Why Can't George be More Like Tony?

Via Instapundit, another tremendous speech by Tony Blair. The British Prime Minister skillfully defends the Iraq invasion, first describing the threat:

I feel so passionately that we are in mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the new world in which we live. . .

The threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before. It is to the world's security, what globalisation is to the world's economy.

It was defined not by Iraq but by September 11th. September 11th did not create the threat Saddam posed.

But it altered crucially the balance of risk as to whether to deal with it or simply carry on, however imperfectly, trying to contain it. . . .September 11th was for me a revelation. What had seemed inchoate came together.

Blair has no illusions about the danger of radical Islam:

The point about September 11th was not its detailed planning; not its devilish execution; not even, simply, that it happened in America, on the streets of New York. All of this made it an astonishing, terrible and wicked tragedy, a barbaric murder of innocent people.

But what galvanised me was that it was a declaration of war by religious fanatics who were prepared to wage that war without limit. They killed 3000.

But if they could have killed 30,000 or 300,000 they would have rejoiced in it.

The purpose was to cause such hatred between Moslems and the West that a religious jihad became reality; and the world engulfed by it.

Blair next defends the timing of the war--because the UN bungled the job:

if the UN had come together and delivered a tough ultimatum to Saddam, listing clearly what he had to do, benchmarking it, he may have folded and events set in train that might just and eventually have led to his departure from power.

But the Security Council didn't agree.

Suppose at that point we had backed away. Inspectors would have stayed but only the utterly naive would believe that following such a public climbdown by the US and its partners, Saddam would have cooperated more.

He would have strung the inspectors out and returned emboldened to his plans.

The will to act on the issue of rogue states and WMD would have been shown to be hollow. The terrorists, watching and analysing every move in our psychology as they do, would have taken heart.

All this without counting the fact that the appalling brutalisation of the Iraqi people would have continued unabated and reinforced.

Finally, Blair defends the attack on Iraq despite failure to find weapons of mass destruction:

It is possible that even with all of this, nothing would have happened. Possible that Saddam would change his ambitions; possible he would develop the WMD but never use it; possible that the terrorists would never get their hands on WMD, whether from Iraq or elsewhere.

We cannot be certain. Perhaps we would have found different ways of reducing it. Perhaps this Islamic terrorism would ebb of its own accord.

But do we want to take the risk? That is the judgement. And my judgement then and now is that the risk of this new global terrorism and its interaction with states or organisations or individuals proliferating WMD, is one I simply am not prepared to run.

This is not a time to err on the side of caution; not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favour playing it long.

Their worldly wise cynicism is actually at best naivete and at worst dereliction.

I wish the President could defend his Administration so fluently. But Bush's approach and achievements are identical to Blair's--and in many cases were first articulated on this side of the Atlantic. Come November, whatever you think of the President's eloquence (or lack thereof), isn't it enough that the Administration's analysis and actions were right? Put differently, even if you don't believe Bush, why not bank on Blair?