Posted on 04/17/2004 2:58:08 PM PDT by Pokey78
How disappointing President Bush's press conference in Washington with the Prime Minister on Friday must have been to those who believe - and hope - that the relationship between the two men is in decline. Their joint appearance in the Rose Garden of the White House had been billed as the geo-political equivalent of the Beckhams' staged frolicking for the cameras in the snows of Courchevel: a contrived display of unity which would barely mask the tetchiness and strains allegedly corroding the "special relationship". And yet, in the dazzling spring sunshine, the Bush-Blair double act looked stronger than ever. "He's a stand-up kinda guy," the President said of the Prime Minister. Well, that's the way they put things in the Lone Star State.
It would be quite wrong, of course, to pretend that there are no tensions between the two, especially at this fraught moment in the history of liberated Iraq. The Prime Minister instinctively invests much more faith in the mystical capacity of the United Nations to bring legitimacy and moral authority to such international dilemmas. The President approaches the UN as most people approach their tax returns: something he has to deal with, rather than something for which he feels the slightest affection.
On trade, Guantanamo and Kyoto, there have been sharp differences between Bush and Blair. As our Defence Correspondent reported last week, British commanders in Iraq are growing increasingly restless at what they regard as the hamfisted methods of their US counterparts. Senior ministers grumble about what they see as the excessive speed of American troop rotation.
Let us acknowledge, too, that, to a great extent, this has been a marriage of convenience: both President and Prime Minister have merrily exploited one another. Mr Bush recognises that one of the legacies of Vietnam - contrary to the lazy thinking of anti-Americans - has been a recoil from unilateralism. As the former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara says in the memorable new film The Fog of War: "If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."
Spain and Portugal are already preparing to desert the coalition in Iraq, preferring, by implication, to take Osama bin Laden on trust when he offers a "truce" to non-combatant European nations than to rally behind the American President when he calls for resolve. Britain's support of US strategy has rarely been so important to the White House.
Mr Blair, for his part, has relished posturing as the only politican outside America who can act as a restraining influence upon Mr Bush. It has suited him to be seen as the human bridge between Europe and the US, the ambassador of civilised values in Washington, and the world's most seasoned war leader, to whom the President turns deferentially in search of wisdom. Few in the Labour Party are impressed any longer (if they ever were) by such claims.
As Mr Blair may well discover to his cost tomorrow evening when he addresses the Parliamentary Labour Party, his own backbenchers believe that his dogged loyalty to the President has made him look ridiculous, and could cost the party dearly in the local and European elections in June. Most of Mr Blair's fellow heads of government in Europe find his support for Mr Bush mystifying and vulgar. That does not alter the fact that the Prime Minister believes his unique access to the President is a rich political asset; and it is certainly true that Sir David Manning, our Ambassador to Washington, enjoys a status there unrivalled by any other foreign envoy.
Even so, Mr Blair's friendship with Mr Bush cannot be explained simply as a matter of expediency, a dance performed out of political necessity rather than personal affinity. The Prime Minister's allies note - in some cases, with alarm - that this relationship has acquired a fundamental importance in his mental universe, symbolic of his determination not to be deterred by doubters and waverers: love me, love my George.
"His friendship with Clinton was obvious and predictable," one Cabinet minister told me recently, "but his alliance with Bush is a much deeper, stranger thing. It is a clue to what Tony is all about these days." If the novice Blair needed to bask in the electoral magic of Bill, the older, weather-beaten Blair craves the moral certainty of Dubya.
In private, Mr Blair readily admits that he has much in common with the American neo-conservatives who have done so much to influence the foreign policy of the Bush White House. He shares with them a belief that the West has a mission to encourage the spread of democratic values, free markets and basic liberties. To borrow the words used by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, the Prime Minister wants to make the world "safe for democracy".
Like Wilson, Mr Blair believes passionately in the role of international institutions in prosecuting this sacred task. Mr Bush, to put it mildly, does not. As he said on Friday, his message to the UN has always been: "Take care of business or others will." But, as the President explicitly acknowledged in his speech at the Banqueting House last November, his strategic response to the challenge of September 11 has Wilsonian roots: "hard Wilsonianism" as it is called in the US.
This is much more than an abstract debate: it is the shared intellectual and moral framework that holds Bush and Blair fast, even when tensions arise between the two of them. The President's endorsement of Ariel Sharon's plan for the Middle East has been almost universally scorned in the Labour Party as a betrayal of the "road map" which Mr Blair presented to his MPs before the Iraq war as a quid pro quo for their support of military action.
Yet on Friday the Prime Minister insisted that the Sharon plan, far from tearing up the "road map", has rejuvenated it. A psychologist might call this denial. Mr Blair would doubtless claim that, since he and Mr Bush are on the same wavelength, the apparent gulf between them is apparent only. In his eyes, as the Prime Minister said on the BBC's Today programme yesterday, this is a Manichean struggle: "There is only one side to be on."
Mr Blair's affinity with the President - so powerfully visible in the Rose Garden - is surprising only to those who believe that it is a performance and that it goes against the grain. I think the opposite is true. Increasingly isolated at home, increasingly impatient with his party, the opinion polls and the intractability of his domestic problems, the Prime Minister finds genuine solace in the company of the President. It suits those who despise Mr Bush and respect Mr Blair to believe that the Prime Minister is only going along with the President because he thinks that he has to. But - as Mr Blair keeps trying to tell people - he means what he says.
"It's worse than you think," he told The Guardian's Jackie Ashley on the eve of war. "I believe in it. I am truly committed to dealing with this irrespective of the position of America. If the Americans were not doing this, I would be pressing for them to do so." Bob Woodward's new book on the Iraq conflict alleges that the President privately offered his friend the option of backing out of the war. But the Prime Minister was having none of it.
No wonder Mr Bush thinks Mr Blair is a "stand-up kinda guy". And no wonder he likes the President - a man who still trusts him as the British electorate once did, so long ago. When the two men first met in February 2001, they feared that they might have nothing in common except the toothpaste they used. These days, it must sometimes seem to each of them that they have little in common with anyone else.
and from what I've heard...not all that free of a country, either...
I've written to PM Blair and Secretary Straw, telling them that history WILL remember them fondly. ---They're both being "stand-up guys" through this whole ordeal....and rightly so.
God has blessed us with these two brave men and with the thousands of brave men they lead.
May God bless all of them.
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