Poor Tom Friedman. Not long ago, he was being called the leading columnist in America, the most influential, etc.
But he damaged his reputation pretty badly with his seemingly gullible attitude toward the Iraq War. He's been scrounging around to come up with some angle to rehabilitate himself, and a lot of it has been pretty pitiful. So I'm hesitant to even quote him.
But in his 11/20/03 column in the New York Times, he does focus on one aspect of the Bush-Blair alliance that has mystified me, on both sides:
<< But [the latest] policy shift [in Iraq] is not enough. It needs shifts toward Europe and the Middle East, too. It is amazing, British officials say, how little the Bush team has done to shore up Mr. Blair for taking his hugely important (and unpopular) pro-war stance. Mr. Blair needs the U.S. to drop its outrageous steel tariffs, to provide a workable alternative to Kyoto, to hand over the nine U.K. citizens held in Guantánamo Bay (which is a big story [in Britain]) and to let London play around with the E.U. on a European defense force, which is not a threat to NATO. But so far, he appears to be getting nothing.
<< Tony Blair was too principled for his own good. He was so convinced that the war was right, he never played hardball with the Bush team to get it to adopt the other policies needed to sustain British support, and which would also have increased Mr. Bush's authority throughout Europe. >>
I'm not at all sure that "principled" is the right word for Tony Blair's participation in the Iraq War, since he knew that the "weapons of mass destruction" claims were highly dubious, as was the status of the invasion in international law.
But Friedman points out a good set of quesions. Why is the Bush team doing so little to boost Blair? Or even to refrain from doing things that undermine him? And why is Blair putting up with all this without getting anything in return? (See also How Bush Betrayed Blair.)
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