What’s it like to be a former world leader who has “no credibility at all” and at whom American officials allegedly roll their eyes when he turns up with another cunning plot? Is it satisfying to be is the figurehead of an organisation that one Palestinian official described as “useless, useless, useless”? United Nations officials say they want to be “divested of” the “tiresome” hero of Chilcot.
Tony Blair became Special Envoy to the Middle East Quartet the same day he resigned as Prime Minister, replacing James Wolfensohn, the World Bank official who had the integrity to resign when he found his every effort to restart the Palestinian economy blocked by the Israelis who could count on automatic diplomatic cover from the United States. There was certainly a stark contrast in their approaches. At the time, Blair’s appointment looked much a like pay-off from President George W Bush for the original dodgy dossier, and it has been the gift that keeps giving, since the correspondence now leaked by Exaro indicates shameless influence peddling with all the great and good of the world. Like the American ward heeler: “He seen his chances and he took ’em.”
Blair’s Quartet job put him in the phonebook for major politicians across the world – he already was on the bankers’ and lobbyists’ automatic dial. And he probably has a Wataniya handset from his latest clients since the recent revelations. The leaked missives show Blair using strings to the world’s great and good to get the Israelis to release the spectrum for the company, whose success, he implied, would stoke the engines of the West Bank economy. Doubtless all those unemployed Palestinians would be calling as they waited in long lines at the checkpoints that divide their circumscribed rat run of a country.
Blair won’t be missed at the Quartet, and his departure might be the right time to put the stake through the heart of this shambling cadaver of an organisation. The Quartet could have been useful once. Back in 2002, it brought the UN into the peace process in a way that was acceptable to the US (and Israel). Russia in those days, while co-operating with the US on most issues, had a residual integrity on Middle Eastern issues, and even the European Union (including Britain) occasionally defied the Washington-Likud consensus.
Early on, the Quartet drew up the famous and since much-palimpsested Road Map, which if followed might have led places, perhaps even closer to peace. But the Quartet has long ago dwindled past that residually useful role. It began with diplomatic ambiguity and rapidly shrank into vacuity as its communiqués referring to the Road Map and failed to note the burn marks where the Israel Defense Forces had sprayed it with phosphorus.
Blair took over just as UN official Alvaro de Soto quit as UN Special Representative to the Palestinians. De Soto’s final report graphically outlined the dismal history of the Quartet, which I leaked to The Guardian in 2007 (http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/06/12/DeSotoReport.pdf) is a merciless and accurate depiction of what the Quartet does and did to the UN – and is even more true now. The genius of the Quartet was that by luring the UN in, it neutered the organisation’s definitive legal solutions. Dodgy dossiers could be passed off as peace plans, and regular statements about progress could disguise complete stagnation.
The UN had already charted the real Road Map, with the full force of international law: Israel should withdraw from the Occupied Territories, allow refugees to return, or compensate them. Under international law, the settlements that Benjamin Netanyahu is expanding even as Blair shakes his hand are illegal – a point reinforced by UN Security Council resolutions and a decision of the International Court of Justice.
To be fair, Blair took over a sinking ship. But he has been steering it into shallower and shallower diplomatic waters ever since. And now it seems he is thinking of moving on, although it may be more likely that the exasperated principals behind the Quartet think that he has been giving their straw horse a bad mane and are giving him the bum’s rush. It is indeed high time that the UN divested itself of the man who would not listen to it on Iraq.