Why did Tony Blair, who reinvigorated Britain's Labor Party and became Bill Clinton's best friend in Europe, allow himself to get Bushwhacked in Iraq?
Robin Cook writes that he told Blair, on March 5, 2003, that "Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use." Blair made no effort to contradict him. "What was clear from this conversation," Cook writes, "was that he did not believe it himself."
Cook writes, "Number 10 believed in the [September 2002] intelligence because they desperately wanted it to be true. Their sin was not one of bad faith but of evangelical certainty."
Cook and Stephens (who is an editor at the Financial Times) have both known Blair for years, and the portraits they paint of this ambitious and accomplished politician are generally consistent. Both seem to admire and respect him, almost despite their better judgment.

Blair held out hope until late in the process that Saddam might capitulate to the U.N. in a manner that would satisfy the Americans and avert war; Blair says he told Bush they had to be prepared "to take yes for an answer." But Blair deluded himself, Stephens writes, about the amount of influence he actually possessed, and violated two cardinal rules of politics: "Never take risks when someone else determines the outcome, and avoid responsibility when power resides elsewhere."

Cook writes, "Tony made no attempt to pretend that what Hans Blix might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion." In other words, contrary to everything Blair ever said in public, the U.N. inspections of late 2002 and early 2003 were strictly for show.

Cook does not think Blair was primarily motivated by a grand global purpose in Iraq. The real mortar in the improbable alliance between Blair and Bush, to use his metaphor, is political power. "It is a fixed pole of Tony Blair's view of Britain's place in the world that we must be the No. 1 ally of the U.S.," he writes. "I am certain that the real reason he went to war was that he found it easier to resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the U.S. President."

His manner is personable, ingratiating and non-ideological; his message is carefully calibrated to appeal to the expanding middle class that thinks of itself as neither liberal nor conservative. His stated goal, however, was ambitious: the creation of a new social compact, focused equally on rights and responsibilities, that will split the difference between the social-democratic vision of equality and the free-market vision of unfettered individualism.

The tragedy of Tony Blair lies in the fact that the very qualities that allowed him to revamp Labor and rescue Britain from the Tory death-grip also led him to defy the U.N., his own public, the great mass of world opinion and probably the wishes of his own wife, and bet everything on an ill-considered war that was almost guaranteed to make him look bad.

During Bill Clinton's last, rueful presidential visit to Chequers, the prime minister's country house, in December 2000, Stephens reports that Blair asked Clinton how he should deal with the incoming President Bush. "Be his friend," Clinton reportedly told him. "Be his best friend. Be the guy he turns to."

Cook reports telephoning former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the fall of 2002, as the Iraq crisis thickened. She asked him in disbelief: "Just what does Tony Blair think he's doing?"

A passionate lifetime advocate for the power of international law, Blair has now done more than almost anyone on the planet to undermine it.
"Nobody in their right mind would dispute that Iraq is a better place without Saddam," Cook writes. "But the world is most certainly not a safer place now that we have reasserted the unilateral right of one state to invade another."