The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by nick sweeney:

Blair illustrates that a reasonable human being, presumably privy to somewhat more information than the rest of us, can in fact agree about that threat.

Blair is a classic Gladstonian liberal interventionist. Except that Gladstone had direct control of the gunboats and troops to deliver on his sense of moral purpose. Blair has to subcontract his moral vision to the Bush regime, the Pentagon's plan to sell out the Kurds, and the plan to bankroll Halliburton with Iraqi oil revenue. That means he might as well put out his eyes with a hot poker.

To do the wrong thing for the right reasons appears to be Blair's nemesis.

And Gladstone split his party too.

A couple of points to reflect the British perspective on this.

1. British politics doesn't have an equivalent to the Republicans. No, not even the Tories; the NYTimes noted that its manifesto for 2001 was to the left of the Democrats in its embrace of public services. The extreme-right in the UK is more than tinged with white-English-nationalism (BNP, UKIP) and there's no real religious influence on British political debate. (The secular nature of the state is clearer de facto in the UK than in the US.)

2. Bush managed to conceal the most hawkish elements fairly well from the electorate. I saw through it while watching the campaign, but I was also looking at British media sources which noted the ideological tenets of the Bush team, and didn't engage in the profound silliness so voluminously documented by Bob Somerby's Daily Howler.

So, it's more than credible that Blair didn't really have any idea who or what he was dealing with. We know now just what a vicious horde of paleowarmongers they are.

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