Blair in Washington: Ask the US journalist

The Washington Post's London bureau chief Glenn Frankel answered your questions.

Click here to read the transcript

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British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said history will forgive the conflict in Iraq even if no weapons of mass destruction are found.

Addressing the US Congress, Tony Blair defended the decision to go to war and insisted he would continue to stand by President Bush.

He also called on the US to "listen as well as lead" in order to win hearts and minds around the world.

During his speech Mr Blair received no fewer than 17 standing ovations.

In Britain, the prime minister is facing growing discontent over his government's conduct leading up to the war.

How do Americans view the British prime minister? Is the timing of his visit politically wise? Is the post-war controversy as intense in the US as it is in the UK?

You put your questions to the Washington Post's London bureau chief, Glenn Frankel, in an interactive forum.

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Transcript

Mike Wooldridge:
Hello and welcome to this BBC news interactive forum. I'm Mike Wooldridge. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, has delivered an historic address to both houses of the United States' Congress in Washington.

In a wide ranging speech, Mr Blair defended the military action in Iraq; warned America to listen - as well as lead in the fight against terrorism; and said the US should not give up on working with Europe. His speech received a rapturous response. Members of Congress gave him seventeen standing ovations. Well, our guest today to help answer your many questions on Tony Blair's lightning visit to the States, is the Washington Post's London bureau chief, Glenn Frankel.

Glenn welcome. The first question is from Chernor Jalloh, Spain: How will the American government view the UK prime minister's speech, particularly what he had to say about what's happening now in Iraq?

Glenn Frankel:
I think the US government is very happy with the Prime Minister's speech. The Prime Minister is able to articulate the aims and goals of the military occupation of the on-going effort in Iraq in a way that sometimes our own officials can't seem to.

The other nice thing about Mr Blair because he's so articulate and because he's from Britain, he doesn't bring all the partisan baggage of Democrats and Republicans. So everybody can unite around and feel more - pure is the wrong word - but just the sense that this is somebody from the outside who's reaffirming what the Americans have been trying to do in Iraq. So it plays very well both with government and with the public.

Mike Wooldridge:
Chernor Jalloh is focusing on what he had to say - or perhaps didn't have to say - about the situation today in Iraq. Do you think that the American public - the American government - expected him to say more about that, about more of all the difficulties that the coalition is facing?

Glenn Frankel:
Well I'm not sure what they expected. Mr Blair's speech, as you know, was very carefully calibrated, to kind of skip over some of the more difficult parts. What he was trying to do was to keep everybody's vision raised. So he was trying to not get bogged down in the dirty business of the details of the occupation or of the Guantanamo detainees or any of that sort of nasty little business.

He was trying to remind Americans and - probably more important from his point of view - the British public of the goals and the principles involved. So he stayed out of the nitty-gritty.

Mike Wooldridge:
Let's just remind ourselves of the kind of response that Tony Blair did get as he entered Congress yesterday. Was it not exceptional, even in American political terms? People can see now there was enormous applause for him. And indeed as he came in everybody seemed to rush to shake his hand.

One of my colleagues was observing this morning that the Congress men and women's personal trainers must be happy about all the exercise that they were getting. Not just as they greeted him but also in all those standing ovations during the course of the speech. Margaret Thatcher, of course, was the last British political leader to go there quite a few years back now. Can you remember whether that compared in any way with the sort of reception that Tony Blair got last night?

Glenn Frankel:
It was good for Thatcher but this was rapturous and I think it was rapturous because Tony Blair in American eyes is not a partisan figure. Margaret Thatcher had friends and enemies in the United States. There were a lot of people in the United States who didn't care for her brand of conservatism.

Tony Blair is not as identified, in spite of his strong support for President Bush and the war, everyone also knows that Tony Blair was Bill Clinton's best friend in a previous administration. So he's not a partisan figure in the same way. Both Democrats and Republicans can feel very good about Tony Blair. He becomes more a symbol in some ways than a reality.

