turkey as 'shameful', and promised to provide the assistance bilaterally. The French and Belgians were driven by naked cynicism and the Germans by a misplaced romantic pacifism. They have all discredited honourable dissent from the Iraq operation. They run the risk of being exposed as irrelevant, as the United States, supported by 15 of the other 18 Nato countries, has the will, the right and the ability to do the just and the necessary, whatever these other countries may think about it.

This fact should be a cause for thanksgiving. Instead, we have been subjected to the endless mantra 'They can't go it alone', meaning, of course, the Americans can and, if necessary, will go it alone — which will reveal those chanting the mantra as the fools or hypocrites most of them are. I do not understand where the idea arose that the armed forces of the United States could only be deployed in response to successive acts of war against the United States with the permission of France, Russia and China. Those countries have plunged into the Ivory Coast, made war on the Chechnyans and Georgians, and virtually eliminated the ethnic Tibetans without consulting the United Nations about it. Yet a very senior member of the government of the United Kingdom told me last summer that there would be no problem on the Labour backbenches or in the EU if Russia or China were leading the coalition against Iraq. This is merely bilious envy of the United States.

President Bush spoke at the United Nations on 12 September of last year in support of the principles of international law. Given the gravity of the provocations it has endured and the military might it deploys, the United States has behaved with exemplary restraint. The allegations of 'cowboy' government and so forth are unfounded. Mr Bush does not want the United Nations to be reduced to the ineffectuality of the League of Nations.

How piquant is this turn of events! In the Thirties, no one would stand up even to Mussolini, much less Hitler and the Japanese. Now, a mighty power offers itself in support of enforcement of treaty obligations and sensible Security Council resolutions, and the offer is resisted because self-righteous weakness resents a law-enforcing power that has become unprecedentedly strong.

The United States has not acted unilaterally, but those who seek to impose unreasonable conditions on it will force it and its genuine allies to do so. Those who claim they want to strengthen the United Nations are in danger of completing its degradation by obliging the only power capable of enforcing international law and its allies to do so outside the posturing and the cynical chicanery of the Security Council.

There is no need to address absurd conspiratorial theories such as those that focus on oil. Oil has almost nothing to do with the American Iraq policy. The primary facts in the Iraq crisis are that the United States has more military power than all other countries in the world combined. That military power is backed by an economy as big as, and more productive and innovative than, the five next economies combined. It is also backed by an overwhelmingly perva sive popular culture, and by a vibrant high culture, as repeated American success in capturing British literary prizes demon strates. In the present crisis, the United States is prepared to use that power in a distasteful but urgent cause.

And while one country has that power, many of those which do not have it are spuri ously misusing the United Nations to try to collegialise the power of the United States. The Americans have indicated that they are prepared to pay something for international support. But what we now have is a chicken game. If the French, Russians, Chinese and Germans overplay their hands, they will be exposed as ineffective as well as disingenuous. They will gravely damage the United Nations they claim to be upholding. They could partly dismantle the Western Alliance, too late to help the Russians, isolating Ger many, which is the reverse of German desires and a status in which Germany's history is, to say the least, not encouraging. It would com pletely debunk France's masquerade as a great power. These countries can agree on little except their concern about the astound ing power and success of the United States. They will not fashion anything durable or geopolitically useful out of mere envy.

If they persist in this course, these countries will play no part in the resolution of the Middle Eastern problems. And the Russians and Chinese will have the consolation prize of trying to sort out North Korea for themselves while the US pro vides anti-missile defences for its Japanese and South Korean allies, if the South Kore ans go back to behaving as allies. The rem edy for those concerned at American power is not pettifogging harassment, but to make themselves stronger. George Bush's role is like that of Cato warning of Carthage, but with greater justice and the means to act on his warnings. He has taken a regrettably long time getting to grips with Iraq, which may have caused some to imagine he was only sabre-rattling. He wasn't.

MY enthusiasm for the miracle of modern Europe is no less than that of the most fervent Eurointegrationist. The level of cooperation and benevolence between these formerly hostile countries is an inspiration and a blessing. However, Europe is not a coherent force in international affairs and does not behave like a great power. There is no doubt that the dream of many of the Eurointegrationists was that with the end of the Cold War, and the evaporation of the Soviet threat, the soft hegemony of the United States, essential to keep the Soviets out of Western Europe, could be dispensed with, and that Europe could unite and reassert itself at the end of the terrible 20th century as the greatest political power-centre in the world. At least, it was hoped that Europe would become an alternative power source to the United States.

