May 31, 2006
SHOULDN'T HAVE STRAYED SO FAR FROM THE LAP:
President Bush should heed Tony Blair's advice (EJ Dionne, 5/31/06, Seattle Times)
Imagine where British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be if he hadn't joined with President Bush in prosecuting the Iraq war. [...]You wish, at least, that the prime minister could have edited Bush's rhetoric. More important, you wish Blair would have pushed Bush much harder to approach the rest of the world in a way that would have left us with a few more friends and allies.
The reality is that most of the political damage that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair sustained from the war is a function of the latter's insistence (along with Colin Powell) on trying to sell it to the international community and to do so using the WMD argument. Had the P.M. just accepted the President's assessment that the UN wasn't going to be any use and that it was up to enforce their resolutions for them he'd have nothing to apologize for today. Though his heart is generally in the right place, Mr. Blair continues to stumble when he makes himself believe his own backbenchers, the continental Europeans, and the UN are interested in the same causes he is. The transnationalist project is aimed at stopping men like Tony Blair as much, or more, as stopping those like Saddam.