MR. BLAIR IS JUST MONTHS FROM HIS LEGACY THEN:

The incredible shrinking Blair: As the Palestinians go to the polls, the Western leader who has staked the most on the Mideast peace process may be slipping into irrelevance (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, January 9, 2005, Boston Globe)

AT THE ANNUAL Labour Party conference in October 2001, Tony Blair gave his most considered response to the atrocities in New York and Washington, in a speech he wrote himself and delivered with passion. Much of what he said could have been spoken by George W. Bush, but Blair's peroration would never have passed the president's lips.

"The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant," Blair said, "those living in want and squalor from the deserts of north Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: They too are our cause."

Those were potent words for his audience, for whom the wretched and dispossessed of Gaza are indeed a cherished cause, never more so than today as the Palestinian elections are held to choose Yasser Arafat's successor. How much the prime minister can actually do to bring peace and justice to the Holy Land is another matter.

Not that Blair has wavered from his commitment. In the crucial months before March 2003, he told his party that destroying Saddam Hussein would lead to a fair settlement of the bitter and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just before the war began, he even enlisted President Bush to stand beside him and endorse this claim, if without much visible enthusiasm.

Now Blair has convened a conference, to be held in London in March, where there will be representatives of the new Palestinian government but, as of now, no Israeli delegation. To lay the groundwork he visited Israel and the West Bank -- by way of Iraq, a more than symbolic route -- before Christmas, an impressive endeavor which has taken its toll on him. He stayed out of sight on holiday in Egypt as the tsunami disaster unfolded, only returning to London last Monday. (Blair was criticized for his absence by political opponents, no doubt unfairly.)

Some Americans as well as Israelis apparently believe that Blair's exertions amount to little more than a maneuver to appease a domestic base still resentful at having been taken into the Iraq war on what look like false pretenses. And it's true that any progress toward Mideast peace could renew some of the prime minister's faded luster before the British general election this spring.

To see it merely in cynical terms underestimates Blair's deep belief in what he is doing, and his hope that a settlement to this seemingly endless conflict could yet be his greatest legacy. And yet it is all too likely that the conference will instead highlight the contrast between Tony Blair's major-league rhetoric and his increasingly minor-league diplomatic standing. The obvious truth, as Warren Christopher reiterated some days ago in The New York Times, is that no real progress will ever be made in resolving this conflict without forceful American participation, of which there is no sign at all under the present administration.

Mr. Wheatcroft wrote the one truly insightful piece about Tony Blair at the time of his election, which included the following:

Someone who knows him says, "You have to remember that the great passion in Tony's life is his hatred of the Labour Party."

But shows no similar insight into George W. Bush, whose forceful participation has made the prospect of a Palestinian state a reality.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 10, 2005 6:32 PM