But Europe has been hobbled by the habits of weakness. The implosion of the Soviet Union made the United States, not Europe, incomparably more powerful. morally, as well as militarily, economically and culturally. Europe has been obsessed with the minutiae of union, an unremitting preoccupation.

Reunited at last, Germany is ready for a third try at being a great power. It has followed up to now Helmut Kohl's sincere policy of a European Germany rather than a German Europe. Kohl, like many Germans, feared what an unattached Germany would attempt politically. No one seriously imagines that Germany would be tempted by belligerency, but its foreign-policy preferences are erratic, as we have seen in the last few days. Germany still suffers a natural revulsion at its past, and its fear of itself has led to a culture of political weakness.

The present German policy is going to land them, once again, in a position of complete and sullen isolation. They are in danger of offending the Americans, irritating the British, and being abandoned by the French and the Russians when the time for mischief-making is over. The French, Russians and Chinese are at the poker table; the Germans are on the psychoanalyst's couch. Neither is much of a platform for the conduct of foreign policy.

France has had the policy throughout the Fifth Republic of purporting to be America's absolutely reliable ally in times of crisis, a foul-weather friend, while spending almost all of its energies attempting to undermine the Americans. The only instance when France did rally at a critical time was during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when de Gaulle supported President Kennedy with admirable robustness, while Harold Macmillan havered and wobbled. In fact. France has tried to set itself up at the head of all countries that resent American or Anglo-American leadership, while enjoying all the benefits of the Western Alliance. De Gaulle expelled Nato from France but continued to allow the United States the great privilege of guaranteeing French security. Francois Mitterrand began the Gulf war with a pro-Iraqi defence minister, Chevenement, whom he sacked when he saw the Americans and their other allies were serious, then called for an embargo, then sent an aircraft carrier with no planes on it as matters escalated, and finally sent 10,000 Foreign Legionnaires, Polish and German volunteers, and declared that they were 'advancing at the speed of the Blue Train' when they drove into Iraq without opposition. The French can usually be relied upon to pursue their self-interest. Most of the time, it is pulling the eagle's feathers, as long as it doesn't provoke a response. In the present circumstances, this is a dangerous game.

These are the foreign-policy postures of Western Continental Europe's two leading powers: a Freudian German fantasy and vintage French opportunism. This is not a serious alternative to American leadership. Nearly 60 years after the second world war, Western Europe's foreign policy is one of deliberate weakness, emphasis on soft options, sanctions, persuasion, commercial incentives. In the same way, their domestic policy, for notorious historical reasons. pays Danegeld to the working classes and small farmers at the expense of the incentive system and economic growth. Nine of the ten most aged populations in the world are in Western Europe. In Italy, three people work for every two on benefit. In the Nineties, in the United States, 44 million jobs were eliminated as superfluous or inefficient, and 75 million private-sector jobs were created, for 31 million net new jobs. In the European Union apart from the UK, a net five million jobs were created, all in the public sector.

The paradox of this is that the Europeans do not see that American power, which they resent, maintains their ability to be weak, to have shrunken defence budgets, minimal military capability beyond the borders of the EU, a relatively stagnant economy, and a general attitude of indulgent but righteous lassitude. Chris Patten grandly assures us, 'We know how important it is to handle failed states properly — and to prevent them failing in the first place. We know how to tackle the root causes of terrorism and violence.' We' is the Europeans, in contrast to the Americans, who rebuilt Europe and Japan. created South Korea and Taiwan, reorganised the Mexican currency and democratised and revolutionised the economy of that country in a managed free-trade agreement while Europe has straight-armed the Turks.

Chris Patten added, 'Frankly, smart bombs matter, but smart development assistance matters more.' Not necessarily. and Chris Patten doesn't know a great deal about either, but smart EU Commissioners would be welcome too.

The United States does feel under some threat after 11 September, and it will destroy the threat. Its policy is one of strength, constantly maintained but sparingly applied. The war on terrorism is at least a partial success. In the 17 months since the 11 September attacks, the international terrorists have only managed to blow up one nightclub in Bali, a small hotel in Mombasa, and to kill a few German tourists in Tunisia. They have had no success in the United States or other advanced countries. The incidents mentioned were tragic and outrageous, but they are a sparse follow-through on the blood-curdling threats of bin Laden and others.

