Blair Triumphant

He is unpopular at home, popular with the American right, and set to leave office with his apparent legacy, the Iraq War, still an unmitigated disaster. And yet.

I admire him.

He transformed the Labour Party from old-left obsolescence to center-left dominance, a New Labour for a dynamic new Britain. He invested in health care and education. He sought to reduce poverty both at home and abroad. He worked for real solutions for Africa’s ongoing plight. He brought Britain closer to Europe even as he reached out to America. He was a leader in the fight against global warming. He was the liberal interventionist who brought moral purpose to foreign policy, providing leadership in times of struggle on Kosovo and Darfur. He was, I once thought, the world’s leading statesman.

Here’s E.J. Dionne: “What Blair built in his pre-Iraq days was not the Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land imagined by the poet William Blake but something more workaday: generally competent government, steady growth built on reasonably orthodox economic policies, fiscal responsibility, some expansion of public services, a rather serious war on poverty.”

Yes, Iraq. Along with devolution — the establishment of regional parliaments in Scotland and Wales — it is Iraq that could form the core of his legacy. And yet.

He didn’t support the Iraq War for the reasons Bush and the neoconservatives did. He didn’t support it out of a naive belief in the benevolent hegemony of America. He didn’t support it because of oil. He didn’t support it because he had some messianic vision for the Middle East. No, he supported it because removing a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, a tyrant who had gassed his own people, who was still committing heinous atrocities against his own people, who would never accept the terms of U.N. resolutions, who continued to pose a threat to the region.

This is why I supported the war. Not because of George Bush but because of Tony Blair.

But that was Blair’s downfall. He trusted Bush. He allowed himself to be taken in by Bush. Whatever he may have thought in private, he acted as if he believed that Bush knew what he was doing, that he could work with Bush, that he could check and balance Bush. And then everything went wrong.

Remember, though, that the British have controlled the relatively peaceful southern region of Iraq. (Basra, as violent as it may be, is not Baghdad.) Remember, too, that the British are already withdrawing their troops from Iraq. Blair is getting out, Bush is refusing to get out and pushing for more.

What else was Blair to do? His moral purpose intact, he has admitted fault. He knows that the war to which he attached himself, his legacy, his party, and his country has been a disaster.

Still, I cannot forgive him entirely for Iraq, just as I cannot forgive him for devolution, which has weakened the United Kingdom as a sovereign state governed with justice and equity from Westminster.

And yet, with Dionne, I come to this: “We may be done with Blair, but his influence will long outlive his tenure — and the war he embraced.” His party, now firmly Blairite, will carry on under his rival, Gordon Brown. The opposition Conservative Party, under the Blairesque David Cameron, is Blairism of the center-right. The Third Way is broad and vague, but it is a way that the vast majority of Britons support.

Whatever happens from here will happen in Blair’s shadow. And that, I would argue, is good for Britain, good for Europe, and good for the world.