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Looking Back

Evaluating Tony Blair's Successes and Failures

Political brilliance won Blair rare longevity as prime minister.

It is a familiar pattern in democracies. A leader is elected because the preceding president or prime minister loses the trust of the public. The new man or woman sets out to change things utterly, changes them only a little, and eventually wears out his or her aura as a savior. This recurring pattern is called in some quarters the attrition of power. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who announced his resignation Thursday, exemplifies the syndrome.

The received idea about Blair is that he lost the confidence of Britons because he foolishly followed President George W. Bush into Iraq. But when it comes to the attrition of power, there is always some egregious failing that fills the foreground. History tends to revise, over and over again, the evaluation of Blair's successes and failures.

He certainly did go too far in following Bill Clinton's advice to preserve the special US-UK relationship by bonding with Bush. He failed to distinguish between manageable humanitarian interventions like those in Kosovo, Sierra Leone or Afghanistan and the challenge of building an Iraqi nation where Saddam Hussein's tyranny and international sanctions had left a hollowed-out shell. And for that shortsighted error he paid the price.

In an address Thursday to supporters in his home constituency, Blair showed how he came to make his Iraqi mistake. The explanation was in his moralistic profession of good intentions. "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right," he said. "I may have been wrong. That's your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else: I did what I thought was right for our country." Sound statecraft calls for less of a parson's conscience and more of the foresight commended to Machiavelli's prince.

Still, there is no denying the political brilliance that won Blair rare longevity as prime minister. He refashioned the Labour Party after years in the political wilderness, molding a British version of Bill Clinton's third way -- a cleverly packaged balancing of Margaret Thatcher's free-market policies with a willingness to spend revenues from a booming economy on hospitals, schools and public safety.

Blair deserves the praise he has received for achieving peace in Northern Ireland, for the creation of separate legislatures in Scotland and Wales, and for overcoming his Tory predecessors' knee-jerk hostility to the European Union. Blair sagely dispensed with British insularity when he backed the EU expansion that brought in Central European countries of the vanished Soviet bloc. And he rightly preached a policy of building a strong Europe that would not weaken the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Blair's detractors would do well to recognize two inconvenient truths: that the attrition of power will always be a prime virtue of democracies, and that Blair is not the only figure to be tainted by a connection to Bush's failed presidency.

This editorial originally appeared in the Boston Globe