Hezbollah’s new supporters

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1. The cartoon commentary by Peter Brookes and Morland in UK’s The Times yesterday 4 Aug was both funny and sad. It pretty much summed up Europe’s view of the travails of Tony Blair. Brooke’s illustration captured the spirit of a beleaguered Blair and perhaps, foretells of the impeding unglorious end of the British Prime Minister who was once held in high esteem by many British and Europeans.

   UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was the political darling of Europe for years. Rightly or wrongly, many European leaders took his policies and his stand on British political and economic life as their models.

   Never mind that Blair is a socialist espousing conservative and right-wing views. He had the charm and the near perfect eloquence to persuade most of Europe’s right and left-wing leaders to see him as the prime minister role model. Many ordinary folks outside Britain thought his ideas smacked of common sense and thought how lucky the Brits were for having Tony Blair, well, until his perfidy.

   The admiration turned to scorn when Blair, the educated, the intelligent, the thinker, bought George W Bush’s hollow rhetorics and followed the American leader’s war drumbeats blindly with nary a thought that the coalition aren’t quite prepared for the war on Iraq. It wasn’t so much that Europeans didn’t think Saddam Hussein wasn’t evil. No! The majority of Europeans agreed that Saddam was evil and that Iraq would be better off without him.

   Never mind the moral dilemma of a non-UN sanctioned invasion of a sovereign nation. The bone of contention was Blair’s methods: the deceit, the lies, the half-truths, the ommissions and the gung-hoism, made worse by his unrelenting European advertising work for Bush that Iraq could be overrun in a few weeks, some months at most with the least troop casulaties and the war was won. Europeans on the whole, felt that plans for the invasion were ill-prepared. They didn’t believe the boys would come out victorious of an invasion of or win a war on Iran on the premise that when Saddam was gone, everything would be fine.

   The true error of Tony Blair was he allowed himself to be used and be abused by a shallow, warmongering Bush, the inflexible preacher and avenger rolled into one. And for that, the British themselves gave him an extremely unflattering dog tag: “Bush’s poodle.”
   He further suffered political indignities on both the home and European fronts when British investigative journalist Michael Smith wrote damning reports known as The secret Downing Street memo with follow on stories in the Los Angeles Times and other various US papers in which one cannot fail to read that Blair virtually ‘connived’ with Bush to force an illegal war on Iraq.

   Blair lost the potential for becoming a leader of leaders not only in Europe but on the world stage as well, long before the G8 summit in St Petersburg, and with his ‘bumbling along’ policy on the Lebanon crisis, his entire leadership credibility at home, not surprisingly, is now in tatters.

   Sadly, Blair’s recent admission that he and his ‘Yo Blair! ‘tomentor’ may have erred in their method of tackling the radical Islamist problem has come too late. He just didn’t stand up to give a sound British view against an unsound American rhetoric when it was warranted.

   The harm is done. It’s hardly surprising that he suffers the reputation at home and abroad today of being a mere appendage to Bush’s vocal chords. His poignant hurrah before the World Affairs Council in California, may well be his last because in the UK, it’s no longer a question of simply disliking Blair, it’s gone to “Why I loathe Tony Blair.”

   ‘Yo Blair blew it big time. He missed an international political opportunity to stand out as a good leader. Instead, he will be leaving 10 Downing Street with a poor legacy for being a nondescript follower.

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