The Bush administration's extraordinary capacity for undermining American national interests while attempting to advance them is on prominent display this week as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, until now President George W. Bush's closest ally, arrives in Washington to address a joint session of Congress, the first British prime minister to do so since Winston Churchill.

The prime minister's visit coincides with the decision taken by his friends in the White House and Pentagon - one perhaps should now say his former friends - to make him take the fall for President Bush in the matter of the false information used in the president's State of the Union address to justify invading Iraq.

The White House had first tried to lay the blame on George Tenet, director of the CIA, who obediently put his head on the block last week, saying that indeed it was he and his agency that did it.

However, the CIA is under the president's responsibility, so it was thought better that Tenet add that the CIA got its information from Britain. A distraught Downing Street in turn said that Britain received the information from still another source - which the British government has conveniently sworn never to reveal.

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, declared on Monday (his final day in the position) that "the bottom has been gotten to." The buck has stopped. Unknowable unknowns did it.

The president is guilty only of taking seriously what faithful friends told him. One is expected to assume that his friend the vice president, Dick Cheney, neglected to tell him that his office had ordered the uranium from Niger story checked out in February 2002 and had found there was nothing to it.

One must wonder why these people expect the public to take seriously such bamboozlement, producing, along the way, the disgraceful victimization of one of the few true friends the Bush administration has had in the whole Iraq adventure.

Does anyone really doubt that before the war Washington was sweeping absolutely everything remotely useful into packaging for public opinion an Iraq invasion already decided upon for ideological and strategic reasons? The White House, Congress and the press, under a variety of political interests and headline and television pressures, have collaborated in turning the issue of whether the public was lied to about the reason for the "preemptive" invasion of Iraq into an argument over who was responsible for saying that Iraq attempted to buy a form of processed uranium from Niger. This successfully trivialized the matter, as the administration wishes. The American public, normally disposed to support the president, is naturally inclined to say that if that's all the controversy is about, it's a minor matter, compared with the big issues of Iraq's liberation and what now is happening to American troops occupying Iraq - 140,000 Americans surrounded by 23 million Iraqis (with the deployment of the poor 3rd Infantry Division, which fought most of the war, extended indefinitely; what happened to that American army that was going to fight three wars at once?) The British press and public are not taking this betrayal of Tony Blair calmly, least of all at a moment when the United States refuses to yield up to Britain the two British citizens about to be put on military trial at what we must, alas, describe as the U.S. political prison at Guantánamo Bay - outside the reach of American constitutional guarantees and the formal legal jurisdiction of the United States, or of anyone else.

The prime minister seems too badly hounded and confused by critics of his own government's handling of the Iraq affair to think straight about these betrayals by the Bush administration. He might have salvaged some dignity by canceling the Washington trip and making it plain that London's terrorism policy is not totally dictated by Washington.

The Bush administration has distinguished itself by its inability or unwillingness to deal with allies as equals, with legitimate interests and views of their own to be respected.

This is the issue Washington obfuscates and London has refused to raise. Prime Minister Blair's support for the United States has been exploited to lend legitimacy to a war entirely conceived and controlled by Washington.

The United States has a new kind of government, which takes a new view of what allies are worth, and how they are expected to behave.

This has been an underlying issue throughout the U.S.-European drama of the past 10 months. It will determine the future of the Western alliance, as well as the character of the new European Union now being ushered into existence by an EU constitution, EU expansion and an independent EU security policy.

Copyright © 2003 the International Herald Tribune

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