Unpopular Bush/Blair alliance

If George W. Bush, who's on the cover of the latest issue of Runner's World magazine, were to go running around his ranch with another world leader, which would it be? Jean Chrétien would surely struggle to keep up. Pervez Musharraf, still more so. Gerhard Schröder, currently engaged in his own electoral race in Germany, might lack the stamina to pursue W. through the West Texas heat. When you think about it, there's really only one choice: Tony Blair, the still-youthful British Prime Minister.

It was a mercy, then, that Blair and Bush had their latest love-fest at Camp David rather than at the 'Western White House' in Crawford. Perhaps Bush, whose conversation with an AP reporter while jogging this summer was hilariously clipped ("Bovine," said the president when passing some of his livestock), fretted that the sedentary longhorns would bring back bad memories (BSE? Foot and Mouth?) for Blair. More likely, the leaders decided that a degree of casual gravitas — the sort of thing you transmit by wearing open collars and blazers, rather than running shoes — was necessary to impress the world that the alliance against Iraq was purposeful and solid.

In reality, the "alliance" doesn't seem to extend very far beyond Blair and Bush. When you've got folks like Lawrence Eagleburger, a Republican hawk of some decades' standing, opposing the president's policy on Iraq, you realize that Bush's position isn't exactly moderate. The surprise, then, is not that virtually every other country in the world opposes the President; but that Tony Blair, leader of a supposedly left-leaning political party, would fly to Maryland to make it seem as if Bush's archly unilateral war-on-Saddam enjoys international support.

Why is Blair doing this? And is there broader backing for Bush in Britain or the rest of Europe? The second question is easier to answer. Opinion polls suggest that there's very little support in any European country for Bush's war plans. Even in Britain, the public is opposed to a strategy in which Britain and the US go it alone. Moreover Blair, unlike Bush, seems to be very much his own man. While W. is cramped by Dick Cheney's sinister acumen and Donald Rumsfeld's priapic bombast (Rumsfeld, who's starting to look like an extra from Cocoon, might actually be able to beat W.'s time in the 5K), Blair has only to transcend the dreary presence of his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. So let's assume for a moment that Bush can at least plead ignorance or poor counsel in his saber-rattling: What's Blair's excuse?

It can't be British public opinion, since virtually everyone in the UK seems to dismiss the Blair-Bush axis. Europe is united in its opposition (and many Americans are also skeptical) because of the almost embarrassing number of reasons why attacking Iraq is foolish: From the strategic argument that this may trigger a broader war in the Middle East (recently made by Milton Viorst in the Times); through the international-law argument that it's inconsistent to go after Iraq when, say, Israel is confirmedly in possession of weapons of mass destruction (as Nelson Mandela suggested in a Newsweek interview); to the practical argument that there's no evidence that Saddam has nukes and, in any case, it's the job of weapons inspectors to go back into Iraq to check on this stuff before the missiles start flying.

So here are two guesses about Blair's behavior. First, he's overcompensating for Britain's fairly marginal standing as a world power and its laggardly position in the European Union. Britain has a seat on the UN Security Council but has nowhere near the political prominence that it enjoyed at the UN's founding in 1945. Blair thinks that, if he backs Bush when every other European leader thinks Bush is crazy, the American government and the American people are going to see Britain as strong and significant and think that, say, the Germans or the French are the whiny European pipsqueaks. Second, Blair wants to be Bush: He's frustrated that British leaders have to endure the scrutiny of a parliamentary system, and he'd much rather have Bush's open mandate and relative immunity from the legislature. His hero in this, weirdly enough, is Margaret Thatcher; and one of the legends surrounding the Iron Lady is that she steadied the first President Bush in the summer of 1990, and told him that he had to unleash Desert Storm against Iraq in spite of his doubts.

All this is bad news for Iraqis, but maybe also for Blair. Mrs. Thatcher and Bush, Sr. got their war last time around, even if it spared Saddam and precipitated the odious sanctions regime which has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. But Thatcher, isolated from the British people and from her own party, fell from power before the shooting began. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.