LONDON, Sept. 7--Bending to pressure, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced today that he would leave office within the next 12 months, heralding the end of a remarkable three terms in office during which he has lifted the nationÂ’s mood at home but plunged it into unwelcome wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
His pronouncement meant that, some time around or before next summer, Mr. Blair will resign the leadership of the Labor Party and make way for Gordon Brown, his finance minister, to take over as prime minister. For much of this week, Britain'’s political village has been gripped with the spectacle of a brutal behind-the-scenes power struggle between the two men. On Wednesday, eight junior aides quit Mr. BlairÂ’s camp, leaving the sense of a land in crisis.
In what seemed a carefully choreographed series of pronouncements, Mr. Brown first made a separate announcement today, drawing back from a showdown with his onetime ally. "“I will support him in the decision he makes," Mr. Brown said.
It was not clear whether the absence of a clear timetable would satisfy a restive Labor Party, many of whose legislators have been clamoring for an exact date for him to leave before local elections next May. Mr. Blair, who has said he will not seek a fourth term, has been desperate to set the conditions of his departure, anxious to mold a legacy of achievement to offset the profound unpopularity he has garnered from his close alliance with President Bush in the Iraq war.
Tony Blair staked his government on the Bush administration's war in Iraq. He blindly followed Bush and the neocons into the war, has gotten bogged down in a costly occupation in a country that is in the throes of civil war, and is now reaping the destruction of his own government with the falling public opinion polls and the mass resignations of key aides. What is even more amazing is the profound legacy of his previous accomplishments will be overshadowed by the disaster of Iraq. Consider this from the Times:
Mr. Blair took power in 1997 on a wave of euphoria that built as he struck the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement and, with Mr. Brown running the economy, opened the country to a remarkable period of low unemployment, low interest rates and high employment.
In foreign affairs, he built a close relationship with President Bill Clinton and took a prominent role in the Kosovo war, a forerunner of his interventionist policies in the Muslim world. He was returned to office with another landslide in June 2001.
But it was on Sept 11, 2001, that Mr. Blair'’s tenor and style changed. He became a close ally of President Bush first in Afghanistan then in Iraq--a war that was deeply unpopular among many Britons, including Muslims who argued that the vision of British troops fighting in Islamic countries as allies of the United States exposed the country to terrorist attack. His handling of the Iraq invasion, moreover, cost him the trust of many Britons.
In the end, Tony Blair has no one to blame but himself for getting Brtain into this mess.
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