Britain can offer Barack Obama advice on Iraq

With Obama's visit to Europe (and Iraq and Afghanistan) next week, there's been the inevitable discussion of America's relationship with Europe: who is now it's favourite ally and what would an Obama presidency mean for Britain's hallowed "special relationship"?

The older US foreign policy experts - and European ones for that matter - are obsessed with the problems and direction of the European relationship. With the changes in leadership in Germany and France, a different pattern of power has developed in which Britain is no longer the only apparent friend of the States.

After all the strains and tensions of the Bush era and the Iraqi venture, will European-American relations return to the situation antebellum? Or are America's eyes now turned from the Atlantic to the Pacific now that China and India are emerging as the new economic giants?

All important questions, no doubt. And worth asking of a potential president whose interests, travel and background seem very divorced from Britain or the Continent. McCain knows Europe of old. Obama hardly knows it at all. If he has personal interests they lie to the south and east, in Africa and Asia.

But asking what he would do as president and seeking to read the runes from his visit here is surely the wrong way of looking at the visit.

This is a whistle-stop tour by an US presidential candidate intended, on his part, to show that he can operate abroad to repair US relations with its allies while, on Europe's part, it's meant to show that the EU's leaders can forge a relationship with the new man likely to take over the White House. Solid policy debate is not going to be on the agenda, nor any revelations. Indeed the one thing that London, Berlin, Paris and Rome will be worried about is how not to cross the line between paying due courtesy to a US candidate and embracing one man over the other.

Instead of worrying about what Obama will say to us (which won't be much beyond cliches), we should be thinking about what we can say to him. That's what he most needs after all. Chancellor Angela Merkel can offer him her views on relations with Russia and the future of the EU. Nicolas Sarkozy will fill him with visions of what France can do and how pro-American its President now is. Silvio Berlusconi will not doubt just try and smother him in praise and gifts.

But Britain - for all the current suggestions that we have become less important than Germany as a European ally - can offer advice on what concerns Obama most in this election: what to do about Iraq, the war, as Obama put it this week, that "distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize."

If Gordon Brown had any sense he would say to his guest: "look, Mr Obama, you have based your campaign on an early withdrawal from Iraq and promising a complete change from Bush's policies of intervention and confrontation. Your problem is how practically to achieve this without looking as if you are cutting and running.

"Iraq's president has given you some help by saying he wants foreign troops out within a set deadline. And we're with you on that. We're overstretched and want out. We are also increasingly exposed in Afghanistan.

"What you could do, and where we could help you, is in achieving a pull-out within the context of a regional security framework. For that you need, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran. The time is ripe. All the signs are that the Iranians want an end to confrontation and that they are willing to come back into the international community. They have problems at home, they need investment and growth. But they also need a US President to make a change in policy possible, free from the current politics of demand, threat and sanction.

"There's no need to fly to Tehran. But you could - as you have - give a date for withdrawal and organise regional conferences in which Iran's legitimate interests are recognised. Its interests are not so different from ours so far as the Taliban, al-Qa'ida and regional instability are concerned. Bring Iran in and you could be on the way not only to solving the nuclear issue, but also removing the constraints on Iranian and Iraqi oil and gas output. And that, I need not remind you, could do wonders for the energy market.

"Britain's prestige has suffered greatly from the Iraqi venture, but we have the locus of troops on the ground and the experience of the region. We can help you in this in a way that no other country can."

Mr Brown won't say any of this, of course. Instead he'll go on about Britain's contribution to the war effort, its lonely stance in Afghanistan and all it has done for America as its special friend, and how much we have "shared values." We have no views - not that they have been shared with the public at any rate - on the future of the EU, the Middle East, post-exit Iraq or even the credit crunch.

Well might Obama retort: "I am the face of the future. All you seem to be offering is a continuation of the past. Is there nothing else that you can do?"