It was brilliant while it lasted. Since he joined US President George W. Bush for a press conference on the lawn at Camp David a month ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has managed to have the best of both worlds, convincing the US that he's a true believer in the "special relationship" between the two states and reminding Britons he's no Tony Blair. But the game may soon be up.
At their first summit, the workmanlike rapport between Brown and Bush perfectly suited both sides. The Bush-Blair love match was a thing of the past; that went without saying. The new duet would be a partnership, businesslike and profitable.
Brown looked at Bush and said he was pleased "to be able to affirm and to celebrate the historic partnership of shared purpose between our two countries."
Bush looked at Brown and said: "The relationship between Great Britain and America is our most important bilateral relationship."
Celebrants on both sides of the aisle recognized this as a marriage of convenience, but a successful one none the less.
In Britain, the headline writers were persuaded that Brown was "no poodle."
In the US, it was clear that Bush and Brown, like Bush and Blair before them, would "stay the course."
However, it is only a matter of time before their differences threaten to bring them down. Brown could soon be forced to make decisions about the deployment of British troops in Iraq that will put both his political resilience at home and his alliance with Bush to the test.
In the middle of next month, the top two US officials in Iraq, US General David Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, will report their findings on progress there. They seem likely to conclude that the US troop "surge" is working and the Iraqi government isn't.
I won't hazard a guess as to what Petraeus and Crocker will or will not have to say about the British presence in southern Iraq and about the security situation there.
But regardless of whether they talk about it, the fact is that the picture in and around Basra is far from pretty. By almost any measure, conditions in the south have deteriorated in recent years, both for Iraqi civilians and British troops.
In the aftermath of the Petraeus-Crocker report, everyone's attention will be drawn to Baghdad and its environs -- and to the US' predicament.
But at some point, heads will turn toward Brown and a single question will float his way: Now what are you going to do?
When that happens, the nature of Brown's administration could change radically.
Last week, Bush, in his speech arguing that to "abandon" Iraq would replicate the "tragedy of Vietnam," described himself with grim pride as a "wartime president."
The last thing Brown wants to be is a wartime prime minister.
For at least a year now, an assumption has lodged itself firmly in the British body politic: We're on the way out of Iraq; our boys and girls are coming home.
Though Blair never got credit for it (or blame from the US side) he presided over a massive drawdown of personnel -- from 46,000 in the spring of 2003 to 8,500 in May 2005 to 5,500 before he left office.
There the number stands today. It is expected to fall again, to 5,000, in the autumn, when the UK turns the besieged Basra palace, once one of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's smaller residences, over to the Iraqis and then concentrates its forces at Basra airport.
In coming weeks and months, Brown will come under increasing pressure to not "cut and run" from the south.
Official Washington remains discreet when it comes to criticism of the prime minister, but cries of "Who lost Basra?" fill the air as outriders for the Bush administration circle Fort Brown.
The Washington Post quoted a senior US intelligence official in Baghdad as saying: "The British have basically been defeated in the south."
Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA intelligence analyst and early advocate of the invasion of Iraq, says British military participation in Iraq "has been meaningless for some time."
Last week, US General John Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the US army and adviser to Petraeus, who had just returned from Iraq, told BBC radio that Basra was rife with "almost gangland warfare" and that with further British troop withdrawals, "the situation will continue to deteriorate."
But what is Brown to do? He will probably try to walk a fine line on troop deployments in Iraq, bringing the numbers down -- slowly -- so as not to rile Washington or risk the appearance of defeat and yet still keep the home front happy.
Up to now, the softly, softly approach has worked. For a couple of years, the quid pro quo has kept the US at bay has been that Britain will shoulder a larger and larger burden in Afghanistan -- a cause more easily justified to the British electorate than Iraq -- while tiptoeing out of Iraq.
Suddenly, that quid pro quo is looking very shaky. For one thing, the British experience in Afghanistan's Helmand Province is getting direr, and more politically complicated, by the day. For another, Basra itself looks more and more complicated.
The same could be said for relations between Brown and Bush and between London and Washington. The inherent tension between Brown's determination to distance himself from Blair and his commitment to the special relationship could reach a breaking point before Bush leaves office.
A pragmatist, Brown was never going to buy into the war in Iraq, much less the broader neoconservative US agenda, in the way Blair did. As Brown tries to move out of Blair's shadow, and to recover the support Blair lost by his closeness to Bush, Brown is seeking to recalibrate the special relationship, not end it.
If Blair's bond to Bush and the US was forged in the heat of Sept. 9, 2001, Brown has sought a cooler version, one that resides in the shared history of the two countries but is free of the ideological straitjacket of the last six years.
Blair's inner circle thinks Brown's special-relationship balancing act is a ramshackle intellectual construct doomed to failure -- or "tripe," as one of them said.
You can't pick and choose when to be close or not close to the US, the Blairites would argue.
Of course you can, the Brownites would fire back: Former British prime minister Harold Wilson was right to refuse to commit troops to Vietnam. Does Brown have to be Wilson in order not to be Blair?
Brown will hope that time is on his side -- as of today, it's 509 days until Bush leaves office. After all, he's got his own election -- not just the one in the US -- to think about.
All summer long, Brown has been sitting pretty, blessed by Blair's departure and the Conservatives' surge-in-reverse. Wouldn't you know that Iraq, the bane of Blair's political existence, would come back to haunt Brown, who is sometimes accused by his enemies of treating the war there as if it were an event occurring in a galaxy far, far away?
Stryker McGuire is London bureau chief for Newsweek.
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