People say, oh we wish Tony Blair could run for president - well the fact is, he's to left of any serious Democrat candidate in this campaign - people aren't looking at that. What they're looking at is this very presentable articulate figure who is espousing principles that Americans want to believe in and want to feel good about. The rapture is both because he's so articulate and a good sense of humour, great pacing on the speech, but also just because of who he is.

Mike Wooldridge:
We've had an e-mail from Iceland from June Morikawa who says: How do you think that public opinion in both countries, not just the United States but also here in the UK, will receive Tony Blair's speech?

That's interesting - your perspective on that as a foreigner who lives in Britain but observes everything that happens here and observes Tony Blair very closely indeed.

Glenn Frankel:
Well the fact is I don't think it's going to have a big impact on public opinion probably in either country. While Americans love Tony Blair and they love the speech, they're looking very closely at President Bush right now and at what President Bush has been saying in his justification for war. This is a little bit of a sideshow - entertaining and it makes us feel good. But I think the Bush administration still has a lot of questions to answer.

Similarly, and perhaps even more so, here in this country, I think British public opinion which as you know was generally opposed to this war before it began and was sold the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction and that that was basically the raison d'etre for the war. They're looking very carefully at that and in some ways Mr Blair's got a harder hill to climb up on this than President Bush does. Because the American public was generally thinking, ok this is a good idea. But the British public was generally thinking, no. And it's funny, it was Blair's very eloquence and passion that I think convinced the British public and convinced the House of Commons to go along with this and so in some ways, showing that eloquence and passion again now may not work as well the second time.

Mike Wooldridge:
You've touched on this but Simon Guerrero, UK says: It's hard to see through all the 'spin' here - but it's clear that many people are disillusioned with Tony Blair. Is there similar disillusionment with George Bush in the USA, or is he still hugely popular?

Glenn Frankel:
Well it's a very good question. I think President Bush - at least at the moment - is probably in less trouble politically. The doubts are just beginning to seep in about Iraq as the casualty numbers slowly begin to climb there and as the sense takes hold in the US that we're not finished with Iraq militarily never mind the hard slog of rebuilding and all that. That's something Americans have never quite understood, how long it would take or what it was.

Mike Wooldridge:
Tony Blair was reminding viewers and listeners and readers in the United States of that wasn't he? That they must be there for the course.

Glenn Frankel:
He was - there for the course and spending the money that needs to be spent. Americans are not quite on board with that. But much more importantly, I think, is this question of if American soldiers are dying there day after day - alright what's the purpose? If Saddam Hussein is still around and conducting a guerilla campaign, the war clearly is not over. I don't think the American government has quite found the way to articulate to the American people what the situation is right now and what we have to do next.

Frankly Mr. Blair's speech, as you pointed out earlier, was long on principles and lofty sentiments but very short on details about where we go from here.

Mike Wooldridge:
Obviously weapons of mass destruction an issue right at the heart of this. Kim from the USA asks: I was disappointed by the lack of accountability for the incorrect assessment of WMD claims made by George W. Bush during his State of the Union address. How is the Blair government responding to the statements (or rather, shifting of blame) by the White House that it was basically the British who gave the US incorrect intelligence data?

Now that's all pretty complex but I think we know what's at the heart of that. Did Tony Blair take that forward perhaps in any way in either the speech before Congress or indeed the remarks after his one-on-one meeting with George Bush last night?

Glenn Frankel:
I don't think the claim here is that the British gave the US "bum" intelligence that the US then used inadvertently. Each intelligence agency seems to have made their own independent assessment. The CIA decided that the information wasn't reliable and it sort of inadvertently made its way into the President's State of the Union address anyway and that's been a source of endless news stories in my newspaper over the last week as to how that happened.

