MissMagAddict
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2005
- Messages
- 26,630
- Reaction score
- 1,309
image source | mensvogue
By Roger Cohen | excerpt: The garden of the British high commissioner's residence in Pretoria commands a fine view of the South African capital, an unlovely town distinguished by a lone architectural jewel, the Union Buildings with their semi-circular limestone colonnades. Cannon salvos and a white-gloved honor guard had welcomed the U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair earlier in the day to this colonial-era monument, home to the presidency, and I had thought: He will miss the heady pomp of office even after a decade as prime minister. He will miss the red carpets, the tensed bayonet-clutching soldiers, the gun salutes, the leaders like Thabo Mbeki waiting to usher him into the inner sanctums where history gets shaped. Power is adrenaline; the Sicilians say it is better than sex.
But sitting then with Blair—at the end of his four-day trip to Libya, Sierra Leone, and South Africa—on the manicured lawn of one of his country's diplomatic outposts, tea being served, the June sun setting with African abruptness, it was clear that he was already looking forward, beyond being Europe's most powerful head of state, to other grand challenges: "Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I do think there are lessons from Northern Ireland for the Middle East. What it requires is an absolutely intensive focus."
With Blair, you begin and end with the eyes. His dark suits and white shirts and generally modest ties (with an occasional splash of Paul Smith boldness) are unremarkable, sending you back to his most arresting feature. Blue and warm in laughter, the eyes can harden to a gemlike intensity that has its measure of ice. This is his talisman. It is an expression that speaks of the willfulness beneath the geniality.
He fixes me with that gaze and says, "Look, it won't happen without someone there in the Middle East. The only reason we got the breakthrough in Northern Ireland was that we did in the end focus on it with such intensity over such a period that every little thing that went wrong—and everything that could go wrong did at some point—was all the time being managed and rectified. Jonathan Powell, my chief of staff, once said to me that the important thing about this is that at any time we can't solve it, we have to manage it, until we can start to solve it again. What you never do is let the thing govern itself."
Call this the bicycle approach to peacemaking: If you don't keep moving forward, especially when the bombs go off, everything topples. But, I put it to Blair, had the Bush administration not done the exact opposite with Israel-Palestine: allowed the mess to fester because Washington is a one-issue town and the issue has been Iraq? He pauses a moment—unusual in a man of such fluid articulateness—before saying, "Put it this way: I am glad they have now focused. Because my view of the Middle East is that we are on a long-term mission to sort it out. If you look at extremism in Pakistan or Chechnya or other parts of the world, extremism on the streets of Spain or France or wherever, it wasn't born there but imported in."
Sort it out—a bloke's colloquialism that says Blair does not believe in half-measures. At 54, three years past a cardiac procedure to correct an irregular heartbeat, he has not mellowed but hardened. The 9/11 attacks on the United States produced what he describes as "a moment of complete and total conviction." It helped him identify his goals, despite post-Iraq approval ratings in the U.K. that hovered in the low thirties, near Bush's in the U.S. That certainty, unshaken by the mayhem in Baghdad, involves a belief "that we have to root this terrorism out" in what he sees as a generational fight against Islamist fanaticism. Blair believes much of that struggle depends, because of its religious and strategic charge, on the Israeli–Palestinian confrontation. This holy terrain is where, as Blair once put it to Congress, "the poison is incubated" before ending up in Glasgow or London or New York.
