Watching Tony Blair is always instructive for Americans, and sometimes the source of envy. He faces much the same political conundrum as President Bush - a war gone wrong in a charged political season - with the added fillip that he followed Mr. Bush's lead into Iraq. But Prime Minister Blair has acknowledged the validity of the criticism he faces, and he is also not pretending that things in Iraq are humming along on schedule. "I entirely understand why many disagree," he said at the annual meeting of his Labor Party on Tuesday.
To some extent, Mr. Blair had no choice. His party is far more critical of the war than the Republicans who cheered Mr. Bush at their convention in New York. And he did not go quite so far as to invite a broad debate in Britain about the necessity of the war and the bungling of the occupation. At Brighton, Mr. Blair's official line about the false intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq was: "I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam." That raises a lot of questions, but at least the words "apologize" and "wrong" were put on record, and his critics were not called unpatriotic.
Mr. Blair's hope at the Labor conference was to shift the focus away from Iraq and onto his domestic agenda in anticipation of an election next year. In fact, the largest protests around the conference were against a planned ban on fox hunting. But it was obvious that Iraq still casts a dark shadow over British politics. Regardless of how Mr. Blair's decision to join the United States in the invasion of Iraq plays out in his bid for a third term, at least he showed respect for his constituents by not glossing over the war and by not scorning those who consider it a terrible mistake.
There must not be a "cowboy mentality" in England. Maybe Blair doesn't have an inferiority complex. Maybe he doesn't have to listen to conniving, evil advisers. Maybe he's got some balls.
I think it's too late for Dubya to grow a pair, but I do wish he'd learn to tell the truth.
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