The British say they made their own independent assessment based on their own independent sources and they're sticking by it. You will notice yesterday, there wasn't any blame game going on between Bush and Blair - these guys, you couldn't get an index card between them. They really have a very solid line that they're keeping to. But Blair's line changed a little bit yesterday. It changed in the House of Commons on Wednesday and then yesterday. He was basically saying, well look we think we'll find them, we think we're there but if we're wrong, history will still justify what we did. So he's been moving ever so slightly, I would say, for a couple of weeks, to try to just ever so slightly distance himself from the intelligence findings - to say well its intelligence, it's raw, it might not have been right, we think we'll find something eventually, but never mind it's still important that we did this.

Mike Wooldridge:
It's interesting what you say there, the perceived shift in Tony Blair's position - Downing Street, as you'll know undoubtedly, is denying that there is a shift. But M A Jabbar from Singapore touches on this in an e-mail: Tony Blair says that history will vindicate him and Mr. Bush even if weapons of mass destruction are not found. I wonder how far in the future he can see? Will he be proved wrong?

In other words that history would, if you like, excuse an action of this kind, even if no weapons of mass destruction were found.

Glenn Frankel:
I think Tony Blair has emerged as a conviction politician and the basic conviction that Tony Blair has is that as prime minister of Britain, he's on the right side of history and that he can see forward over the horizon and so this is classic Tony Blair now. Ever since September 11, he has seen the world in a new light. He believes that Britain and the United States have to play much more activist role, as he outlined yesterday. And he is persuaded that he is on the right side of history on this and that history will vindicate this judgment. So you saw the pure Tony Blair vision there. I think supremely self-confident that the weapons inspectors will eventually find something - they may not find the weapons themselves but they'll find evidence of programmes and that's one of the places where he's backed away a little bit in the last couple weeks. He's started to say, development programmes rather than weapons themselves. But confident they'll find something and then supremely confident that if they don't at the end of the day it will still come out alright because Iraq will be a better place for not having Saddam Hussein.

Mike Wooldridge:
If he is such a conviction politician and if he is so confident that weapons of mass destruction will be discovered, why do you think the language is changing? Do you think that's him or do you think that advisers around him are getting him to do that just to reduce the potential political risks?

Glenn Frankel:
Hard to say. I don't think it does reduce the potential political risk really. There has been a little backing away because they've been - in Downing Street and in Washington - frankly surprised that they haven't found evidence of weapons of mass destruction - stunned really at first that they didn't find something. Even during the war itself, every day they waiting for some sign of this and you got these occasional trickles of news that didn't pan out in the end. So I think they genuinely were surprised. They're still thinking, hey it's got to be there in some form.

But yes, you're right, they are creating a little bit if wiggle room - politics requires that, doesn't it. Plus you've had this fiasco now really - there's not other way to describe it - of the CIA and the British Intelligence agencies kind of contradicting each other and getting their political masters in deeper hot water. So you've got Bush and Blair, if you will to mix my metaphors, trying to dig out of this hole. Donald Rumsfeld is the guy who famously said - when you're in a hole, the first thing you do is don't dig any deeper. So Tony Blair's trying to avoid digging any further.

Mike Wooldridge:
You probably saw this comment yourself from one of the Democrat congressmen from Massachusetts and I think a long-standing critic of the war, Ed Markey, who said of Tony Blair after the speech last night - you say you stand by your intelligence but the public cannot stand by you without a full and complete accounting. So far both sides of our trans-Atlantic alliance appear unwilling to tell the whole truth about how little we really knew when the order for war was given. Our own CIA doesn't know what you know. Our national security council says it doesn't know what you know. Indeed the President says he doesn't know what you know. Please Mr Prime Minister - to Tony Blair - redeem our trust.

Now that's quite a challenge isn't it? Is that really just an isolated challenge or does that represent a wider truth, that Tony Blair, for all that rapturous reception that he got, has got to do some rebuilding of trust in the United States beneath the surface?

Glenn Frankel:
To be honest, no, I can't see that. I don't think that Americans, by and large are focusing on Tony Blair and on whether he can rebuild trust. Tony Blair comes across as a very trustworthy politician in Americans' eyes because he sounds so good and he's so articulate and so presentable and he sounds so reasonable - Tony Blair has this great ability.

