A Journey (103 page)

It was the oddest of periods. The reform programme was buzzing along, I felt on top form on the issues, but around me was a kind of sustained mayhem of scandal and controversy. In my eyrie high in the trees, with my soulmates, we could replenish mind and body before venturing back out into the undergrowth below; and we cleared our way through it with as good a temper and will as we could muster. But if it felt like we were under siege, that’s because we were.

It tripped me into error at times as well. Following the local elections of May 2006, which were bad but frankly could have been much worse, I decided to reshuffle the Cabinet. There’s a kind of convention that it should be done every year. It’s clear that governments need refreshing and there is a need to let new blood through. Also, a prime minister or president is always engaged in a kind of negotiation over the state of their party that requires people’s ambitions to be assuaged. Some ambitions are reasonable, some are not, but they are wholly reasonable to those who have them. If you don’t promote someone, after a time they resent you. If you promote them, you put someone else out, and then that person resents you. You look for an elaborate index of methods to keep the offloaded onside, but let me tell you from experience: it never works. The only thing that determines their loyalty from that moment on is their character. The good behave; the bad don’t. Unless you give them something that really is spectacular as an alternative to being a minister, then they aren’t fooled; and, naturally, it’s all played out in the media, and the impression is they’ve been sacked. The good characters in these circumstances tend to be a small and distinguished minority.

So, you have to reshuffle. But here’s some advice: you should always promote or demote for a purpose, not for effect. With this one, I determined that we should make a splash, show we still had vigour, show I was still governing for the future. I had thought of making Charles Clarke Foreign Secretary. He would have done a great job, and probably in retrospect I should have done it, but he was mired in the wretched ‘foreign offenders’ business. There was also a case for keeping Jack Straw. He had done really well and was admired by his fellow foreign ministers. There was no compelling reason to move him, other than that he had been doing it for five years; but when I think about it, moving him for that reason was plain stupid. I even toyed with the idea of David Miliband, but thought that for his own sake he should remain domesticated, since that allowed him a better profile in the party.

In the end, I made a sort of ‘worst of all worlds’ set of decisions. Having put David in Environment, I moved Margaret Beckett from there to be Foreign Secretary. She was stunned rather than elated with the promotion. Unsurprisingly, Jack was upset at being replaced. I offered Charles Defence, which he refused – foolishly, in my view – and he returned to the back benches. All in all, a mess at the wrong time and with the wrong people, who I needed onside. The rest of it in fact allowed some good promotions of younger people like Douglas Alexander, James Purnell, Andy Burnham and Jim Murphy. But overall, it did little for the government and harm to me.

As if that wasn’t enough, in the summer of 2006 came the Israel/Lebanon war. That event, and my reaction to it, probably did me more damage than anything since Iraq. It showed how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people; but also how set (stuck?) in my own mode of thinking I had become.

The whole episode demonstrated the difficulty in fighting the modern, asymmetrical struggle in which we are engaged. Hezbollah launched an attack on Israel, low-level but killing several Israeli soldiers. Gaza was by this time locked down, following the Hamas takeover and expulsion of the Palestinian Authority. As the Israelis stepped up their siege of Gaza and the peace process went nowhere, Hamas fired rockets into Israeli towns. Then Hezbollah opened up a new front.

It was a quite deliberate provocation. Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon. True, the Shebaa Farms issue – land taken by Israel in the 1980s and still occupied, and the theoretical reason why Hezbollah said they had to remain armed – was unresolved, but the amount of land was tiny. The issue wasn’t really troubling anyone and the real challenges inside Lebanon were to do with the slow and steady accretion of control by Hezbollah over the political and military structures of the country. Lebanon was a democracy. Beirut had been rebuilt since the disasters of the early 1980s. But, as all over the region, the essential underlying tensions, born of the much wider struggle, remained extant, not extinct. The country was at peace, but it was fragile, its democratic politicians under threat, several of them like Rafiq Hariri assassinated, and the influence of Syria pervasive. Such a land of beauty, history and promise; but a land that attracted to itself all the poisonous gases of a region that at its core was decaying.

Israel reacted to the provocation in the way it does. Israelis believe one thing and they believe it from their perception of experience: if provoked, do not turn the other cheek; strike back and hard. You take one eye; we will take out both. They believe any sign of weakness and their short history of nationhood, sixty years, will end.

There was no doubt who started the war. There is a familiar pattern to its unfolding. Israel is attacked. Israel strikes back. Here lies the problem. At the outset, people are with them. Behind the scenes, many even in the Middle East, anxious about Hezbollah’s links to Iran and seeing them like Hamas as proxies of Iranian power, urged privately that Israel destroy Hezbollah. Western leaders who could see the same thing queued up, at the beginning, to advise Israel to stand firm and hit hard.

As the conflict began, the G8 summit at St Petersburg got under way. It was memorable for two things. There was a great ‘George’ moment when, not knowing the microphones were on in the meeting room, he greeted me in George-like fashion with ‘Yo, Blair’. We proceeded to have a conversation that was recorded for posterity until I realised we were being listened to, but it was all light-hearted stuff and could have been a thousand times worse. People went nuts back home, for some reason finding it an insult to Britain. We have become something we really never used to be: chippy. Personally I didn’t have the chip, so I thought the ‘Yo, Blair’ greeting funny. In fact, it indicated total intimacy. Of anyone I ever met at a high level in politics, he was the person least likely to be rude or offensive. He would talk to Alastair or Jonathan in a way and with an informality that most presidents of most countries would never have begun to tolerate. Alastair in particular used to josh him in a manner that probably nobody did, not even those in his inner circle, and I think George kind of liked it. After I left office, a group of my friends visited the White House with Leo in tow, but without me or Cherie. George happened to be there at his desk and heard they were there. He came out, showed them round, took each one into the Oval Office, had a picture and was thoroughly and completely charming. Didn’t need to do it. Wasn’t pushed to do it. Just did it.

