Marty Peretz: The Accelerating Decline Of Europe
[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.]
There were two high points in the career of Tony Blair. One was 2003 when Hugh Grant played the British prime minister in Love Actually. The second was in 2006 when Michael Sheen played him in The Queen who was herself portrayed by Helen Mirren. Frankly, it's been downhill ever since. Of course, he had been the longest serving Labour prime minister in history. But he was also a victim of the Iraq war which he had supported basically against the wishes of his party and certainly of its rank-and-file. On the very day he told his monarch that he was stepping down and moving out of 10 Downing Street he was appointed Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, the quartet being the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. A more motley group of intruders into the almost century-old Israel-Palestinian dispute could not be imagined, let alone invented. Anyway failure was its destiny and so also was it the destiny of Blair, poor bloke.
Well, not exactly poor. Like his great friend Bill Clinton he was adept at making cash cling to his fingers and also putting a varnish of philanthropy over his clammy enterprises. In any case, his successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, pushed Blair as the first full-time president of the European Union. For weeks, fate seemed to be on his side. But the traumatic decline of Labour's standing with the British electorate, which goes to the polls in May, must have made the Europols think twice or thrice about putting Blair at the head of a quarreling and cumbersome government of Europe. It must have also occurred to these pols and to their colleagues at home that Blair had achieved exactly zero--and not a whit more--in his droopy venture with the Israelis and their Palestinian foes...
Read entire article at The New Republic
There were two high points in the career of Tony Blair. One was 2003 when Hugh Grant played the British prime minister in Love Actually. The second was in 2006 when Michael Sheen played him in The Queen who was herself portrayed by Helen Mirren. Frankly, it's been downhill ever since. Of course, he had been the longest serving Labour prime minister in history. But he was also a victim of the Iraq war which he had supported basically against the wishes of his party and certainly of its rank-and-file. On the very day he told his monarch that he was stepping down and moving out of 10 Downing Street he was appointed Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, the quartet being the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. A more motley group of intruders into the almost century-old Israel-Palestinian dispute could not be imagined, let alone invented. Anyway failure was its destiny and so also was it the destiny of Blair, poor bloke.
Well, not exactly poor. Like his great friend Bill Clinton he was adept at making cash cling to his fingers and also putting a varnish of philanthropy over his clammy enterprises. In any case, his successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, pushed Blair as the first full-time president of the European Union. For weeks, fate seemed to be on his side. But the traumatic decline of Labour's standing with the British electorate, which goes to the polls in May, must have made the Europols think twice or thrice about putting Blair at the head of a quarreling and cumbersome government of Europe. It must have also occurred to these pols and to their colleagues at home that Blair had achieved exactly zero--and not a whit more--in his droopy venture with the Israelis and their Palestinian foes...