I don't believe there will be a very serious falling-out between any of the major countries, as they all ultimately oppose terrorism. But the Germans should remember that the greatest postwar act of statesmanship in any country was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's rejection of Stalin's offer of German reunification in exchange for German neutrality. Adenauer carried West German opinion in accepting temporary but indefinite division in exchange for permanent alliance with America and the West. If Germany, having achieved reunification, impairs its alliance with the United States, especially under the dubious enticements of the French and to the delight of Saddam Hussein, it would be colossally stupid, though, by German historical standards, well short of a catastrophe.

THERE are, of course, many things about America that may not be pleasing to everyone. I myself often find it overcommercialised and even garish. I quote the distinguished historian Paul Hollander that American 'mass culture enshrines mindlessness, triviality, the cult of violence, a shallow sentimentality and a pervasive entertainment orientation'. Millions of people, and not all of them in what used to be called the Third World, form their opinion of the United States from exposure to such sources, which do not accurately convey the good qualities of the American public. They rather convey the commercial acumen of certain categories of American businessmen.

There are great bodies of opinion that rail against American support of Israel, especially Muslims and their sympathisers. The presence of Israel symbolises the sense of Arab retreat and inferiority that has persisted and grown for many centuries. Since Israel is a small country, the myth was created that only with massive American support could such a little people have inflicted such defeats on its Muslim neighbours. In its more odious permutations, this argument becomes mere anti-Semitism, and many antiSemites are also anti-American. Ayatollah Khomeini was the first prominent Muslim leader to preach that America was conspiring to destroy Islam. He raged against the United States in a manner as intense as Hitler raged against the Jews, even if he was not as forensically talented. Fortunately. most Iranians completely reject this proposition and are waiting for the overthrow of the post-Khomeini tyranny and for Iran's re-entry into the Western, particularly the American, orbit.

There are somewhat more respectable anti-American complainants among anticapitalists, anti-modernists and militant environmentalists, all of whom tend to attach themselves like limpets to any antiAmerican cause that appears. There are vocal but generally uninformed people in these groups who claim that the United States promotes global inequality, exploits the poor, assaults the environment, is dominated by large corporations, and that it is militaristic.

The anti-globalists rail at the great American corporations: Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Nike, Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, ExxonMobil, Levis, Starbucks and MTV. To some extent, this hostility is sour grapes, emanating from those who wish to direct youth elsewhere than in the pathways of addictive American consumerism, But those who riot at IMF meetings are the political equivalent of football hooligans; they are incapable of coherent articulation and are merely misfits who should be dispelled with as little force as necessary whenever they become disorderly. They should not be accorded any credence in the discussion of serious issues.

And there are the raving, foaming-atthe-mouth Americophobic lunatics, followers or kindred spirits of Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag, who thought 11 September a justifiable, or at least comprehensible, assault on an evil country, though one in which they have lived comfortably and enjoyed its constitutional liberties and general prosperity for many decades. Like people of other countries, some Americans, especially certain academics and writers, are carriers of a national self-hate and death wish, but, unlike some countries, they are refreshingly unrepresentative of public opinion.

The overwrought French commentator Jean Baudrillard claimed equivalence between the slaughter of thousands of innocents on 11 September and the 'horror of living and working in [the hideous and arrogant] sarcophagi of concrete and steel' of the World Trade Center towers. To such people, just to build a 100-storey building is a provocation, at least if it is American and not, for example, Malaysian. That otherwise pleasant man Harold Pinter professes to regard the United States as the greatest source of terrorism on earth'. It is more accurate to say that, on this subject, Harold and those who think like him are the greatest source of drivel on earth.

Determination of alliances between great nations are not referenda on fastfood or Hollywood. In those matters people vote with their feet and their wallets, and the success of the United States in these fields, too, is beyond dispute, if not beyond criticism. Relations between great nations are, or should be, determined by their national interests.

The national interest of the United Kingdom requires a good and close relationship with Europe and with the United States. In general, the Prime Minister has done a commendable job of facing down the lobotomous old Left in his own party, being close but not obsequious to Washington, and recreating Pitt the Younger as he has co-ordinated Iraq policy with the European countries tired of being browbeaten by the French and Germans.