So ‘Yo, Blair’ was a joke; but unfortunately only I got it!

Anyway, that was a pinprick. The other thing was the discussion of Lebanon. What was interesting was that, behind all the usual statements and resolutions and press conferences, there was a common belief that Hezbollah had it coming, and if Israel took them out, so much the better.

Of course, what then happened is also familiar. After Israel retaliated with force, Hezbollah hit back with rockets. The inevitable visual paradigm of such a battle is: superior ‘Western’ force, with superior weaponry, causes devastation. Within days, the international angst transfers from the provocation to the retaliation. Suddenly Israel is the aggressor. The damage done is truly shocking. But then force employed in that way always is. The alternative is not clear. Do too little and the provokers are emboldened. In Israel, the worry was that it was all too little. In Britain, as elsewhere with the exception of the US, the reaction was: it’s far too much.

By its nature, such action is not effective, if by ‘effective’ one means the enemy is defeated. That’s the point about this modern warfare. Hezbollah were and are an urban guerrilla movement. They target civilians deliberately. Their weapons are poorer, so they kill relatively few. They assume the posture of the plucky underdogs. Israel is a government with a well-armed and well-trained army and air force. They do not target civilians. But their only ultimate weapon, in a civilian setting where the guerrilla movement is located, is deterrence. Therefore they use their force to try to deter further attacks. Inevitably, large numbers of civilians are killed. They quickly assume the mantle of oppressors.

International opinion, at first understanding the provocation, rapidly became dismayed at the nightly scenes of carnage of innocent Lebanese casualties. Dismay pretty sharply then turned to condemnation.

There then came about a choice in politics which did me real and lasting damage. European opinion quickly solidified around the demand that the Israelis should stop. Unilaterally. Even if Hezbollah continued with their rockets. US opinion was in a totally different place, with over 60 per cent of Americans supporting the Israeli action.

I felt it was wrong that there should be a unilateral cessation. It should be on both sides, and we couldn’t expect Israel to stop unless the rockets stopped. But that was not how it seemed to most people. They felt we were simply indifferent to the bloodshed. I thought the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was in a really tricky position. I knew if I were him I would regard it as impossible to stop unless Hezbollah did too; or unless they were beaten; or, which is what finally occurred, Lebanon took enough pain that Hezbollah would not feel they could do it again. It was a ghastly method of deterrence and horrible for Lebanon. But I could see it from his and Israel’s position.

Underneath it all, of course, was the state of the Israel/Palestine peace process. With that stalled, all manner of bad things were going to happen. With that moving, each tunnel – in a region full of dark tunnels – suddenly acquired some light at the end of it. In my mind, it all came back to the same problem, of which the Israel/Arab conflict was the manifestation, not the cause. Israel/Palestine is used as a potent source of friction and war because of religious difference.

The occupation of Palestinian land may be an injustice, depending on your viewpoint, but this is a region with plenty of injustices. What transformed it into a threat to global security was that Jerusalem is sacred for Islam, the third most holy site because according to Islam the Prophet was transported there in a dream; the occupation of that land by Jews was an affront, an indignity and most of all a symbol of Islamic weakness. It invoked every dimension of Muslim victimhood from the Crusades onwards. It spoke of a religion disrespected and people oppressed because of it.

Gradually, but too gradually, with tentative steps when strong strides were required, there came to be the outline of a solution, which was really a compromise. Israel has its state; the state of Palestine comes into being. Jerusalem is divided, at least territorially. The holy sites are shared.

It would do as a solution – there isn’t another – but getting to it has begotten all sorts of other obstacles. So a really quite simple answer has come to have a quite horrendously complex process to achieve it. The result is occasional breakthroughs, punctuated by long periods of regression or drift. When it moves forward, everything else looks better; when it doesn’t, as I say, bad things happen. The conflict in Lebanon was just another example.

The war went on longer than it should. The alienation of Israel from the international community – and this time international opinion, not governments – became worse. As one of the few people ready to understand their point of view, I suffered accordingly.

In September 2006 I visited Beirut. I had talked constantly to the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, throughout. He was a thoroughly decent man, but absolutely caught between dislike of Hezbollah and the impossibility of doing anything other than verbally lacerating the Israeli action. I landed at the airport in a military plane and drove in from the airport with as heavy a security detail as I had ever had. Unsurprisingly, I was not popular with many Lebanese people. But, as ever, the key political leaders understood the complexity of the situation and understood, above all, that for Hezbollah to have emerged victorious would have been disastrous for Lebanon’s future. We met in his office in the old part of town and, even being preoccupied as I was with the politics, I thought how beautiful it was, how rich in the history of the region, of its religions, art and culture.

He was dignified and friendly. He had one straightforward message: there will never be peace unless Israel/Palestine is resolved. ‘With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing is,’ he said. I pledged again to do what I could to get the US president to refocus our efforts on it.

I met several members of the government, some Muslim, some Christian, some Druze. All were grateful that someone had come to see them. Their message was extraordinarily poignant: their country was on the brink, it had to be saved; but its fate depended on resolving the power struggle of the region as a whole. A couple of them said that their colleagues had been assassinated over the past years, almost picked off one by one, and they said, without a hint of self-pity, that this might be their fate too, but nonetheless the spirit of the people was good and would prevail in time. At our press conference there was an organised disruption, and as always, of course, that took the news.

As I sat with Siniora, I realised that my own political problem was now very acute; terminal, in fact. At points I had wondered why I didn’t just cave in and condemn Israel and call for them to stop unilaterally. The Israelis would have understood it, and it would have been the proverbial safety valve for the fierce political criticism.