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  Blair's Resignation: The End of the Tony Show

Blair's Resignation The End of the Tony Show

By Sebastian Borger in London

Part 2: Tony Blair's Regrets

One of Blair's closest political allies, current EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson conceded the second mistake: "We were perhaps too ready to place emphasis on our management of the media in those early years of government rather than concentrate on a more policy-driven process." Mandelson should know: he was dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" because of his image as one of Blair's reviled spin doctors. Downing Street's press officers were masters at "spinning" the facts to their own advantage. It was only after the second election victory in 2001 that Blair and his ministers concentrated on the painstaking, long-term reforms of the public services.

Then came the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, and the prime minister made his third mistake, something bestselling author and former Blair admirer Robert Harris ("Fatherland," "Pompeii") called his "most difficult political misjudgment" -- Blair became a nearly unquestioning apostle of US President George W. Bush and took part in the invasion of Iraq without thinking through the risks.

Sketches of a Postmodern World Order

Though it is clear he regrets the first two mistakes, he continues to defend the third. When it comes to foreign policy, Tony Blair sits stubbornly atop the rubble of his ambitious policies, trying to spin the heap as some kind of postmodern building. Not that Blair is totally wrong. When he sketched out his vision of a postmodern world in a speech eight years ago in Chicago, he said a coalition of Western democracies would be justified, or even obliged, to interfere with other countries when the cause was good -- "to advance the values of freedom, rule of law, human rights and an open society."

The irony of this speech on international law is that Blair delivered it during the Kosovo conflict, a war that wasn't sanctioned by the United Nations and therefore, strictly speaking, was a violation of international law. The British prime minister would become the first prominent world leader to suggest that international law and its relevant institutions no longer lined up with reality.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the underlying Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, on the other hand, didn't quite fit Blair's vision of humanitarian imperialism, which rested on a presumption of multilateral action. His adherence to a so-called "special relationship" with the superpower across the Atlantic wasn't based on noble international ideals, but on cold power politics à la Henry Kissinger -- which means it belonged neither to Blair's own publicly declared politics nor to his personal self-image.

Half-Truths, Quibbles, and Near-Lies

For exactly this reason Blair and his associates entangled themselves in embarrassing half-truths, legal quibbles, and near-lies when they defended the campaign against Saddam on the basis of his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The prime minister himself still refuses to call his participation in the Iraq invasion a mistake.

Ultimately, God would judge him, Blair once said -- and in interviews with filmmaker Michael Cockerell an almost messianic certainty creeps into his speech, which Blair seems to have used to bamboozle high-ranking government and military officials. "Put simply: We're doing the right thing," Blair was known to say before the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and his cabinet secretary at the time, Sir Richard Wilson, was "struck by his conviction that he was right." From Wilson's expression, it's clear that he doesn't mean the sentence as a compliment.

Before his time as party chief and prime minister, in 1993, Blair wrote: "Christianity is a very tough religion, it is judgmental. There is right and wrong, There is good and evil. It's become fashionable to be uncomfortable with such language. But when we look at our world today and how much needs to be done, we should not hesitate to make such judgments. And then follow them with determined action. That would be Christian Socialism."

A Christian and a friend of America at the head of "their" party -- no wonder so many left-liberals never liked Blair, and saw him as a traitor. "Treachery," in this case, could also be a function of over-popularity. And the man has always been popular. In a poll taken last week for the 10th anniversary of his term in 10 Downing Street, just under 50 percent of the British called Blair "overall a good prime minister."

A majority even said he was nice.

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