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 If Gordon Brown writes a memoir, will anyone care? That cannot be said of former British prime minister Tony Blair, who has been been flayed and sniped at by critics inside and outside the Labour party he did so much to renovate. His new memoir A Journey has triggered a new round of remonstrations, as Alex Massie observes in Foreign Policy. But the blunt fact is that Blair will surely go down in history as one of the great British prime ministers.

Blair's greatest accomplishment was to institutionalize the Thatcher revolution. The state of England was dreadful when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Blair did nothing to rollback her measures. Quite the contrary. He forced a recalcitrant Labour party, mired in Fabian nostrums, to modernize itself as well as England. He also brought about peace in Northern Ireland.

"But what about Iraq!", the doubters will cry. What about it? Blair stood by his American ally, believed in the cause, and helped to topple a despot. He says that it turned into a "nightmare," which it did. But Blair was a politician of conviction and substance. One of the few reasonable assessments of Blair comes from the Financial Times: "all the gun smoke of Iraq and Afghanistan cannot obscure the fact that Mr Blair was an astonishingly successful party leader."

Newspaper Digest - Thursday

The Washington Post saved their commentary on the end of combat operations in Iraq for this morning. Columnist David Ignatius reports that the ceremony in Baghdad was “appropriately tentative rather than triumphal.” As for the way forward, Ignatius us puzzled why “Washington keeps pushing a formula” designed to keep Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in office after the current political stalemate is resolved. Ignatius’s counterpart, E. J. Dionne, dissects President Obama’s speech last Tuesday, writing that it contained “an almost impossibly difficult combination of goals.” And an editorial wonders, if the president’s focus has shifted to the economy, where is Obama’s “resolve and confidence” to win the war in Afghanistan?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove largely agrees. Rove wishes Obama had “the confident voice” of Truman or Eisenhower. And he can’t resist taking a shot a the administration’s “trillion dollars” of stimulus. At the top of the same page, Daniel Henninger has a column extolling the virtues of Saddam Hussein’s removal. He tries to explode the myth (in his eyes) that Iraq was a “dumb war” in the first place.

Once again, there is optimism in the air about the future of the six-party talks to end North Korea’s nuclear program. Following his surprise visit to China, Kim Jong-il announced that his government was ready to return to the negotiations after an absence of nearly two years. China praised his responsible statesmanship, and Russia, South Korea, and the United States all seem willing to participate in a new round of talks. Japan is the only party that is balking, arguing that it is still “too soon” to expect productive negotiations.

Tokyo is right—but for the wrong reason. It’s not merely the timing that makes it unlikely that anything worthwhile will come out of another round of negotiations with North Korea. The real reason is Pyongyang’s lack of seriousness about giving up its nuclear program. North Korea’s record over the past two decades provides strong evidence that the goal has always been to become a member of the global nuclear-weapons club. The rest is just atmospherics, diplomatic theater, and misdirection to stall for time until the program is complete and Pyongyang can present the world with the fait accompli of an operational deterrent.

Blog Roundup - Wednesday

President Obama’s Oval office address Tuesday night inevitably generated a maelstrom of commentary, ranging from those who hated it (Jonah Golderg, Victor Davis Hanson, Rick Richman, Peter Wehner) to those who liked it (Steve Benen, Andrew Exum, Jim Fallows) and everyone in between. Yet not everyone’s opinion was predictable. Bill Kristol and John Podhortez enjoyed the speech and welcomed Obama into the neoconservative fold (well, at least they claim he sounded like one). Max Boot was also pleasantly surprised. And Peter Feaver wrote that the president did “better than I feared, but not as well as I hoped.” Jim Moss of FireDogLake heard some neocon rhetoric, too, but he found it rather “insulting.”

President Obama’s address to the nation last night was alone noteworthy for his clear explication to the American people of why our troops are fighting in Afghanistan. “[N]o challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against al Qaeda” he declared.

Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there. But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists. And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense. In fact, over the last 19 months, nearly a dozen al-Qaeda leaders—and hundreds of al Qaeda’s extremist allies—have been killed or captured around the world.

There can in fact be no other—nor more compelling—explanation or justification for our continuing, and increasingly melancholy, military commitment in Afghanistan.

Yet, as the Washington Post’s Cameron W. Barr points out in a small article unfortunately buried on the bottom of page 8 of today’s paper, by providing this much needed clarification of the purpose and mission of U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan, the President was curiously “off message” given recent statements from his top intelligence and national security advisers.

President Obama is kicking off talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas today, holding meetings with each of the leaders. The sitdowns follow an attack in the West Bank yesterday during which a Palestinian shooter killed four Israeli settlers. Obama will also speak with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah II before a dinner with the whole gang this evening.

