Tony Blair puts principles before popularity

One of the ironic travesties of history is that Yasser Arafat, who mismanaged the Palestinians' aspirations for peace, got a Nobel peace prize, but Tony Blair, who's done as much as any living politician to get that cause back on track, probably won't.

Blair, Britain's prime minister, came to Washington earlier this month, the first foreign leader to bask in the glow of newly elected President Bush. It was appropriate. Blair, in the face of much dissent at home, has put his political career on the line to support the United States in Iraq. That puts him deeply in Bush's debt. It also knocks him out of contention for any Nobel, should that thought ever have flickered across anybody's mind. But Blair has also been spunky about constantly nagging his good American buddy to get cracking on the Palestinian-Israeli peace problem. That may have irritated some in the Bush administration, who put it on the back burner while Arafat, the man they could not deal with, was alive and calling the shots for the Palestinians. But Blair, gutsy on Iraq, is gutsy too on pushing Bush to move on the Palestinian-Israeli divide. Blair sees it as a central factor in Islamic disaffection with the West.

They are an odd couple, this Labor Party prime minister and conservative president, but they have forged an Anglo-American relationship every bit as meaningful as that in earlier times of crisis between Thatcher and Reagan, or Churchill and Roosevelt. Both were misled — as were the leaders of other nations — by speculative intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But both have been unapologetic about ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.

Some of his critics have derided Blair as "Bush's poodle." But he is no man but his own when he speaks with extraordinary passion about mankind's right to liberty, as he did in an address to the American Congress last year. His voice trembling with emotion, he declared: "We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind to be free. Free not to bend your knee to any man in fear, it's a battle worth fighting." It is the same kind of passion that infuses Bush when he speaks of his mission to spread democracy. It is the common bond that binds them.

Although Britons fought a lonely battle for some time in World War II to rid the world of Adolf Hitler, they have not afforded Blair, in the case of Saddam, the same unity of support they then gave Winston Churchill. It is an omission Blair accepts as the price of principle. "I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honor," he told his countrymen in a London speech earlier. "But sometimes it is the price of leadership and cost of conviction."