Leading article: This special relationship is looking rather jaded

Thursday, 17 May 2007

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Those were the days - days of barbecues and jeans, days of country walks and Colgate, days of informality and innocence. How distant they seem now. Six years on from that first, cheery Bush-Blair summit at Camp David, the special relationship has a tired and tarnished look. The two leaders meet now in largely formal settings, in business suits and beneath flags. Isolated in their own countries, older - and perhaps a little wiser - they stick together for comfort.

In travelling to Washington to make his farewells, Tony Blair has underlined the change. How long ago is it that London was a US President's natural staging post on his way to and from the rest of the world? Since Iraq started to go wrong, Mr Bush has done Mr Blair the courtesy of preferring Warsaw or Berlin. An alliance whose closeness was once the envy of other Europeans had become just too much of a political liability in Britain.

We know at once too much (thanks to our former ambassador in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer) and too little (because Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former ambassador to the UN, has not been allowed to publish his memoirs) about the discussions that led to the invasion of Iraq. There is still controversy about whose zeal to remove Saddam Hussein was the greater, although Britain's inferior power and the assumption that Mr Blair was the follower not the leader saddled him with the damaging soubriquet "Bush's poodle".

Nor do we know for certain, even now, whether Iraq's supposed weapons were the real reason for the US and British military action, or just a pretext whose legality could be fudged. And it will be for historians to judge, in the end, whether it was the invasion itself, or the failure to prepare for the aftermath, that constituted the fatal error. Those who supported the war naturally prefer the latter judgement; we incline to the former.

What is not contestable is that the war in Iraq has proved a catastrophic miscalculation that has blighted the reputations of both leaders. It casts its pall over almost anything else they might have achieved. It is telling that a theme of Mr Blair's day in Washington will be the agreement on power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Africa and climate change will also feature, but not Iraq - our most significant and costly joint enterprise. Nor will Mr Blair be passing by Capitol Hill to pick up his Congressional medal, associated as it is with his support for Mr Bush over Iraq.

But it is not only the personal reputations of both leaders that have been damaged. That elusive "special relationship" has suffered, too, at both the political and the popular level. The awkwardness was all too apparent in Gordon Brown's recent visit to the White House. Already Prime Minister in waiting, he needed to be acknowledged as such in Washington, but could not afford to be seen paying court to George Bush. The solution was the "drop-by" - a furtive, off-camera encounter that was a sad comment on what the Bush-Blair alliance has done for bilateral relations.

That power in Washington is now divided between a discredited Republican White House and a Congress controlled by Democrats should make it easier for Mr Brown to deal with the US without seeming to kow-tow to Mr Bush. The legacy of transatlantic relations Mr Blair bequeaths, however, must be very far from the one he intended. In return for helping to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mr Blair hoped that Mr Bush would commit the US to bringing peace to the Middle East and that, between them, they would leave the world a better place. The mayhem that has been unleashed across the region is proof of the arrogance of their misjudgement and a measure of how far they failed.