Trilateral talks start tomorrow with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton running the show (she met with Netanyahu and Abbas for preparatory talks yesterday). Special envoy George Mitchell has given a hint of what’s to come. He thinks it’s possible for the Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord within a year and called Netanyahu’s proposal to meet with Abbas every two weeks “a sensible approach which we hope is undertaken.” Washington would be sure to be “physically represented in every single meeting.”

One actor will be missing from this round at least. Mitchell commented that “We do not expect Hamas to play a role in this immediate process.” That might be because Hamas, which governs part of the Palestinian territories—Gaza—and is considered a terrorist organization by Washington, has officially rejected the talks. But Mitchell said that Hamas is more than welcome to join the discussion “once they comply with the basic requirements of democracy and non-violence.”

Newspaper Digest - Wednesday

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak opines in today’s New York Times that peace in the Middle East is “within our grasp.” He says he’s been working to “turn the dream of a permanent peace” into reality ever since his predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat, was assassinated in 1981. Mubarak claims that “the biggest obstacle” to a deal is “psychological,” and writes that any agreement should be embedded in a larger “regional peace between Israel and the Arab world.” He calls Jewish settlements “incompatible” with peace, and finishes by offering Egypt as host for further negotiating rounds.

Thomas L. Friedman follows up with a column on President Obama’s “two Mission Impossibles”: the Israeli-Palestinian talks and soothing the Shiite-Sunnni conflict in Iraq. He says extremists on all sides are “doubling down” to prevent progress, and it will only get if deals can be brokered. But this is “a reason to succeed,” and, Friedman hopes, if Iraqis can “write a social contract for the first time in modern Arab history,” then “viable democracy” is possible anywhere in the Middle East.

President Obama is bailing out from Iraq. Now that he's withdrawn 100,000 combat troops from Iraq, the country may lapse back into civil war or, by some miracle, create a stable government. America may be turning a page on the war, but it's unclear whether or not Iraq will follow suit. But as Obama indicated last night in his sober and lackluster speech from the Oval Office, Iraq is free to choose its own future.

Obama himself has little choice but to exit. George W. Bush, whose insistence on promoting a freedom crusade in the Middle East created the whole mess, managed to stave off complete disaster by championing the surge, a strategy that Obama is now pursuing in Afghanistan, even as he declared that the economy will be his main focus (which doesn't quite square with his attempt to promote Middle East peace this week, but never mind). Like Obama himself, few Americans ever really cared about Iraq, which is why the GOP's efforts to depict Obama as leaving prematurely will go nowhere. As the Los Angeles Times reports, House minority leader John Boehner declared:

"The hard truth is that Iraq will continue to remain a target for those who hope to destroy freedom and democracy," Boehner said, speaking to the American Legion in Milwaukee. "The people of that nation — and this nation — deserve to know what America is prepared to do if the cause for which our troops sacrificed their lives in Iraq is threatened."

In his Oval Office address, President Obama hit many of the right notes, especially in the half of the speech referring to the Iraq War.  There was much to admire, in terms of both the policy and the politics.  He appropriately reminded us of the conflict's enormous costs but was upbeat about what U.S. forces had achieved.  He emphasized the responsibilities that Iraqis must assume for their own security.  He talked about a continuing "partnership" with Iraq but made clear his intention to bring the last U.S. troops out of Iraq on schedule by the end of next year, leaving no apparent wiggle room of the sort that might have been hoped for by those who have been talking up the idea of negotiating a new agreement with Baghdad to keep the troops there longer.  And although Mr. Obama can hold his head high as someone who opposed from the outset this ill-advised war, he did not dwell on the colossal error of launching it or the unseemly methods that were used to get most of the country to go along with the idea of launching it.  Instead, he was extremely gracious in referring to his predecessor, while mentioning in passing the obvious fact that he and George W. Bush had been on opposite sides of the issue.

These positive aspects of the speech made it all the more chilling to hear, just half a dozen sentences after the reference to the president's disagreement with Mr. Bush over Iraq, this justification for Mr. Obama's war, the ongoing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan:

There appears to be a new batch of Nicaraguan contras organizing in the mountains and determined to mount a rebellion against leftist President Daniel Ortega. This development might cause one to think that we’re experiencing a time warp and that we’re back in the 1980s. And not surprisingly, the new contras hope for the kind of U.S. aid that Washington gave to their fathers. That’s unlikely to happen—and a good thing, too.

Ortega never was a very savory character, contrary to the worshipful accounts of his groupies in the United States. Throughout the 1980s, his Sandinista regime combined Leninist economic idiocies with some rather ugly authoritarian political tactics. And spending more than a decade-and-a-half in the political wilderness, after being voted out of office in 1990, has not improved his behavior. Although voters restored him to power in 2007, following a campaign in which he ran on promises of “peace and reconciliation,” his conduct since then is reminiscent of the quasi-dictatorial tactics of his good friend, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.