Tony Blair has adhered to a position that is not popular in his party and which he has not been as successful as would have been thought in selling to the country. He has been reviled outrageously as a poodle of the United States. The nadir of journalistic insolence on this subject, in my observations, occurred last week when the egregious Jeremy Paxman asked him if he and President Bush 'prayed together'. It was the climax of a line of questioning designed to incite the inference that the two men are religious quacks. Jeremy Paxman might have noticed that the religious quacks are on the other side of the war against terror.

The Prime Minister has naturally emphasised international law and holding Saddam to his obligations over the war on terror and regime-change. In general, Tony Blair has straddled skilfully but has been conscientious and courageous, and has put principle before expediency at great inconvenience to himself. fain Duncan Smith has resisted the urgings of some of his partisans to try to exploit the divisions in the government. He has put country ahead of party. Both men have distinguished themselves starkly from the shabby performance of the German and French leaders.

It is not conceivable that any country would not wish alliance with the United States if alliance were available on acceptable terms. The United States is not an onerous ally. It has been reasonably content to consider the bloc of states whose security it guarantees in Nato as a pool of potential volunteers rather than conscripts to its causes. It doesn't seriously infringe the sovereignty even of Canada, which is more completely integrated into the American economy than is the state of California, as 85 per cent of Canada's external trade and 43 per cent of its GDP are trade with the USA. It is precisely because the United States has been so undemanding that some varieties of antiAmericanism have become so vigorous. The legitimate application of strength generally has a sedative effect, and that is what we are about to observe.

The clear American preference is to work with reliable allies, but not to be strangled by Lilliputians masquerading as allies. The United States gave the world the League of Nations and the United Nations. It is an enlightened and civilised democracy that generally tries to behave responsibly, with as much success in this regard as any other important country. It certainly has no lessons to learn on state morality from the Germans and the French. Many may deride its popular culture or resent the retention of the death penalty in many of the American states. 1 personally do not approve of the death penalty, but these matters are settled by popular choice in the United States. With the same system here, capital punishment would be restored. In any case, this is not a foreign-policy issue.

MORE powerful than its mass culture is America's concept of individualism and freedom. Under the constitution of the United States, all unallocated powers reside with the people, who famously endowed themselves with that constitution; its rights were not devolved to them by any other authority. When the students and dissidents of Eastern Europe were dismantling the Soviet empire, their public readings were of Jefferson and Lincoln, and the occupants of Tiananmen Square built a replica of the Statue of Liberty.

The United States will pay more attention to the United Kingdom than to any other power. This status has been earned by British leaders of both parties, with rare exceptions, from Winston Churchill to Tony Blair. We have the fourth economy in the world and have earned and enjoy considerable respect.

When Iraq has been resolved, there will remain many urgent challenges in international affairs. We will have to launch a determined and generous aid programme to underdeveloped countries capable of channelling such aid into genuine progress for the needful. I have never been the greatest supporter of the Third World, because of its chronic misgovernment, but we must show more interest in some of those countries and we must make it harder for the West, and the United States in particular, to be caricatured as indifferent to or even exploitative of those countries.

We should devise some form of trusteeship for failed states that stabilises them and prevents them becoming infestations of terrorists, like abandoned houses occupied by neighbourhood thugs. And some plan for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement will have to be sponsored by the Americans, Europeans and the reasonable Arabs. In all these initiatives, and in many others — including a rigorous formulation of the right of pre-emptive attacks so it is not abused — little can be accomplished without the United States, but it cannot be accomplished by America alone. Yet there is a huge opportunity for this country in all of these areas.

Our relations with Europe are vital and intimate, but going to a common security and foreign policy would lead to a constant struggle with the German practice of using foreign policy as a substitute for psychotherapy, and with the Ruritanian posturing of the French. It would also anaesthetise our economy. Surely, our national destiny is more exalted than that.

It is more than 40 years since the American secretary of state Dean Acheson said that 'Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role'. Being the junior but influential partner of the United States in modernising world institutions, including the United Nations and Nato (and ideally the EU), in alleviating the conditions that breed political extremism, as America's chief associate in crushing the terrorists, is an important role. Never has a country that had ceased to be the most influential in the world managed such a slight and dignified diminution of status to a still important position as Britain would then have made.

To give maximum service to the causes of freedom and economic growth, we must maintain and build on our unique alliance with the United States. It is preferable to continue to be envied because of our success and attachment to principle than to fall altogether into the company of those governments for which cowardice is wisdom, ingratitude is olympian serenity, and the spitefulness of the weak is moral indignation.

This is an edited extract from a speech given by Lord Black at the Centre for Policy Studies on 13 February.