Sound familiar? Prime minister Tony Blair often sounds a lot like President George W. Bush. Indeed, there is no indictment more politically damaging to Blair these days than that he is Bush’s “poodle,” slavishly following him into such doomed adventures as the invasion of Iraq. Yet Blair made the comment quoted above in November 1997. Blair’s preoccupation with Iraq dates back to the year he became prime minister, and more than three years before Bush reached the White House. So who followed whom? At their first meeting–seven months before 9/11–it was Blair who brought up Iraq. “If anything,” Blair said last week, “I was raising weapons of mass destruction more than he was.”
That argument gets Blair nowhere. Iraq policy has hurt him not only in Britain but around the world, where many once saw him as the only leader who could rein in Bush. At home, according to a Sunday Times of London poll, 57 percent of Britons have little or no confidence in Blair as prime minister. The same poll shows that 75 percent have little or no confidence in Bush’s handling of Iraq, 60 percent believe he’s a danger to world peace and 37 percent think he’s “stupid.” With Bush in London this week, protesters lying in wait and security services on high alert amid fresh intelligence of a possible Qaeda attack, another politician in Blair’s shoes might be looking for a bolt-hole. Not Blair: “Actually, I don’t believe that the essential strategy of the Americans is wrong. I believe it is right.”
If Blair looks like a poodle, it’s partly because he seems to get so little for his loyalty. “Tony has walked the walk for Bush,” one of his ministers told NEWSWEEK. “We’d like just a little reciprocity.” Blair, no admirer of Ariel Sharon’s, has found Bush immovable in his support of the Israeli prime minister. And Blair and his inner circle felt betrayed last month when Washington stepped in to criticize British efforts, with France and Germany, to create a modest European defense arrangement outside of NATO. Last week Blair aides were hopeful that the Bush visit would finally yield an American concession: a decision to rescind U.S. tariffs on steel imports.
With reciprocity or without, Blair will stand by Bush. Despite Blair’s reputation as an idealist, says the historian Ben Pimlott, “he’s essentially very practical.” Blair believes that for historical, cultural and economic reasons, the U.S.-British relationship is inviolable. “You throw away a lot if you’re an unreliable ally,” said Pimlott. Yet Blair, when he meets Bush this week, may be inclined to make that very same point.
