Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian): Blair's luck has run out

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Wednesday March 22

Blair's luck has run out - and he has no one to blame but himself
Three years of conflict in Iraq has corroded public trust in every aspect of his premiership, both domestic and foreign
By Jonathan Freedland

If you want to understand the current plight of Tony Blair, there was a brief but revealing glimpse of it on BBC News 24 yesterday afternoon. The channel carried live a thoughtful, cogent speech by the prime minister on foreign policy, the first of a trilogy. The moment the PM finished, the presenter invited a correspondent to offer a few words of analysis - before returning to the big story of the day: the ongoing row over loans-for-peerages. Blair's face was gone, replaced by Tory benefactor Stuart Wheeler, denouncing the corruption of the Blair regime.

There it was, Blair's problem in a televisual nutshell: he can get no message across, can set no grand vision, drive through no important policy, because his voice is drowned out by political noise. This week's noise was Labour sleaze. Last week it was Labour's split on education reform. The week before that it was more alleged Labour sleaze, centred on the financial arrangements of Tessa Jowell. These are the passing squalls, but they are not the source of the storm. That lies elsewhere.

To find it, one has to look hard at that speech yesterday. Ambitious to lay out a coherent Blair doctrine of foreign policy, the prime minister began by restating his belief in liberal interventionism - the creed that democratic countries can no longer stand by while dictators commit hideous crimes against their own peoples.

When he first developed the idea, in the so-called Chicago speech of 1999, at the height of the Kosovo crisis, he won many admirers. Those who, like me, backed the principle of intervention believed Blair was articulating a new approach to international affairs, one that would no longer see the principle of state sovereignty trump all other moral considerations. That same year, Augusto Pinochet had failed in his attempt to hide behind the legal notion of "sovereign immunity" rather than be answerable for his crimes in Chile. The Blair doctrine suggested a new dispensation, one that would no longer let horror go unpunished, one that would not tolerate a second Rwanda.

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[MadMaddie]

1. If * cabal loses Blair....they are in deep shit....

Hopefully the British will get rid of him soon.....