London Dispatch / Ray Moseley: Will the real Tony Blair please sit down?

For the new paperback edition of his best-selling memoir, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has produced a foreword outlining his considered views on the Arab Spring.

The man who went to Libya as prime minister, publicly kissed Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, and was hailed by Mr. Qaddafi’s son as “a personal family friend,” now congratulates Europe and the United States for doing all they can to remove the man he so unashamedly befriended.

“Europe and America came together over Libya and, though it is difficult and though the way things will turn out is uncertain, it showed leadership,” he wrote. It would be inconceivable, he said, to leave the colonel in power after his attacks on his own people.

The man who has earned money as an adviser to the Kuwaiti royal family and as a public speaker throughout the region now urges Western support for change in the Gulf States. He said the lesson from the Arab Spring for autocratic regimes the world over is to change—or be changed.

Four years after stepping down as prime minister, Mr. Blair seems unable to understand contradictions in his own position or to realize how little weight the world gives to anything he says about the Middle East.

In 2007 the so-called Quartet—the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia—appointed Mr. Blair as its envoy to the Middle East, in large part because of his lobbying for the job. It was an appointment that stunned some Middle East observers.

In effect, the Quartet was asking the Arab world to accept as an impartial broker the man who marched alongside George W. Bush in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and who has been a consistently firm supporter of Israel.

His brief as envoy has been to focus on Palestinian governance, economics and security, leaving to others the heavy lifting of charting a road map to a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. While his achievements in the job have been unclear, he has plowed on. His predecessor, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, quit the job in frustration after just one year, and President Barack Obama’s special Middle East envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, also resigned recently, similarly discouraged.

Mr. Blair argued that the Arab Spring will make it harder to secure a Palestinian peace deal since Israel is less certain about the nature of the threat it faces. The stability and predictability of Israel’s neighbors, he said, has been replaced by instability and unpredictability.

Mr. Blair is not lacking in negotiating skills, of course. As prime minister, he played a key role in forging the settlement in Northern Ireland. But he came to that role with all the authority of his position as head of the British government behind him, and without the baggage he carried with him to the Middle East.

Before and after becoming prime minister, he was a longstanding member of Labor Friends of Israel. As prime minister, he appointed as his personal envoy to the Middle East his friend and tennis partner, Lord Michael Levy, a strong supporter of Israel with no similar affinity to the Arab world. In 2006 Mr. Blair openly supported Israel in its war against the militant Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.

Fourteen months after resigning as prime minister, he was revealed to be a paid consultant to an oil company with interests in Iraq, opening himself to accusations that he profited financially from contacts made during the Iraq war.

Mr. Blair’s comments on the Arab Spring, in his book and in a radio appearance he made to promote the book, drew withering scorn from Ian Birrell, a former speechwriter for Prime Minister David Cameron, in a column in the Guardian newspaper.

Mr. Birrell said money lay behind Mr. Blair’s radio interview, since he was promoting his book. “Just as money lay behind his decision to take free holidays at the expense of the Egyptian people while in power, ignoring complaints from families of those being tortured in the country’s notorious jails,” he said.

Mr. Birrell said that, even as demonstrators in Egypt were demanding the removal of President Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, Mr. Blair hailed Mr. Mubarak as “immensely courageous and a force for good.”

Likewise, he said, Mr. Blair demeaned Britain as prime minister by halting a case in which the British arms manufacturer BAE was accused of bribing officials in Saudi Arabia. And he noted that Mr. Blair sent “a smarmy message” of congratulations to Rwandan President Paul Kagame after he won 93 percent of the vote in a sham election that followed the jailing of Mr. Kagame’s opponents and closure of critical newspapers.

Mr. Blair, he said, backed an ethical foreign policy before ending as “an apologist for torture” and “embarking on a war of doubtful legality.”

In the new foreword to his book, Mr. Blair called for an elected European president who would have a mandate for far-reaching reforms. Could it possibly be that his candidate for the job would be none other than Tony Blair?

“Someone should tell him the journey’s over,” Mr. Birrell concluded.

(Ray Moseley is a London-based former chief European correspondent of the Chicago Tribune and has worked extensively in the Middle East. He can be reached at: [email protected])