Blair knew better

HISTORY WILL forever link Tony Blair, the outgoing British prime minister, with George W. Bush against a backdrop of carnage in Iraq. That is, in one sense, as it should be. For all of Blair's brilliant success in reshaping and reviving the Labor Party, the failure in Iraq looms as his most consequential decision. Yet, as Blair arrives in Washington today for a valedictory sit-down with Bush, the simple conflation of the prime minister and the president obscures the contradictions of their partnership.

Though Blair and Bush marched into war together, they did so in the service of distinct and even opposing visions. Long before 9/11, Blair argued that no single nation could solve the 21st century's toughest problems. Only through international cooperation could the world confront challenges from global warming to global terror.

"We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not," Blair insisted in a landmark 1999 speech to the Chicago Economic Club. The best hope for stability and progress, he declared, was for the world to unite behind "a new doctrine of international community."

For Blair, international action against Saddam Hussein was meant to embody that collaboration. In the weeks before war in 2003, Blair portrayed the invasion as an opportunity for the world community to prove it could come together to enforce global rules.

Bush welcomed Blair's support. But in Iraq, the president had something very different in mind. Whatever its other motivations, the invasion was intended to demonstrate the consequences of threatening U.S. interests after 9/11. For Bush, Iraq was a rock through the window of the world's outlaw regimes. And in that mission, trying to encourage "international community" by accepting constraints on American action was not only unnecessary but counterproductive.

Even after the war, Blair never stopped preaching the virtues of an "international community that ... acts in pursuit of global values." But he undercut his ability to promote such a community by locking arms with Bush on an Iraq strategy that alienated much of the world, during the invasion and in its aftermath. At crucial moments, Blair sublimated his inclusive internationalism to Bush's brusque unilateralism.