London
IF YOU’RE INTERESTED in a modern profile in courage, keep your eye on the press conferences that will be a part of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to America later this week. After a few days in Bermuda for much needed rest and recreation, and some time for detailed briefings on the situation in Iraq, Blair will sit down with President Bush to review what some are calling the current crisis, and to discuss how to manage the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, due to occur just a few months from now.
This is very much a meeting of friends as well as allies, perhaps not in the Roosevelt-Churchill sense, but in the sense of mutual admirers. Bush admires the prime minister because “he does what he says he is going to do.” Blair, in turn, makes no secret of the regard in which he holds the president, lapsing into the colloquial style he uses when campaigning in pubs to call Bush “a clever bloke” (American translation: “an intelligent man”). Blair especially admires Bush’s ability to see issues quickly and clearly, unburdened by what the prime minister considers the tendency of intellectuals to see so many sides of every problem that they are paralyzed into inaction.
