Blair Tries Again

Tony Blair, still hoping to get support from President Bush at the upcoming G8 summit for his pie-in-Africa proposals, stepped up to the plate one more time in an AP interview. Noting with surprise (the same emotion summoned up by Sunday Telegraph editor Con Coughlin during a CNN appearance this morning) the splash now being given to the Downing Street memos, Blair tossed aside the central allegation of those memos with a claim of astonishment -- as in, he’s “astonished” that some people read those leaked papers as proof the United States was committed to war in Iraq far earlier than the Bush administration has ever admitted.

But Blair now returns, with the WMD and connection-to-terrorism arguments in tatters, to a golden oldie as the Real Reason (no relation to OJ’s Real Killers): After Sept. 11, he told the AP in an interview, it was necessary to "draw a line in the sand here, and the country to do it with was Iraq because they were in breach of U.N. resolutions going back over many years."

So we picked Iraq because of their bad record of compliance with U.N. resolutions? Try this little test: check out which countries have defied the most U.N. resolutions, an exercise I performed in the leadup to the war. The answers, as of late 2002: Israel and Turkey.