Bad Day For The BusHitler And Saint W Crowds
Former U.S. President George W. Bush was a “true idealist” who displayed “genuine integrity and political courage,” former British prime minister Tony Blair reveals in his memoirs.
Detailing the close professional and personal relationship which developed between the two leaders in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks in the U.S. and during the build-up to the Iraq war in 2003, Blair writes that Bush was “very smart” while having “immense simplicity in how he saw the world.”
“Right or wrong, it led to decisive leadership… he sincerely believed in spreading freedom and democracy,” he writes in “A Journey;” which hit book stores in the UK on Wednesday.
But Blair, whose premiership overlapped the presidencies of Bush and Bill Clinton, reserves his warmest words for Bush’s Democratic predecessor, describing him as a “political soulmate” and “the most formidable politician I had ever encountered.” He also defends Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.
By contrast, Blair describes an initially awkward relationship with Bush when the pair first met at Camp David in February 2001, disagreeing on most social issues as well as being “poles apart” on climate change…
Bush had also displayed the most integrity of almost anyone he had met in politics, Blair says…
He [Dick Cheney] thought that the world had to be made anew, and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power…
Blair candidly admits he had more in common with Bill Clinton, praising his personal charisma and political skills, describing him as “a great guy, a good president, and above all a friend.”
“We were political soulmates. We shared pretty much the same analysis of the weakness of progressive politics… We were both informal in style and young in outlook for our age.”
Clinton was a “brilliant thinker… who would have shone at Prime Minister’s Questions” — the weekly session in which the British prime minister faces a grilling by lawmakers in the House of Commons…