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Blair's Three Amigos
Three former cabinet ministers have come to Tony Blair's assistance and thrown their weight behind a Yes vote in the EU treaty referendum.
In a joint opinion column in the Guardian, Stephen Byers, Peter Mandelson and Alan Milburn warned that a No vote would betray the "progressive social democratic programme" which the Labour Government represents. They also claimed that opponents of the treaty are in the grip of a US-style neo-conservative agenda.
While Blair will be grateful for the support, he might not have wanted the case for the constitution made in such party-political terms. It may be gratifying to depict closer integration as a guarantee of EU-style social solidarity but Blair has been eager to deny Euro-realist claims that the converse is true and that a Yes vote will tie Britain to the EU's stagnant economy and sky-high unemployment.
EURSOC argued last week that Blair's status as the US's closest ally prevented Eurofanatics from exploiting anti-American sentiment to increase the Yes vote. We claimed then that while the Eurofanatic left was unlikely to ditch Blair, supporters of the treaty would seek to bypass him in order to convert public disapproval of the United States, and president Bush in particular, into support for the European constitution.
We did not expect the strategy to develop so quickly. Milburn, Mandelson and Byers, all safely out of government, write of how opponents of the treaty are dominated by a "neo-liberal" and "neo-con" ideology.
The UK neo-cons, they claim, support a "British foreign policy whose only leg is the US alliance."
The former ministers continue that the constitution's opponents see EU defence "as a joke" and then, oddly, go on to list just why it is a joke - even though they claim to be defending it.
The neo-conservative opponents of the treaty, they say, "They would let the Balkans burn, African wars rage and the Palestinian Authority go without help."
The EU watched the Balkans burn until NATO stepped in. One EU member state even had military officials pass information to the people who were doing much of the burning. France and Germany, continental Europe's most powerful nations, sympathised, at least initially, with opposite sides in the conflict.
Britons are happy with NATO, even on a pragmatic level: If it isn't broken, why fix it? An EU-wide defence force is another unnecessary expense. Euro-fanatics should not attempt to force Britain to choose between the two: They may not like the results.
In Rwanda, in Algeria, in the Congo, certain EU nations have been implicated in the worst African massacres of recent years - and the only European states to intervene in Africa have done so mainly to protect their interests and citizens on the continent.
There is no suggestion that a united EU military force would be capable of gathering EU-wide support to intervene when either NATO or the UN were unable to.
And as for the Palestinian Authority, well if providing Yasser Arafat's people with "help" means sending millions of Euros in untraceable cash in the knowledge that some of it may end up in the hands of mass-murdering terror organisations and suicide bombers, well most Britons could live without that.
Like too many other conspiracy theorists, Blair's three amigos credit America's neo-conservatives with more power and influence than they merit.
Like their co-conspirators, Mandelson, Byers and Milburn portray neo-conservative influence as a shady, manipulative and behind-the-scenes kind of power - we wonder why this is the case?
By giving the EU constitution a purely left-wing ideological significance and then warning that rejecting it will open Britain to even more sinister neo-con influence, Blair's three amigos are doing his cause more harm than good.
