Anthony Charles Lynton Bliar

Above, photo of Tony Blair in Dublin on his book tour...

no, wait a minute: that's a photo of the angry, egg- and shoe-throwing mob

who showed up to greet the former British Prime Minister.

Remember the Right Honorable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Member of Parliament for Sedgefield? We all knew him better as Tony Blair. Many Brits prefer to call him "Bliar."

There were moments in the early years of Blair's time as British Prime Minister, when there seemed an intersection of man-and-moment, as if chance and time and luck had placed Blair right there at the heart and center of potentially vast, historic changes: in the wake of Princess Diana's death, with public opinion turning against the Royal Family, some say Blair could even have abolished the monarchy.

But in the end, it seems that New Labour Tony was a conservative, both small and large 'C'. There is next to nothing of the principles of equality and fairness that drew him into politics and the Labour Party a lifetime ago. He's now worth over $30 million and growing, and he does not need the profits from his newly-published biography, My Journey, so he's donated them and the $7 million publisher's advance to a charity for soldiers injured in Iraq.

None of this has altered Blair's status as "a pariah" in the U.K., according to Maureen Dowd in the NYT. Blair's legacy is forever tied to the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, which even he admits in his biography, was executed less out of any real fears of Saddam Hussein than to do with the humiliating psychological effects of the Sept. 11th attacks on the U.S. leadership. Blair hitched himself to George W. Bush and for the rest of time will stand accused of being Dubya's lapdog, and of lying to the British public to convince the country of the necessity of taking out Saddam.

That is why the above scene took place hours ahead of Blair's arrival on book tour. After soul-searching, Blair has cancelled the rest of his tour and, well, we wish him a retirement of happy hand-wringing.

In sections of the book dealing with Iraq Blair writes that the 9/11 attacks so humiliated the U.S. that Iraq was conjured up as a policy in order to send "a message of total clarity to the world" — don't dare mess with Uncle Sam.

So there are uncanny parallels with Nixon, his foreign policy and U.S. actions in Vietnam and Cambodia, as described in a book called The Time of Illusion by Jonathan Schell. Schell argued in that book that Vietnam became more about America's domestic disputes as the Sixties wore on, than about anything to do with events on the thoroughly bombed-to-dust ground of South-East Asia. Nixon escalated the war each time he perceived himself humiliated domestically: in essence, don't mess with me or I'll go crazy on Hanoi!

In fairness to Blair: he presided over the dawning of an imperfect peace which seems to be surviving in my home, Northern Ireland. And about Iraq he writes:

I still keep in my desk a letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began. She told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced having fallen foul of Saddam’s son. She begged me to act. After the fall of Saddam she returned to Iraq. She was murdered by sectarians a few months later. What would she say to me now?

Who knows what she'd say? This anecdote hardly supports the sentiment it seems calculated to convey to the reader, that some of his decisions were extremely tough. If he is to be believed.