Wed 06 Jun 2007Blair defined the agenda of his ageThe Blair mantra may have been "education, education, education"
but his political legacy will long be associated with "Iraq, Iraq,
Iraq". Yet there was much more to this remarkable career than the
association with Bush, man and project, that came to sour
perceptions of him.How sad, though, and ironic, that speech in Paris in 1997 in
which he seemed to encapsulate the bright new day many saw in him
after the bleak Thatcher years: "Mine is the first generation able
to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives
without going to war or sending our children to war". He would send
British troops to war six times, the nobility of the Kosovo and
Sierra Leone missions later overshadowed by the ill-considered
disaster of the Iraq adventure.