Tony Blair has a credibility gap, too

One of the permanent non-physical casualties of the Iraq War has been the reputation of Tony Blair. When he first came to office, he looked like a serious and pragmatic reformer in domestic policies, and a far-sighted internationalist in world affairs.

On foreign policy, we now know that he's little better than a Bush clone. So it's not surprising that he is undertaking a parallel PR push to gin up support for his and Bush's merry little Mesopotamian adventure: Words can't fill in policy gaps left by the bombs by Bronwen Maddox Times of London 03/22/06. Maddox is the foreign editor for the prowar Times, and her column has a distinct feel of the search for someone on whom to blame the failure of policies her paper supported:

Tony Blair's speech was a heavy-handed attempt to substitute a philosophy of the War on Terror for success in Iraq.

He was helped by President Bush, who gave a simultaneous press conference in the White House, to defend the Iraq invasion on its third anniversary. ...

But Blair’s weakest link remains the connection between the War on Terror and Iraq: both the justification of the war and the damage that the turmoil has done to the promotion of democracy elsewhere.

The impression of trying too hard began with his declaration that we face “Not a clash between civilisations, but a clash about civilisation”. That ugly title destroys the succinct menace of Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, and barely makes sense. ...

He has a powerful message — but he wants Muslims to deliver it to each other, and they may not. He can defend what Britain and the US are doing in Iraq — but they have almost no levers left to pull there. And Iraq undermines his wider fight against terrorism.

Language is a poor substitute for power. Blair is throwing heavy handfuls of words at the crater that has been blasted in his plans for Iraq, but they aren’t filling it up.

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