Word: blaire
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Britons (who have and expect an intensely personal relationship with their politician) love to grumble about their lot and their leaders, especially if--like Blair--they've been around for a decade. So you would never guess from a few hours down the pub how much better a place Britain is now than it was a decade ago. It's more prosperous, it's healthier, it's better educated, and--with all the inevitable caveats about disaffected young Muslim men--it is the European nation most comfortable with the multicultural future that is the fate of all of them...
...today's climate, however, this counts for naught compared with the blame that Blair attracts for ensnaring Britain in the fiasco of Iraq. As the Bush Administration careered from a war in Afghanistan to one in Iraq, with Blair always in support, it became fashionable to say the Prime Minister had become the President's poodle...
This attack both misreads history and misunderstands Blair. Long before 9/11 shook up conventional thinking in foreign affairs, Blair had come by two beliefs he still holds: First, that it is wrong for the rest of the world to sit back and expect the U.S. to solve the really tough questions. Second, that some things a state does within its borders justify intervention even if they do not directly threaten another nation's interests. Blair understood that today any country's problems could quickly spread. As he said in a speech in 2004, "Before Sept. 11, I was already reaching...
...Blair's thinking crystallized during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. For Blair, the actions of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic were so heinous that they demanded a response. There was nothing particularly artful about the way he put this. In an interview with Blair for a TV film on Kosovo after the war, I remember his justifying his policy as simply "the right thing to do." But Blair was nobody's poodle. He and Bill Clinton had a near falling-out over the issue of ground troops. (Blair was prepared to contemplate a ground invasion of Kosovo, an idea that gave...
...office, moreover, Blair had become convinced of the dangers that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed. He didn't need 9/11 to think the world was a risky place. As a close colleague of Blair's said to me in 2003, just before the war in Iraq, "He is convinced that if we don't tackle weapons of mass destruction now, it is only a matter of time before they fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. If George Bush wasn't pressing for action on this, Blair would be pressing George Bush on it." To those...