Mike Wooldridge:
So those kind of questions are really from a real minority perspective?

Glenn Frankel:
I would say all those questions are aimed at the President - that the President has to redeem the trust, the President has to explain himself. The CIA is in the process of trying to explain itself. We're not that interested in the United States as to what British Intelligence knows or doesn't know or how they came to it. But we are clearly focused on what the American government told the American people and what basis they had for it.

Getting back to what I said earlier, Tony Blair is great to listen to, he was a lot of fun to have around, great to have a little rapture and to be reminded of what a great country we are by this very nice young man from Europe. But the fact is this is an American issue, it's about American politics and with the presidential election coming up next year, the President is the one who has to explain.

Mike Wooldridge:
Just bearing on what you say there. Sherry Rice, USA says: As an American, I can say that most Americans, including myself, have a very positive opinion of Mr. Blair and always have. Who do you think has the best vantage point to judge how good a leader is, those outside his/her country or those within?

Glenn Frankel:
That's a really good question. Sometimes you don't see the forest for the trees when you're up close. Day after day here in London, if you read the press and the critics, Mr Blair is under constant fire, people are calling for his resignation - one of his own former Cabinet Ministers is gonging every day on that - Claire Short - now. So you would get the impression that Mr Blair is bleeding and is about to expire politically any moment.

You can see, if you step just outside London - you don't have to go all the way across the Atlantic, I think - but if you just step outside London for a minute - you can see that that isn't quite the case. We may be seeing the beginning of a change. We may be seeing something that in a year or two or three may lead to big changes.

But there does tend to be - I plead guilty as well as all of my colleagues if they stop and think about it, plead guilty to being constantly driven by the events of a particular day, to hyperbole about the state of a politician's health. Tony Blair still looks pretty healthy to me in a lot of ways - in part because he doesn't have a coherent opposition as of yet and part because even within his own party, where he probably faces his most opposition, nothing has coalesced behind a strong strategy to take him out.

Mike Wooldridge:
Again this is something you touched on briefly earlier. What the fallout for Tony Blair might be - of his level of conviction politics around Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and so on. Rahul, UK asks: Even with Tony Blair's popularity with the American left and right at present, do you think his domestic problems will be his downfall?

Now that's presumably referring to all those other issues like education and health and so on as well. Again as an outsider in our society - although you're almost a member of it now with all your experience of living here - do you think he could be facing his downfall maybe even because he's allowed Iraq to overshadow some of these major domestic issues?

Glenn Frankel:
Well this is my second time through. I was here in the late '80s when Mrs Thatcher finally fell after 11 glorious years and it came so suddenly, as you recall, and to everyone's great surprise. But it all made perfect sense afterwards. There's no question that a sitting prime minister over time both accrues a certain amount of political enemies in his own party and in the Commons. But also facing with these, as your listener suggested, these nagging domestic problems like the National Health Service and transport, crime and the education system - problems that never quite go away - they eventually take their toll.

Every leader likes to deal with foreign affairs because they give them the chance to be on the world stage, to articulate visions and goals and that's an easier haul in a lot of ways. It's the nitty-gritty of the domestic business that can sometimes do you in and that inevitably does do in a prime minister it seems over the course of time. So I would never be the first to predict one way or the other that Tony Blair is in serious trouble right now or about to go. But I do think that a natural process of erosion had already started to take place over domestic affairs and yes, this Iraq question, if it continues to nag at him and if they don't find the weapons of mass destruction, that's going to combine with these domestic issues to make his job a lot harder.

Mike Wooldridge:
There was an element of Tony Blair's address to Congress that we haven't dealt with at all yet, but he made something of and that was the Middle East - not just Iraq, but the Middle East and specifically the Israeli/Palestinian dispute - looking forward, to paraphrase him, to a state of Israel that would be secure within its borders in ways it hasn't been before. But certainly also as provided for under that road map to be peace for an independent and viable Palestinian state. Kevin Kirby, USA asks: Will next year's presidential race interfere with our attempt to defeat the Middle Eastern terror cabal?

