Blair Is Voice of Morals in New War

In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair is being called a moral visionary in the mold of 19th century statesman William Gladstone, a commander in the cloak of Winston Churchill and, less fondly, “Mr. President.”

In the United States, President Bush simply calls him “friend.”

Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Blair has dedicated himself to the role of America’s closest ally in the U.S. war on terrorism. His job in this partnership has been to articulate the moral and legal case against the suspected author of the assaults, Osama bin Laden, and to shore up international support for military action.

Blair has made it his mission.

As the embers still smoldered in New York and near Washington, Blair appeared beside First Lady Laura Bush for the president’s speech to Congress, joining in standing ovations. He shuttled back and forth among European allies and met with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow before flying to the front line in Pakistan and on to India. He offered British troops for the war.

But his greater contribution may be this: While the president of a wounded nation sought retaliation, the prime minister of Britain sought to make sense of the senseless killing of thousands. He appealed for a new world order, in which rich countries help the poor and put down tyrants, to serve as a memorial to the dead.

“Out of the shadow of this evil should emerge lasting good: destruction of the machinery of terrorism wherever it is found, hope amongst all nations of a new beginning where we seek to resolve differences in a calm and ordered way, greater understanding between nations and between faiths, and, above all, justice and prosperity for the poor and dispossessed,” Blair said to his Labor Party last week.

Globalization applies not just to trade, he argued, but also to conflict and chaos, confidence and order.

“The world community must show as much its capacity for compassion as for force,” he said. “What is the lesson of the financial markets, climate change, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation or world trade? It is that our self-interest and our mutual interests are today inextricably woven together.”

The 48-year-old prime minister’s eloquence earned him praise from normally hostile quarters.

“Blair’s Finest Hour,” said the conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper, evoking Churchill. “This was the speech that persuaded the nation that our prime minister is more than equal to the challenge we face.”

Some people joked that this was “the inaugural speech of the president of the world” and dismissed Blair’s lofty goals as impractical, if not arrogant. Writing in the Evening Standard, political commentator Andrew Rawnsley reminded readers that Blair was seeking to solve all of the world’s problems while failing to repair Britain’s decrepit public services.

“If the man can’t fix the school lavatories, what hope for plumbing in a new world order?” Rawnsley asked.

But even he acknowledged that Blair’s idealism was “a damned sight better than possessing no vision at all of a better world.”

This vision of a world community is not new for Blair. He discovered the theme as a student at Oxford in the mid-1970s, when friends introduced him to Christian theology and social doctrine, and he carried it into politics when he was elected a member of Parliament from the northern mining town of Sedgefield in 1983.

To friends in government and the Labor Party, Blair’s convictions are his strength.

“He has a strong moral code based firmly in religious belief,” said David Hill, a Labor Party activist. “This gives him a clear sense of moral duty and right and wrong.”

To critics, it can make him an insufferable preacher, better suited to teaching Sunday school than to leading a nation as secular as Britain. The satirical magazine Private Eye has dubbed the prime minister Vicar of St. Albion.

And that was before Blair called Jews, Muslims and Christians “all children of Abraham” at the Labor Party conference.

But Blair has made a career of breaking with tradition. He was known as something of a rule-breaker at boarding school and university, where he played guitar with a rock band called Ugly Rumors.

In politics, Blair became an anti-crime crusader, pushed the leftist party to the center and, at 41, was elected the youngest Labor leader in British history. He soon jettisoned the party’s old commitment to nationalization and state control of the economy and, taking a page from the “new Democrats” who had recently elected President Clinton, forged the “new Labor” party.

The Tories dismissed him as “Tony Blur” and “Bambi,” but the public didn’t. In May 1997, his new Labor ended 18 years of Conservative rule, and Blair took over as prime minister.

In his first term, he threw himself into the pursuit of peace in Northern Ireland, devolution of power to parliaments in Scotland and Wales, and the abolition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords, Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament, whom many people saw as relics of a feudal society. With a large majority in the House of Commons, he got almost everything he wanted.

He had the great fortune of governing at a time of economic abundance and weak political opposition, fumbling only once during his first term in the face of protests over fuel taxes. Even grumpy media smiled on him when his wife, attorney Cherie Booth, became pregnant and delivered their fourth child at age 45. Blair didn’t even have to leave home to kiss babies.

Although Britons were unhappy with the lack of progress on their schools, National Health Service and decaying railroad system, in June the Labor Party won its second landslide victory--albeit with the lowest voter turnout since World War I--and kept Blair in power. It was the first time that the 100-year-old party had retaken 10 Downing St. after a full term in office.

Blair established himself as a statesman during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, when he made his debut on the world stage as a man on a mission against evil.

With a couple of exceptions, Britain and the United States have backed each other in military campaigns since the Korean War.

As an English-speaking former empire, Britain has seen itself as America’s No. 1 ally. But the prime minister’s role has sometimes been to goad Washington into tougher action and sometimes to argue restraint.

In a conversation with then-President George H. W. Bush about anti-Iraq sanctions during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously warned the U.S. leader that “this is no time to go wobbly.” She wanted the U.S.-led military coalition to bring down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but the war stopped at Iraq’s retreat from occupation of Kuwait.

Likewise, Blair pushed his good friend Clinton to prepare ground troops for deployment into Yugoslavia during the 1999 campaign to expel Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s troops from Kosovo province and end the brutal crackdown there. Clinton, at least initially, balked, and NATO forces managed to achieve their goals through air attacks.

Blair has since sent peacekeeping troops to Sierra Leone and Macedonia and said that if the 1994 slaughter of more than 800,000 people in Rwanda were to happen today, he would act.

“Blair is a very moralistic leader, compared by many to Gladstone,” who also was an exponent of international moralism, said Oxford professor Vernon Bogdanor. “He would like to hold communities or whole nations responsible for other nations. Blair’s difficulty is that sometimes there is a gap between his ideals and practice.”

When Clinton was replaced by Bush, many in Britain feared that the “special relationship” between London and Washington would come to an end. But Blair quickly made a pilgrimage to Camp David, offering to serve as a bridge between the United States and Europe. Bush subsequently visited the prime minister at his weekend retreat, Chequers, and the two declared that they had gotten on famously. The special relationship, it turned out, was as institutional as it was personal.

Almost as soon as the hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Blair headed to the battlefront.

He feared that Bush would withdraw into isolationism or, worse, blindly strike back on his own. Blair was one of the first leaders to get through to Bush on the telephone to express his solidarity and offer help. As Bush called for Bin Laden “dead or alive,” Blair threw his voice behind U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others arguing for moderation. He sought to reassure Muslims that this was not a war against Islam but a war against terrorism, and he sent his foreign secretary to Iran with that message.

Blair has been unwavering in his support for the U.S., marching toward a war in Afghanistan with scarcely a nod to his Cabinet or Parliament. In a country where the prime minister is regarded as first among equals in Parliament, this has rubbed many the wrong way.

“So just when did we elect Tony Blair president?” columnist Robert Harris asked in the Daily Telegraph.

“Gradually, it has become apparent that America is the country run by a Cabinet of powerful equals . . . and the legislature has to be treated with respect. It is Britain that looks like the presidential state, with no Cabinet government left to speak of, with the spotlight directed onto a single chief executive and with a legislature that barely merits consultation.”

When Parliament was recalled from recess last week, Conservative member John Wilkinson addressed Blair, “Would the president--er, prime minister. . . .” The chamber filled with laughter, some of it nervous.

But although political observers cringed at the process, the people have supported the policy. A poll taken Sept. 23 showed a 76% approval rating for the way Blair is handling the British response to the terrorist attacks.