When Tony Blair was elected to Britain’s House of Commons in 1983, he was just 30, the Labour Party’s youngest M.R Labour had just fought and lost a disastrous election campaign on a far-left platform, and Margaret Thatcher, fresh from her victory in the Falklands War, was in her pomp. The opposition to Thatcher was limited to a few ancient warhorses and a handful of bright young things. Blair, boyish Blair, quickly became one of the best of the breed.
Nobody would call Blair, 54 on May 6, boyish today. His face is older and beaten up, his reputation in shreds. Very soon, he will announce the timetable for his departure from office. In a recent poll for the Observer newspaper, just 6% of Britons said they found Blair trustworthy, compared with 43% who thought the opposite. In Britain—as in much of the rest of the world—Blair is considered an unpopular failure.
I’ve been watching Blair practically since he entered politics—at first close up from the House of Commons press gallery, later from thousands of miles away. In nearly a quarter-century, I have never come across a public figure who more consistently asked the important questions about the relationships between individuals, communities and governments or who thought more deeply about how we should conduct ourselves in an interconnected world in which loyalties of nationality, ethnicity and religion continue to run deep. Blair’s personal standing in the eyes of the British public may never recover, but his ideas, especially in foreign policy, will long outlast him.
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. It would be foolish to give all the credit for the state of this blessed plot to Blair but equally foolish to deny him any of it.
In 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 foreig, n 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 for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648—namely, that a country’s internal affairs are for it and you don’t interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance."
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 Clinton’ s team the vapors.) The success of Kosovo—and that of Britain’s intervention to restore order in Sierra Leone a year later—emboldened Blair to think that in certain carefully delineated cases the use of force for humanitarian purposes might make sense. As far back as 1999, he had Iraq on his mind. In a speech in Chicago at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Blair explicitly linked Milosevic with Saddam Hussein: "two dangerous and ruthless men."
In 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 who knew him, there was simply never any doubt that he would be with the U.S. as it responded to the attacks or that he would stay with the Bush Administration if it close to tackle the possibility that Iraq had WMD.
The Prime Minister, of course, turned out to be disastrously wrong. By 2003, Iraq was already a ruined nation, long incapable of sustaining a sophisticated WMD program. And the Middle East turned out to be very different from the Balkans and West Africa. In a region where religious loyalties and fissures shape societies and where the armies of "the West" summon ancient rivalries and bitter memories, it was native to expect that an occupation would quickly change a society’s nature. "When we removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein," Blair told Congress in 2003, "this was not imperialism. For these oppressed people, it was their liberation." But we have learned the hard way that it is not for the West to say what is imperialism and what is liberation. When you invade someone else’s country and turn his world upside down, good intentions are not enough.
Yet that on its own is not a sufficient judgment on Tony Blair. He will forever be linked to George Bush, but in crucial ways they saw the world very differently. For Blair, armed intervention to remove the Taliban and Saddam was never the only way in which Islamic extremism had to be combated. Far more than Bush, he identified the need to settle the Israel-Palestine dispute—"Here it is that the poison is incubated," he told Congress—if radical Islam was to lose its appeal. In Britain, while maintaining a mailed fist against those suspected of crimes, he tried to treat Islam with respect. He took the lead in ensuring that the rich nations kept their promises to aid Africa and lift millions from the poverty and despair that breed support for extremism. The questions Blair asked—When should we meddle in another nation’s life Why should everything be left to the U.S. What are the wellsprings of mutual cultural and religious respect How can the West show its strength without using guns—will continue to be asked for a generation. We will miss him when he’s gone.
The main purpose of the passage is to ______.