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2008-02-08 Europe
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Blocking Blair
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Tony Blair is being tipped as a candidate for the new post of EU Council President, and suddenly it's 2003 all over again.
Mr. Blair's sin is his alliance with the U.S. in the Iraq war. His detractors want Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and the EU's other national leaders, who choose the Council President, to pass over the most successful politician of his generation, and one of the most eloquent advocates of the fight against Islamic terrorism, for the leader of tiny Luxembourg. Somehow, the argument goes, this will better enhance Europe's presence on the global stage -- the raison d'être for this new Presidency.
It's a curious time to renew the Iraq debate, just as the U.S. surge has put al Qaeda on the defensive and allowed for slow but sure political progress in Baghdad. Events on the ground make the antiwar crowd's narrative of a "disastrous" invasion less plausible almost daily. So it's compensating by repeating its claims of catastrophe until the public believes they're true. Mr. Blair's potential candidacy -- he hasn't yet declared whether he will stand -- provides an excuse to keep trying.
Leading the people's revolt against Mr. Blair is the European Tribune. The Web site this week launched a petition in 13 of the EU's 23 official languages, with the aim of collecting one million anti-Blair signatures. (By yesterday afternoon they were rocketing toward 5,000, with much support from "Anonymous.")
Prominent among the petition's list of grievances is that the Iraq war "has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims." This assertion was made most famously in the British medical journal The Lancet in a 2006 article that has since been debunked as a statistically flawed exaggeration. Maybe it's too much to expect blogging buddies of the Daily Kos to stick to the facts.
But this is hardly the nastiest attack on Mr. Blair. A blogger on the Guardian's Web site, Neil Clark, says a President Blair would be "the culmination of the neocon dream." The result would be "to fully neuter Europe as an alternative source of global power" so that "European troops [could] be sent -- in their thousands -- to die on the front line" of "U.S. illegal wars of aggression." (The same Mr. Clark in August urged against granting asylum to imperiled Iraqi interpreters who worked with U.K. troops, saying the "real heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.")
Beyond exaggerations and conspiracies, some of Mr. Blair's critics conclude that the Iraq war has made him too unpopular in Europe to serve as Council President. They offer no evidence that this is true. But they do raise a valid point: Shouldn't the people of Europe get to vote for the face of their union to the rest of the world?
Here, Europe's timing is just plain embarrassing. EU leaders are gearing up to choose an unelected President, after ramming through a warmed-over version of the Constitution that voters rejected twice and right when Americans are flocking to voting booths for primary elections.
Mr. Blair helped bring this about. Days before stepping down as Prime Minister in June, he signed off on the guts of the new Lisbon Treaty. Since then he's offered no protest as his successor, Gordon Brown, has reneged on a Labour campaign promise to give Britons a vote on any EU Constitution -- which, for all practical purposes, is exactly what the Lisbon Treaty is.
Mr. Blair may be culpable here. But he deserves a debate on these issues, not an ideological lynching by an angry but fading movement. 
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Posted by ryuge 2008-02-08 07:15||
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Posted by doc 2008-02-08 08:24||
2008-02-08 08:24||
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