Tony Blair in the Middle East: Right Man for the Job?

Just hours after Tony Blair stepped down as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Quartet -composed of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations- appointed him as its representative and envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And only a few hours after that, the debate over the wisdom or foolishness of this choice raged on.

Supporters rightly indicate that Tony Blair is perhaps the most gifted politician of his generation. On the domestic front, he leaves the UK in far better shape than it was when he arrived at 10 Downing Street in 1997. Steady economic growth, improved hospitals and schools, and impeccable skills as a performer-cum-politician, explain his victory in three consecutive national elections, a feat never accomplished by a leader of the Labour Party. He has managed to successfully navigate the always turbulent waters of devolution -higher autonomy to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland- and make of the UK a cosmopolitan country awash with immigrants without the corresponding nativist backlash.

His popularity was not just domestic. On the international front, many European politicians -from left and right- defined themselves as Blairites, and many Americans wished he could be elected president of the United States. His efforts against global warming and extreme poverty in Africa have been laudable. And despite being a neophyte on global affairs when he became PM, Blair's assertive and interventionist foreign policy -in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan- turned out a collection of qualified successes. Yet none of these accomplishments qualifies him better for his new job as the resolution of the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland. One can only hope that he will be able to bring the same patience, perseverance, and the ability to reconcile sworn enemies, to the Middle East. For starters, he was instrumental in normalizing relations between Lybia's Gaddafi and the West, maintains a good rapport with leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and his appointment was well received by both Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas.

However, it is more than an ugly coincidence that all of Blair's shortcomings and blunders have to do precisely with the Middle East. Most of his demise in popularity -in the UK and abroad- has to do, of course, with Iraq. He is considered by many a war criminal -waging, under false pretenses, a military misadventure that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and has yet to bring any peace or stability to the region. But more than the mistake of this decision, what annoys his growing detractors is his inability to express remorse. In every chance he gets, Blair continues to affirm, with stubborn ideological zeal, that the war was justified, that the decision he took was the right one for his country and the world, and that history will soon be on his side.

Similarly, last summer, with a majority of world opinion appalled by Israel's bombing of Lebanon, Blair refused to condemn Israeli actions as disproportionate, and stayed alone with his American and Israeli counterparts in blocking UN efforts to call for a ceasefire. Both in Iraq and Lebanon, Blair appeared as uncritically doing the United States' bidding, even against the Britons' preferences. And after the 2000 Camp David negotiations, Blair joined Clinton in singling out Arafat as the main culpable of the collapse of the peace process, a judgment that remains disputed even in the West. This is hardly going to help him in Gaza and the West Bank, where every international initiative is already regarded as pro-Israel, and where Blair, like in the rest of the Arab world, is disliked almost as much as George Bush. He has failed to convince the US President to make a stronger effort to solve the Middle East crisis. Mahmoud Abbas was quick to welcome the appointment, but in a divided Palestine, his political clout and authority carry less than half of the Palestinians. The Europeans, beginning with Javier Solana, were not very happy. And Russia stalled the appointment for a while, a possible echo of the Litvinenko case and Blair's recent anti-Putin statements.

Does any of this matter? Hardly. Blair's appointment, right or wrong, is unlikely to be of much impact. Peace in Israel and Palestine, even though nearly everyone agrees on principle to a two-state solution, seems farther than ever. Dozens of international mediators came and left, to no avail -starting with the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, who was murdered by the Jewish terrorist group Lehi in 1948. Before Blair, the Quartet's last envoy was James Wolfensohn, another high-profile figure much praised for his leadership at the World Bank. Wolfensohn resigned after a year, criticizing Israel for its refusal to engage seriously in the peace process. And Hamas and Fatah are too busy fighting each other to worry about the plight of the Palestinians, reset the peace talks, or listen to Bush's poodle.