Salon: Books: Lost in the Desert (Tony Blair Bushwhacked)

[kskiska]

Why did Tony Blair, who reinvigorated Britain's Labor Party and became Bill Clinton's best friend in Europe, allow himself to get Bushwhacked in Iraq?

(snip)

One might uncharitably argue that this is just more evidence that Berman has snapped the tether. Or, to be more specific, that he has drunk so much of Paul Wolfowitz's Kool-Aid he's starting to hallucinate. (He goes on to explain that Saddam Hussein is indeed connected to al-Qaida, and that the secret link between them is, more or less, Adolf Hitler.) But the "sort of" suggests that Berman is trying to be funny. He's too smart not to understand this as a sort of macabre political joke. It's like observing that George W. Bush belongs to the party of Abraham Lincoln -- it possesses a certain technical or historical correctness, without actually meaning anything.

If the beleaguered Tony Blair might be flabbergasted to be described as a socialist at this late stage, it's better than some of the other things he's been called lately. This Clintonesque warrior of the center, an Oxford-educated lawyer who breathed new life into the moribund Labor Party and presided over a British mini-Renaissance at the end of the '90s, wound up loyally following George W. Bush into Baghdad, and may have scuttled his impressive political career along the way. In the vernacular of the ever-vicious Fleet Street press, Blair has become Bush's "poodle."

(snip)

Blair's masters in Washington, counting on the ever-distractable nature of the American voter ("You're such a cute baby! Now look over here -- ooh, what a scary gay marriage!"), are pretending they never said anything about WMDs. But Blair has remained out there by himself, shivering in the wind, pathologically unable to let go of all the misinterpreted and half-baked evidence that paved the way for George and Tony's not-so-excellent Iraq adventure.

Some point of pride is clearly involved: Rather than apologizing or prevaricating, Blair keeps insisting that he was right all along and that the truth will come out, even as scandal after scandal -- a plagiarized Ph.D. dissertation, a scientist dead in the woods, evidence of Anglo-American spying at the United Nations -- crashes over his government.

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http://salon.com/books/feature/2004/02/20/blair/index.html

[roguevalley]

1. excellent article. what a small man he is.