From the Guardian
Unlimited (UK)
Dated Wednesday April 28
Iraq will be his legacy
History will remember Blair not for the Good Friday agreement or devolution, but for the Gulf war
By Jonathan Freedland
(O)n Saturday it will be seven years since the fine May day when Tony Blair won a landslide and hailed a "new dawn". Seven years is a totemic, almost Biblical milestone to reach; it is also a longer premiership than most. So it's fair to ask what legacy these years will leave behind. When the TV viewers of the future look back on the Blair era - gasping at the pictures of women in midriff tops and men with their hair so carefully messed-up, all of them texting each other furiously - what will they decide was the Blair legacy? . . . .
First, say the PM's people, Blair has transformed Labour's destiny. Once deemed unfit to govern, the party is today setting political records - enjoying an opinion poll lead even now, after 84 months in office.
Second, and more enduringly, they say these last seven years have changed the terms of trade of British politics. Thanks to Blair, a nakedly Thatcherite conservative could no longer get elected. "At the very least, they would have to pretend to care about public services," says one paid-up loyalist. Blair has shifted the entire political centre of gravity leftward, he says, so that the future contest will essentially pit social democrats against a British version of Europe's Christian democrats, with both sharing the same core assumptions: "Blair's legacy will be to have converted Britain into a permanently social democratic country."
Constitutional reform, the most concrete part of the Blair record, is also incomplete . . . .
But it is Blair's international record which will undo him - even, perhaps, overshadow everything else he has achieved.
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