Blair Visit Comes at Difficult Juncture

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s scheduled visit today in Washington was supposed to be a victory lap for America’s most faithful ally in the Iraq war, complete with the rare honor of speaking before a joint session of Congress, and a White House stop for talks with President Bush.

But it is instead proving to be a political embarrassment, even a liability, for both leaders, as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq raises questions about their credibility on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rather than reflect the strong transatlantic bond, Blair’s presence here also promises to accentuate the differences between Washington and London on issues at the heart of future cooperation in Iraq, the Arab-Israeli peace process and the broader war on terrorism.

A scheduled joint news conference could even prove painful, if reporters grill Bush and Blair over their differences, particularly the conflicting intelligence assessments about whether former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein attempted to buy uranium in Africa to rebuild his nuclear program. Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the MI6, claims that Iraq did. The CIA thinks that Baghdad didn’t, at least not in Niger.

Reconciling those views -- and accounting for the fact that neither country’s military has found chemical, biological or nuclear weapons -- could well prove awkward.

Seeking to bridge the gap, U.S. national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said last week that Britain’s assessment of Iraq’s uranium-buying efforts in Africa was accurate. Still, she said, it should not have been cited in Bush’s State of the Union address in January because Washington didn’t know the specifics or sources of London’s intelligence.

In recent weeks, Blair has spurned requests from both Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to ignore and isolate Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

The U.S.-backed “road map” to a Mideast peace settlement is built around creating a new Palestinian leadership that is accountable, willing to crack down on militants and prepared to compromise in the name of peace, three steps that the Bush administration believes Arafat is unwilling to take.

Propping up Arafat, U.S. officials say, could prevent the fragile 11-week-old government of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas from gaining wider support. Abbas is scheduled to meet with Bush on July 25.

U.S.-British relations also have been strained by disputes over the status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, particularly nine British citizens. The issue has come to a head now that Washington has selected two of the British detainees to be tried by a new military tribunal.

More than 200 members of the British Parliament recently issued a resolution demanding that the two detainees be repatriated, which the United States has been unwilling to do because Britain cannot provide assurances that they would be tried in British courts. Blair’s government contends that the evidence may not be admissible in British courts, and the White House does not want to risk their release.

“We’re not happy with the fact they could be tried by military tribunals with lower than average norms. That’s not good enough when we fought side by side. Plus, the United States can try its own, John Walker Lindh, in a civilian court, and we should have that option too,” a British official said.

“Blair can’t sit quietly as British citizens go before kangaroo courts,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials acknowledge that the White House has considered repatriation, although they say such a move could set a precedent leading to requests from other allies to hand over their nationals as well.

At least so far, Blair has faced more serious challenges than Bush, who has been hit with serious questions about Iraq only in the past week.

A warm reception in Congress would stand in sharp contrast to the raucous mood in the House of Commons that Blair left behind.

The prime minister is under assault not just from the opposition benches, where Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith on Wednesday accused Blair of “rapidly becoming a stranger to the truth.” The Labor leader is also being attacked with more fervor than ever from disaffected members of his own party.

Last weekend, former Blair Cabinet minister Clare Short went on television and denounced Blair in scathing terms, calling his policies “crummy” and suggesting that he quit.

“I think the best solution for Tony would be if he planned to move on before it gets ever nastier,” she told the BBC. Blair sees himself as a “kind of higher mortal than the rest of us,” she added.

The debate over whether Blair manipulated intelligence information to bolster his case for war has clearly undermined public trust in the beleaguered prime minister. A Financial Times poll on July 1 showed that 63% of those surveyed believe Blair “is losing his grip.” An additional 38% said they had trusted Blair before the year began but no longer did.

“The problem for Blair is that in all this debate about the origins of the war in Iraq, there’s a strong public feeling that he was pressured all along by an American timetable,” said Adam Roberts, an Oxford University professor of international relations. “His positions on the war now look less solidly based than appeared at the time, and as long as this debate goes on, it is going to be terribly tricky for him.”

Like Bush, Blair is now trying to shift public debate away from the issue of weapons to that of whether the world is a better place without Hussein.

“When we have over the past couple of days taken the first steps for Iraqi people actually to take control of their own lives, and we have the United Nations -- not Britain and not the United States -- talking about 300,000 people and mass graves, then I believe we should be proud that Saddam has gone, glad that he has gone,” Blair said Monday. “We should be proud as a country of what we have done.”

Times staff writer Wright reported from Washington and special correspondent Wallace from London.