Blair's End

Sounds like part of a respectable neighborhood, and it is.

I'm with Fareed Zakaria (on This Week with George Stephanopoulos): Blair's legacy is much more than his doomed decision to dance with Dubya in Iraq. His significance in postwar Britain's political history is right at the top, alongside Margaret Thatcher's. Like Bill Clinton, the only tragedy is that such great talent could have accomplished more.

Blair is certainly right that the greatest opportunity for a British prime minister is to maximize alignment with the US president in critical decisions, though the panel's judgment is that he would have served US better to have agreed with US less. Unfortunately, he lacked Clinton's ability to triangulate, or he may have let his emotional impulse to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with US get the better of him.

I like the notion of Tony Blair going to head the World Bank. The US should not automatically get the post, particularly since we did such a bad job of exercising our prerogative last time in naming Wolfowitz. It may be way out of Blair's area of expertise, but it would continue his policy of annoying Gordon Brown by occupying jobs that Brown knows he can do better.

Speaking of This Week with George, though, I have to say I loved having Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation on the panel with Zakaria and George Will, even if she took a contrary position, lining up behind Jimmy Carter's unchivalrous assessment of Blair's bungle in Babylon.