— British official
Poodle no more: Like President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has seen his poll numbers drop as the Iraq War and its pretexts have unraveled. In fact, Blair’s approval rating is even lower than the president’s. Just over 30 percent approve of Blair’s job performance, while Bush’s popularity hovers around 37 percent. In one poll, 57 percent agreed that “Blair had run out of steam and is unlikely to achieve anything else as prime minister.” Nearly half said they wanted Blair to resign this year.
Now Blair, whose slavishness as a helpmate to President Bush during the Iraq war earned him the sobriquet “Bush’s poodle,” is deserting the president over his new scheme to rally popularity for himself and his party in the mid-terms by a-bombing some sense into the Iranian mullahs:
Tony Blair has told George Bush that Britain cannot offer military support to any strike on Iran, regardless of whether the move wins the backing of the international community, government sources claimed yesterday…
[In] the midst of international opposition to a pre-emptive strike on Tehran, and Britain’s military commitments around the world, the government maintains it cannot contribute to a military assault. “We will support the diplomatic moves, at best,” a Foreign Office source told Scotland on Sunday. “But we cannot commit our own resources to a military strike.”
Meanwhile, a new report on the Iran crisis has warned that neo-conservatives in the Bush administration are on “collision course” with Tehran.
