May 21, 2007

What Do Bush and Blair Know?

George W. Bush and Tony Blair might know a few things about Iraq and terrorism. And I’m starting to think they might just keep those things to themselves forever.

That, of course, is not the current template storyline among media on either side of the pond. Bush and Blair are unpopular, stubborn, unyielding and unwilling to accede to the wishes of their constituents. They just can’t admit they made a mistake.

And they sure don’t. During Blair’s recent farewell visit to the White House, he and his longtime ally Bush sounded exactly the same as they did in 2002, when 9/11 was fresh on everyone’s minds and the drive to oust Saddam Hussein was moving toward implementation.

When the two leaders – one a very lame duck, the other getting there – talk about fighting terrorists globally, and about the stakes in Iraq, they talk with the same sense of urgency and seriousness that they have used all along. Neither wavers even a little in his belief that Iraq is central to the overall war on terror. Neither gives an inch in his conviction that a free Iraq will be a deathblow to terrorists throughout the Middle East – and that a failed Iraq will be a huge victory for those same terrorists.

Not that the assembled White House press corps want to talk about any of this. They want to ask Blair if he regrets his close association with Bush. They want Blair to say that Iraq is the big mistake that has ruined his otherwise sterling tenure as prime minister. They want to know what Bush thinks about reports that Britain’s Conservative Party leader doesn’t want to be seen with him.

As far as D.C. scribes are concerned, Bush and Blair are Exhibit A in the Museum of Political Failure. That, not the fate of the free world, is the topic du jour. But if you look at their records in terms of anything other than present-day approval ratings – wait, something else matters? – Bush and Blair are curious models for failure.

Blair will complete 11 years as Britain’s prime minister when he leaves office on June 27. He led the Labour Party’s resurgence and was re-elected twice – the last such triumph in 2005, even though his victory was portrayed as a defeat and the calls for his resignation began the second his re-election was secured. The Conservatives in Britain are surging now, as no one has yet repealed predictable cycles in politics, but Blair has kept Labour in power through two wars and economic challenges at home. He is hardly a political failure.

As for Bush, he defeated a sitting vice president when the economy was good, gained congressional seats for his party in the 2002 off-year elections and won both his own re-election and more congressional seats in 2004, when the economy wasn’t so good and the war was going at full speed. The 2006 congressional losses were typical for the president’s party in the sixth year of an eight-year administration, so Bush, like Blair, is not immune to all laws of political regularity.

But any way you look at it, unless you obsess over approval ratings, these two have been dominant and successful political forces. Far more interesting, and entirely overlooked by their cackling inquisitors, is their unbreakable personal alliance even though one is a conservative and the other is a borderline socialist, and even though neither is picking up popularity points as a result.

Their loyalty to each other, and to their shared foreign policy vision, just might be about something other than obstinacy. It might be about something they both know.

While it’s a popular argument these days to say that Bush and Blair are ignoring the facts, the truth is that Bush and Blair, by virtue of their positions, are in possession of a lot more facts than the rest of us. I have lamented in the past that Bush doesn’t share more of what he knows, because if he did, it might ease some of the political pressure that I believe makes it harder for him to lead this fight.

But there is no doubt that both he and Blair possess far more information than they share – about what’s happening on the ground in Iraq, and about the nature of the terrorist threat in general. Could it possibly be – you think maybe? – they are so stolid in their stance and in their allegiance because they know things about the fight that, in their minds, make the momentary political upheaval worth it?

Or it could be that a right-wing American and a socialist Brit have conspired in a shared endeavor of folly and mutual political self-destruction, just because they thought they should. That’s the running conventional wisdom. You won’t often go wrong betting against convention.