The Blair years: A blessing or a curse?
Arwa Walid - AljazeeraTalk - Leeds
 Waving proudly to the public with a big grin on his face, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair left no. 10 Downing Street to be occupied by his predetermined successor Gordon Brown. A decade has elapsed since the labour party had won the elections to become at the heart of British Politics. The big question comes to mind: Were the Blair years a blessing or a curse?
The economic question
From the year 1997 to 2007 Britons have enjoyed the benefits of a flourishing economy. According to all indicators, the British economy has done very well. Thanks to Gordon Brown, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and current Prime Minister, unemployment and inflation had remained at historically low levels which is an achievement much envied by Nicholas Sarkozy. Average income growth has been 2.4 per cent swelling the pockets of the richest 10% at the expense of those at the bottom.
From "old" to "New Labour"
Perhaps the biggest achievement that could be attributed to Tony blair is the idea of the Third Way which rejuvenated the labour party politically after the conservatives have been in power for most of the twentieth century. After decades of a bitter cold war between the Soviet union and the capitalist world, the labour party has lost much of its vigour and attractiveness to the British public. This new innovation was adopted by the party as a "third" way between liberal democracy and socialism which gave birth to the new "social democracy". Transformed from "old" to "New Labour", the Labour party astonishingly won three consecutive elections since 1997.
The Iraq war conundrum
Despite the fact that more than one million people took to the streets of London protesting against the War on Iraq, Blair continued to support George Bush in his so-called "war against terror". Many commentators describe the war on Iraq as a "serious senseless mistake" and criticize Blair heavily for failing to plan for the post-war Iraq. This "mistake" took the lives of more than 73 000 thousand Iraqi civilians and continues to fuel sectarian violence in the war-torn country. Others openly accuse Blair of lying to the electorate as no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq and the supposed link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda was never confirmed. Serious intelligence failure is coupled with foreign policy failure. How will History judge him?
After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, London saw one of its deadliest attacks in 2005 which killed 52 people. Politicians see no obvious link between the Iraq war and the attacks in London, but Shehzad Tanweer, 22, who killed himself and seven others on an Underground train near Aldgate in east London sad: "What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq,". Indeed, two days after Brown had become Prime Minister, the threats have become true when two car bombs had been foiled in London on June 29, 2007.
Ironically, Blair's role in world "peace and order" is still not over. Tony Blair has become an envoy for Mideast peace and he will be working on behalf of the US, Russia, the UN and the EU. This appointment was not warmly welcomed by the Arab public. Blair's well-known effort in boosting the peace process in the Middle East by invading Iraq is still bringing in hot daily news to the Arab public of mutilated bodies that are found on the streets of Baghdad. Do Arabs suffer from short memory? Probably not.
Blair has finally surrendered to the pressures from his party to step down and pave the way for his successor Gordon Brown to become Britain's new Prime Minister. However, could this be described as a move to replace the weakest link "Blair" with the strongest link "Brown" to win a fourth election in 2009? This may be true since Brown's successful economic record lies in the background, but the Iraq war disaster led many commentators to describe the move as a desperate attempt to perform plastic surgery to the ugly face of Blair's foreign policy, but could the ugly face ever become beautiful? We may have to wait untill 2009 when the British electorate make their decision.
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good 4 u arwa.