Why Blair is standing by Bush now

29 July 2006

Whether Tony Blair decides to step down at the next party conference, or hang in there until 2007, doesn’t much matter when it comes to appraising the much-mocked Blair–Bush relationship.

But there is brawl now being fought in the Middle East. Both the President and the Prime Minister see the current hostilities as a battle in the ongoing war with Islamic jihadists, a war the West must win if it is to preserve its way of life. Neither man blames the Israelis for the death of civilians unfortunate enough to be acting as involuntary human shields for Hezbollah weapons caches, bomb-making factories and rocket-launchers. Blair has a harder political task than does Bush: some of his own ministers, joined by a William Hague who once knew better, are pressing him to support an immediate ceasefire, rather than stick with Bush in holding out for a more durable solution — never mind that the same made-in-Iran missiles that are killing Israelis in Haifa are killing British soldiers in Basra.

For more than one reason, the Prime Minister will side with the President. In part he will be holding to his position that ‘the price of influence is that we do not leave the US to face the tricky issues alone’. In part he will be reacting to his greatest fear: an America defeated in its efforts to spread democracy, and given a bloody nose in the process, will retreat, sulk in its tent, leaving the world leaderless and at the mercy of Islamic fanatics. ‘The thing I fear,’ he told some reporters, ‘is not American unilateralism; it is actually American isolationism... .’ And in part Blair will do what he does when he is at his best — do what he believes is right.

Tony Blair may be no Winston Churchill, just as George W. Bush is no Franklin D. Roosevelt. He may not even be a Margaret Thatcher, and Bush no Ronald Reagan. But the current occupants of the offices once held by those great statesmen are both convinced that they know what is right, and are prepared to suffer such slings and arrows as their opponents may aim at them in order to bring some semblance of order and decency to a world in which those commodities are not in oversupply. We asked no more of their distinguished predecessors.

Irwin Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for the Sunday Times.