Blair is having a rough go of it at home thanks to Bush and Co.
From the NY Times
Dispute on Iraq Weapons Clouds Blair's Trip to U.S.
By WARREN HOGE and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
LONDON, July 16 ? Prime Minister Tony Blair travels to Washington on Thursday on a mission to underline Britain's close and dependable relationship with the United States without reinforcing his domestic critics' portrayal of him as an unquestioning follower of President Bush.
His visit to Washington, the first stop in a weeklong trip that is to take him to Japan, South Korea and China, comes at a time when he and the Mr. Bush are battling accusations that they misrepresented the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and exaggerated intelligence findings to bolster their case for a military strike on Iraq.
The two leaders will be holding their talks against a backdrop of claims and counterclaims about the justification for going to war and a continuing failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that both men said were a menace requiring immediate action.
British public opinion, which swung behind the war effort once British troops entered Iraq in March, has now turned back into opposition, and the leadership of President Bush enjoys scant support among Britons.
In a rowdy House of Commons session today, the Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, told Mr. Blair, "You are rapidly becoming a stranger to the truth,", as lawmakers bellowed disapproval of the prime minister, waved their papers in the air and accused him of having "duped" them into going to war.
"You have created a culture of deceit and spin at the heart of government," Mr. Duncan Smith said, exploiting the government's most vulnerable aspect as portrayed in new opinion polls showing public trust in Mr. Blair at its lowest point in his six years in power.
Mr. Blair told the House that he stood entirely behind the intelligence information that his government had put forward in two disputed dossiers during the past year, and he turned aside repeated calls for an independent judicial inquiry into the government's case for war. Two committees of Parliament are currently holding hearings on the subject.
In a speech he is to deliver before a joint session of Congress on Thursday, Mr. Blair will appeal for continued American efforts to engage Europe and the United Nations as broadly as possible in the reconstruction of Iraq, despite past disagreements over the war.
According to a senior British official familiar with Mr. Blair's message, the prime minister plans to assert that the best path for Britain and the United States is "spreading our shared values ? not just American values, or British values, but universal values ? throughout the world."
Mr. Blair rejects the notion that the Bush administration's assertive policy in the Persian Gulf is unilateralist, and to make that point anew, he may speak of the shared responsibilities of the United States, Britain and their allies as "muscular multilateralism," the official said.
Mr. Blair is expected to argue that it was those shared, universal values that justified the invasion of Iraq and the removal from power of Saddam Hussein, as well as the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan that removed the Taliban from power there.
"There is this myth that these countries don't want freedom, and that Saddam or the Taliban are popular, but then it becomes apparent that they were not at all popular after they fall," the official said.
Mr. Blair will probably not address the controversy over the intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs in his prepared remarks, though he expects to be asked about it in a joint news conference with Mr. Bush, the official said.
"There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about this," the official said. "He expects to be absolutely in lock-step with the president when it comes up at the press conference," the official said, adding that Mr. Blair was "keen on putting the whole thing behind him."
While Mr. Blair has been credited with helping persuade the Bush administration last fall to seek United Nations backing for its Iraq policy and with generally shoring up less hawkish elements of the Bush administration, he is faulted by his critics here for having little influence in Washington and providing international cover for an American administration bent on unilateralist interventions around the world.
Mr. Blair has been repeatedly lampooned in the British press as Mr. Bush's "poodle." Simon Jenkins, a Times of London columnist, wrote today that Mr. Blair had shortchanged Britain's special relationship with the United States, making "a marriage of platonic dignity into one of puppy love."
This week, Mr. Blair has had to confront controversy over the validity of intelligence on Iraq's bid to seek uranium for a possible nuclear weapons program from Niger, a claim that President Bush used in his State of the Union address but that his administration has now distanced itself from.
Britain has asserted that its information was correct, since it was based on intelligence independent from the reports that the United States relied upon and now disavows.
The official added that Mr. Blair was perplexed at the ongoing dispute, believing that it was "no surprise" that Iraq was trying to revitalize its nuclear weapons program.
"It's no secret that Saddam was trying to get uranium from somewhere, and he had succeeded to get uranium all through the 1980's," the official said. "It is not something that we just made up to pad an otherwise thin dossier, as has been suggested again and again."
Although there have been suggestions in Washington that Mr. Blair's government developed the intelligence about Iraq seeking to obtain uranium from Niger, the British official said that Mr. Blair would "stand firm" with Mr. Bush and would not try to pass off any blame.
"Both governments talked extensively about this intelligence last fall," the official said. Asked if British officials would try to blame the Washington in any way, the official said: "We're not going to do that. We're friends; friends stand together."
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