The special relationship

The Bush and Blair relationship is a fascinating one, The Telegraph reports:

“‘His friendship with Clinton was obvious and predictable,’ one Cabinet minister told me recently, ‘but his alliance with Bush is a much deeper, stranger thing. It is a clue to what Tony is all about these days.’ If the novice Blair needed to bask in the electoral magic of Bill, the older, weather-beaten Blair craves the moral certainty of Dubya.

In private, Mr Blair readily admits that he has much in common with the American neo-conservatives who have done so much to influence the foreign policy of the Bush White House. He shares with them a belief that the West has a mission to encourage the spread of democratic values, free markets and basic liberties. To borrow the words used by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, the Prime Minister wants to make the world ‘safe for democracy’……..

It suits those who despise Mr Bush and respect Mr Blair to believe that the Prime Minister is only going along with the President because he thinks that he has to. But – as Mr Blair keeps trying to tell people – he means what he says.

“It’s worse than you think,” he told The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley on the eve of war. “I believe in it. I am truly committed to dealing with this irrespective of the position of America. If the Americans were not doing this, I would be pressing for them to do so.” Bob Woodward’s new book on the Iraq conflict alleges that the President privately offered his friend the option of backing out of the war. But the Prime Minister was having none of it.

No wonder Mr Bush thinks Mr Blair is a “stand-up kinda guy”. And no wonder he likes the President – a man who still trusts him as the British electorate once did, so long ago. When the two men first met in February 2001, they feared that they might have nothing in common except the toothpaste they used. These days, it must sometimes seem to each of them that they have little in common with anyone else.