Is Sunak heading into a war that will swallow his reputation as Iraq did Blair’s?

Military action in the Red Sea is a risk for the prime minister, as his Labour predecessor would doubtless tell him – but it also spells trouble for the leader of the opposition, writes John Rentoul

As if to underscore Rishi Sunak’s new role as a war leader, hours after approving targeted strikes in Yemen, the prime minister flew to Kyiv (Reuters)

Rishi Sunak is taking a terrible risk in approving the air sorties against Houthi targets in Yemen. It may seem to be a minor military engagement. It may seem that he is part of a broad international coalition. And it may look as if the fuss about whether parliament should have voted on it is an irrelevant distraction, given that the Labour Party supports the strikes.

But the echoes from the past should keep Sunak awake at night.

Tony Blair’s first involvement in Iraq was to order airstrikes alongside Bill Clinton, the US president, in 1998, five years before the land invasion was launched.

Those airstrikes were fairly uncontroversial then. Saddam Hussein was refusing to comply with the requirements of UN weapons inspectors, and the strikes were intended to degrade his ability to shoot at US and British aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone in northern Iraq.

Blair enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Conservative opposition for a tough stance against Saddam, and there was a broad international consensus that the Iraqi leader was a threat to his own people and to regional peace. Then, as now, the French government sort of supported the US-led effort to keep a regional troublemaker in check – and sort of didn’t.

Blair’s road to a major ground war was paved with good intentions, and a lot of pious talk about an ethical dimension to Britain’s foreign policy, but it ended up in the horror of an unwinnable occupation, with Blair tied to Clinton’s unpopular successor in the White House, while France and much of old Europe stood aside.

Sunak and Joe Biden are unlikely to be dragged into a ground war in Yemen in the time they both have left before elections later this year, but there are enough parallels with the Iraq war to set any number of alarm bells ringing.

When Sunak announced at half-past midnight on Friday morning, “The Royal Air Force has carried out targeted strikes against military facilities used by Houthi rebels in Yemen”, the very phrasing will have reminded anyone who was aware of events at the time of Blair’s announcement that the invasion of Iraq had begun.

As if to underscore Sunak’s new role as a war leader, he was on his way to Kyiv by the morning, to a second theatre of conflict, signing a new security cooperation agreement with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president.

Wars sometimes define prime ministers, and although the conflict in the Red Sea and the UK’s continuing logistical and financial support for Ukraine’s fight against Vladimir Putin’s aggression are hardly on the scale of the Falklands or Iraq, we may now see Sunak in sharper focus.

While the cause in Ukraine is well understood, the issue in the Red Sea is more complicated.

Sunak said in his overnight statement: “The United Kingdom will always stand up for freedom of navigation and the free flow of trade.” Which rather obscures the motivation of the Houthis, which is to “confront” the US and the West over their support for Israel in the conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

Margaret Thatcher enhanced her reputation in the Falklands war, and Blair, the most astute leader of the country after her, misstepped in Iraq. He survived as prime minister for four years after the invasion, but the conflict broke his support in the Labour Party, and weakened his standing with the British people. He never recovered from the perception that he had not been straight about the case for war, although he had been; and he suffered from the view that the war had increased the risk of terrorism in the UK, even if that should never have been a reason for failing to do the right thing. France and other countries have suffered just as much from terrorism since.

So Sunak faces extraordinary risks. Not least because, while Saddam had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, the Houthi insurgency in Yemen is very much part of the same ideology as al-Qaeda and its successors, including Isis in Iraq and Syria. And if the war in Iraq complicated Blair’s attempts to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians, which he continued for eight years after stepping down as prime minister, a prolonged conflict with the Houthis will be seen more directly as an extension of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

But if the military action in the Red Sea is a risk for Sunak, it is just as much so for Keir Starmer, who was consulted on privy council terms beforehand, and who has supported it. John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, said: “Yes, we back the targeted action.”

Yet another of the planks on which Starmer was elected Labour leader has fallen away. One of the 10 pledges of his leadership campaign was a Prevention of Military Intervention Act, aimed at shoring up support among party members inspired by Jeremy Corbyn’s Iraq-driven anti-war sentiment. But the 10 pledges were quietly removed from Starmer’s website last month, and Labour is now in favour of military intervention when necessary.

The party is not even demanding a vote in parliament, which could easily have been held this week on the principle of airstrikes to protect shipping in the Red Sea. In this respect, Starmer is even more gung-ho than Blair, the first prime minister to concede the right of the Commons to have a say before military action – which it did before airstrikes in 1998, and before the invasion in 2003.

Blair regretted allowing the vote in 1998, because it gave 23 Labour MPs, including Corbyn, the chance to vote against his government. One of the reasons that Starmer is not even calling for a retrospective vote is that he knows that it would advertise Labour’s divisions. But those divisions are real and will persist. It was not just the usual Corbynite suspects who resigned from the Labour front bench over Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, but several from the mainstream of the party.

If there is a Labour government later this year, and if the situation in the Middle East becomes more difficult, as seems likely, Starmer may face an early foreign policy challenge with painful echoes of Labour Britain’s past.