Blair heads for Mid-East tumult

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

One of the reasons that Tony Blair was so reluctant to give a date for leaving office was perhaps linked to his visit to the Middle East this weekend.

Tony Blair has faced criticism for his position on Lebanon

He knows that a foreign leader with a defined shelf life loses credibility and influence in this region.

But characteristically, Mr Blair is heading for the sound of conflict.

The trip was probably on his mind even as he announced that he would be gone within a year.

In his statement he said: "We've got the blockade on the Lebanon lifted today. You know, there are important things going on in the world.

"We the signatories... notables, intellectuals and political figures declare that Tony Blair is persona non grata in our country Palestinian newspaper advertisement

"And I think I speak for all my Cabinet colleagues when I say that we would prefer to get on with those things because those are the things that really matter and really matter to the country."

It is not clear if the "we" refers to the world in general or to something he might have had a hand in.

He still feels though that he can have a hand in the next moves in the Middle East.

And in addition, this visit is designed to try to repair Britain's image in the region, damaged by its position during the Lebanon war.

Whether he can achieve much must be doubted. Perhaps the most the trip can aim for is to put the Palestinian issue back on the international agenda.

It has languished in the background as the war between Israel and Hezbollah diverted attention.

Mr Blair's stock among many Palestinians is low, even though he has consistently called for a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, and tried to get US President George W Bush to use American power to further that cause after the Iraq invasion.

A newspaper advertisement signed by hundreds of Palestinian figures [though none from Hamas or Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement] said: "He is coming here in order to wash his hands, that are dripping with Lebanese blood, with Palestinian water.

"We the signatories... notables, intellectuals and political figures declare that Tony Blair is persona non grata in our country."

Mr Blair will perhaps adopt the detached view of a former British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, who similarly ran into Palestinian hostility just before the Gulf War in 1991.

Palestinians boycotted a meeting with him and when asked by reporters if he felt angry, Mr Hurd jangled his keys and remarked: "I am too well trained to be angry."

Vision

Mr Blair will have a warmer welcome from the Israelis who have seen him as a friend of Israel.

Yet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is so taken up with the aftermath of the war that he will have little inclination to undertake a new initiative with the Palestinians.

Full text: Blair's speech in LA

He hardly knows which way to turn and has even put off his own plan of withdrawing from parts of the West Bank and consolidating Israeli settlements in the rest.

Mr Olmert will probably be more interested in British views on Iran.

Tony Blair, typically, does not go to the region without a vision. He laid this out in a speech in Los Angeles in August.

"What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond, is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future," he said.

"It is in part a struggle between what I will call reactionary Islam and moderate, mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism, but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st Century, about global values."

Part of the answer to what he called the "arc of extremism" was, he suggested, the resolution of the Palestinian problem.

"However, there is one cause which, the world over, unites Islam, one issue that even the most westernised Muslims find unjust and, perhaps worse, humiliating: Palestine," he declared.

That is why he is going, despite all his domestic problems.

But will anyone listen?

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