LONDON -- Prime Minister Tony Blair is back in London after his whirlwind tour of Northeast Asia. For many of us the high point of his tour were the delightful moments at Tsinghua University in Beijing when, following a range of predictable questions that he answered with the usual bromides, he was asked by a student to sing. Without any of his usual advisers on hand to tell him what to do (they had gone home), he turned to his wife, Cherie, and told her to sing instead. Quite. No advisers, no views.
In England we have gotten used to Blair's changing position on the run. Whatever you want to hear he will say, while denying he ever said anything different.
On the justification for going to war with Iraq, he began by stressing the need to destroy Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's capability to activate weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. These were weapons, Blair told us, that posed an immediate threat to the west and its allies (i.e., Israel). Then he was down to the claim that Hussein had plans to develop such weapons. Now the emphasis is on how rotten Hussein was; Blair tells us the world is better off without a man who has put 300,000 people in premature graves, often torturing them first.