How much do you think that the elections will come to bear on possibilities for progress towards an overall Middle East peace settlement?

Glenn Frankel:
I think that's a really good question. There's been a general assumption that we have a window of opportunity right now that lasts for four more months, six more months or until whenever the presidential contest really gets going and that at that point things will slow down a lot in the Middle East. That the Bush administration, for example, which really is the only government with serious leverage over both the Israeli government and the Palestinians, that it will simply be distracted. Mr Bush doesn't face internal opposition within the Republican party, there's no primaries he's got to deal with. So I tend to think that he's good until next fall. In other words that he can still focus on this - there are political liabilities in this.

But Mr Bush is seen on this particular issue as being on the side of the angels if you will - that he really is trying very, very hard to get both sides to move forward. And so I'm not sure that politics are going to interfere with Mr Bush for at least a year on this matter. Plus he's making ground by showing his evenhandedness and he's attempt to get this forward. I think it's a winner unless things go very, very badly wrong. I think for Mr Bush - I think it's more of a winner if he stays with it than if he says, look I've had enough, these people are impossible, we can't make any deal with them, I'm walking away. I think politically that would be much more of a liability for him right now than to stay the course.

Mike Wooldridge:
Do you mean pushed by Tony Blair on this or is he now doing it of his own volition?

Glenn Frankel:
He was pushed very hard by Tony Blair on this before the war in Iraq - very hard. Blair has had, I think, serious influence on Bush on this matter. But at this point Bush has committed himself in the most direct way to staying with this. So no, at this point he's not being pushed by Tony Blair, he's made up his own mind. It seems very clear to me that he intends to go forward - whether he can succeed or not of course is a whole different matter. This administration has been very good at making war whether they're as good at the complicated diplomatic work of something like the Middle East conflict, which is endlessly difficult and complex and where so many leaders, including President Clinton, have failed in the past - I think it's going to be really hard role for him.

Mike Wooldridge:
There's a theme that we've had several questions on and perhaps we can just finish off with drawing on a couple of them. C Hunter, England asks: One regularly hears that, if the USA Constitution allowed it, many Americans would like to have Tony Blair as their president. Is this because just about anyone looks good next to George W Bush - or is the USA really so desperately short of anything vaguely resembling presidential material?

David Devore, USA asks: One of your reporters quoted (presumably) an American as wishing the PM moved here so he "could run for President". I would be interested in your comments

What about that issue of Americans would generally be interested in Tony Blair to lead the country whatever the constitutional provision for it and what does that tell us about George Bush?

Glenn Frankel:
I think at the moment, Tony Blair would do quite well. We don't know very much about Tony Blair except he gives an awfully good speech and he's got a good sense of humour and he looks good. That's all fine, the fact is, as I alluded to earlier, he's to the left of every serious Democrat candidate let alone anyone else. He's programmes would not be popular by and large in the United States. There's such a difference between the two political systems.

It does reflect though, as these questioners suggest, that there is a longing for a more articulate vision in the United States. President Bush has support and right now he's the odds-on favourite to win re-election. He's not an articulate politician, he's not someone that brings together Democrats and Republicans the way Tony Blair does.

Tony Blair reminds me more of Bill Clinton but Bill Clinton without the baggage - both without the personal baggage but also without the partisan baggage. Blair is able to articulate things that we can't articulate for ourselves. Blair is able to look at us in a way that we'd like to see when we look in the mirror but we don't. So he makes us feel awfully good. But that doesn't mean he'd win a contest for president.

Mike Wooldridge:
So perhaps the special relationship is best served by these lightening visits.

Glenn Frankel:
Absolutely. Absence does make the heart grow fonder at times.

Mike Wooldridge:
Well I'm afraid that's all we have time for. My thanks to our guest Glenn Frankel, and to you for your many questions. From me, Mike Wooldridge and the rest of the news interactive team in London, goodbye for now.